Mr Critical is on fire these days: not only did he shared with us two of the most popular Laid Back mixes ever (Funky Coffee & Feed Me My Pill), produced one track for the LDBK compilation, got invited to play at the Couleur Café festival and even joins me to host a Laid Back show at the International Radio Festival in Zurich in June … but he also sent me this funk 45 mix made by record collector Ben 45…

Make sure to read Ben’s liner notes… A crate digger’s story through genres and years.

When I was still a child, my ears got attracted to some of those beautiful sounds coming out of the radio. We’re talking about the second half of the sixties here, when groups like the Beatles, Kinks, Stones, Herman’s Hermits, Who, Small Faces were having their heyday and spawning out lots of hit records. So I guess you could say I kinda grew up on some of that great anglo-saxon music which was so popular at that particular time.

In the next years to come, it was obvious that music was evolving… There was the whole hippie movement (I remember getting totally blown away when I first saw the Woodstock movie at the age of 14), and by the beginning of the seventies there was a new style which was often referred to as underground music or progressive music. Bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Gentle Giant etc. were very hot then. Most of these bands displayed incredible musicianship, and I really liked their complex brand of music a lot. It was a bit like rock being played in a jazzy way…

This was probably the reason why I crossed over more and more to real jazz, listening a lot to different kinds of jazz music alongside progressive rock as well…

By the mid-seventies however a lot of these progressive groups had become super-groups, their music wasn’t as good and adventurous as it used to be anymore, and suddenly… punk happened ! I must admit that punk music only first reached the ears of us people on the continent in 1977, while it had in fact already been “cooking” a few years earlier on both in the UK and US… It didn’t take too long for me before I was down with this new exciting movement and its wild music, and although it didn’t last too long for me it was a lot of good fun. I remember traveling to London in 1978 for a week, watching 2 or 3 punk bands play every single night of that week… nice memories !

After some time however I became disillusioned with the whole punk thing because of the commercialisation of the movement. It slowly changed into new wave, and I really didn’t rate that stuff. It also was the time when I started frequenting discotheques and started getting into disco music, some of it cheesy, some of it very funky. Once again I got hooked on a new musical trend, and I started buying and looking for black music. At first it was just the contemporary black music of the moment, but every now and then I stumbled upon older records, which were more in a vintage soul or funk vein.

I went on with collecting mostly albums and twelve inches for years and years, and got into collecting rap and hiphop music as well during this period. Always having loved old school disco rap from the very beginning, I witnessed the different phases this musical genre was going through, from the early old school stuff through Bambaata’s electro rap, the mid-eighties’ dry computerbeats/bold rap-kinda-style, to the beginning of the “golden era of hiphop” by 1988, when hiphop got heavily into sampling obscure and less obscure old funk records. It were a lot of these samples that encouraged me to dig deeper in the heritage of old US funk records, it made me very curious to know and find out which tunes were sampled because it all sounded so dope and fresh…

Then one day in the early nineties I met somebody who would change my life again musically, meaning that he would pull me onto the “right track” when it came to good old funky music. We met in a record store in the capital of Antwerpen, and got to talk with each other about funk music. He invited me to his place – initially because he had some records for sale as well - and a new world opened up for me. He had lots of albums by artists I had never even heard of before, a lot of them sounding awesome as well. We became best of friends and started buying and collecting funk 45s together at one point somewhere in the mid-nineties. Back in the day we received small postal catalogues from UK dealers who were selling small quantities of these obscure little 45s, and it was a very exciting time. A rather expensive time as well since we frequently phoned up those dealers in the UK in order to listen to snippets of those 45s over the phone… And although a lot of the prices they charged for those 45s back then would look very silly these days, it still was big money for a simple little 45 in those days. Most of our album-only buying friends thought we had lost our minds spending so much money on those 45s : no picture sleeves, no sleeve notes, no credits on artists, and if you were lucky only two good tunes was the best case scenario…

Well, and it all went on from there… I still buy a nice album now and then, but funky 45s are the main thing for me. The reason why a lot of these little beauties are so good is probably because they “had-to-be-good”, meaning that the band or artist only got one chance to make a record, and so they had to give it a 150%… Unfortunately most of the deep funk artists faded after one or two 45s since they didn’t get a solid record deal. The initial 45s were pressed on a very small scale most of the time, 45s were sold or given away at gigs, and most ot them were lost or destroyed over the years. Just in case you were wondering why so many of those deep funk 45s are fetching such big money nowadays…

Ben 45 will be playing at Muziekodroom in Hasselt (Belgium) on the 16th of April together with Mr. Critical, Grazzhoppa and Duvel.