CRAZY P
Crazy business
Nottingham-based five-piece Crazy P have been pumping out an eclectic mix of disco, house, funk and soul since 1995 – and unusually for Producer Masterclass, they’re an actual band, doing their thing using real instruments, both live and in the studio. Over the years, this party-starting outfit has become a bona fide national trinket, and with their eighth album, Age of the Ego, out earlier this year on Walk Don’t Walk, and a hectic touring and DJing schedule dominating their summer, they’re more in demand than ever.
We caught up with founder members Chris Todd and Jim Baron at their studio for a deconstruction of one of the album’s grooviest tracks. But before we got into that, we sat down with Jim to get the back story, starting with the formation of the band.
“The whole band is made up of mates …the same line-up since 2001”
“I met Toddy at Nottingham Uni,” he recalls. “He was doing a contemporary arts course, and I was doing my law finals, but I’d done a conversion course from a music degree, so I was just getting into making electronic music. Toddy was doing the same on his contemporary arts course, and we got introduced by a mutual friend, and just started hanging out.”
The pair began their collaborative musical journey by wringing everything they could out of an Akai sampler, Novation Bass Station and Yamaha CS1x synth, controlled from an Atari ST computer. “We got the sampler really memoried up to the hilt,” laughs Jim. “We carried on like that for four or five years, and then I moved to Manchester to start work, and I met [Crazy P singer] Danielle at a house party. She was a natural entertainer.”
At that point, Jim and Chris, who had been gigging their material since day one, were looking to move away from their “blokes behind a bank of equipment” on-stage presentation, and the discovery of Danielle Moore proved catalytic. “She’d never done any professional singing before, but she
