Hamilton band seeking more action on city music scene

Hamilton band Funk Therapy have barely been together a year, but already they have high hopes and big ideas for the future of music in their city.

The six-piece band were on hand at a Wintec Spark Festival event, River City Sound Sessions, which featured a showcase of Funk Therapy and another local band BattleCat.

Founding member and drummer Matthew Mooney praised Wintec for putting the event on, but said that the state of bands and live music in Hamilton was “not that good”.

“There’s a big cover scene, but it’s getting better and the good thing about Hamilton is that it’s a central hub, so it’s not that far to Auckland or even Wellington really,” Mooney said.

Another founding member and keyboard player Tim Folkema said that Hamilton music is “underground”.

“I mean that literally and figuratively because Nivara Lounge is underground and that’s basically the only live venue we have in Hamilton that is a proper live venue,” Folkema said.

He said that thanks to Nivara Lounge the music scene in Hamilton is actually quite amazing.

Folkema is a Wintec graduate and has volunteered throughout previous Spark Week Festivals. He was amazed by the job students had done on their showcase video this year.

“To do something of that quality, especially for students still learning, was really quite outstanding,” he said.

The 20-minute long video featured interviews with band members and live performances of some of their songs.

He really liked the student involvement.

“It was done by young people, for young people, and that’s really awesome and it helps to push us up.”

“Those students pushing us up are people just like ourselves, people that are trying to get noticed,” he said.

Folkema wanted to see more from Hamilton with events such as Spark.

“There need to be more events like this I think, Hamilton’s an awesome city, it’s under-rated.”

“There needs to be more of this sort of stuff to really help young musicians otherwise we’re just going to be sitting at the bottom for the rest of our lives,” he said.

Funk Therapy was born in Nivara.  Mathew had seen Tim and bass player Chris Field jamming there one night and next time he saw Tim, he joined him for an instrumental.

After getting together to do more instrumentals, eventually they were joined by others including singers and lyricists Tevita Tuvuki and Mrs D.Lite and M.C and lyricist Farai Farizone.

The band are currently extremely busy.

“We’re doing gigs, saving money, and putting any little bits of loose change we get into a kitty so we can save up and get t-shirt designs done and make a press kit to represent ourselves,” said Mooney.

“We manage ourselves, we record ourselves, we do everything ourselves within our own internal label, Lunar Productions.”

The reason people should come and check them out is simple, Mooney said.

“We’re not a cover band, we’re doing what no one else is doing, it’s original and you’ll leave feeling great.”