With Kendrick Lamar & RHCP On Side, George Clinton's Still Got The Funk
George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic collective has influenced everyone from Prince and Red Hot Chili Peppers to Kendrick Lamar and Wu-Tang Clan. The legendary funk pioneer George Clinton tells Steve Bell how artists like those helped his band to "reinvent themselves".
After over 50 years at the musical coalface - a journey that started in the conservative climes of song factory the Brill Building, branching out into writing hits for Motown in the mid '60s before his own wildly expansive funk career kicked into gear in the early '70s - the great George Clinton is finally retiring from touring.
Naturally the man who inspired us with the notion Free Your Mind... And Your Ass Will Follow is having a farewell party, one that stretches out for nearly a year alongside his rabble-rousing Parliament-Funkadelic ensemble. Clinton is quick to assure that while he's personally reaching the end of the road, this doesn't mean the end for either the band nor his other creative endeavours.
"I got one year from November, so I haven't got into retirement mode yet - that'll be next November, a year from now," he laughs heartily. "I'm just going to enjoy the party for the next year, and then the kids - the third generation of P-Funk - they've been doing great for the last two years, so it's in good hands. It's going to be fun just being in the studio and keeping on recording, and doing movies. It's still entertaining."
The P-Funk concert experience has always been far more of an occasion or event than a mere gig - a vibrant burst of colour and energy where anything could happen and probably will.
"I felt from early in my career that being unique was the only way to go and stay around."
"It's always been like a play: we're not just like a singing group with musicians, there's a whole theatrical play. And whatever era it's in we try to cater to whatever they're doing in that time zone. We have enough songs to go around - all the different styles and all the different energies."
The veteran knew from early on that he had to be different to stand out from the pack. He did this with both his eye-catching live shows and his innovative and groundbreaking music, which touched on everything from deep funk and soul to psychedelic rock and beyond, a heady amalgam as distinctive as it is intoxicating.
"I felt from early in my career that being unique was the only way to go and stay around," Clinton reflects. "I could see that from jazz musicians, gospel musicians, old rock'n'roll and guitar players - it had to be a unique thing for it to last. I could see Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles lasting up until now and on into the future - I could see that way back then.
"Jazz musicians always put out albums - they didn't put out 45s - and those kind of records stayed around for a longer time when you cater to the album market. So that's why we made albums - part of the problem I had was cutting it up into a single, because they would be too long! [1979 Funkadelic single] (Not Just) Knee Deep is 15 minutes!"
Clinton attributes the eclectic nature of his aesthetic to his upbringing as a songwriting gun-for-hire, which by nature broadened his own artistic palette significantly.
"My love of different musics comes from songwriting. When you were in the Brill Building you had to write songs for every artist that came out: you had to try to think about what kind of song that person was making and how to cater a song to whatever style was hot.
"You learned that when songwriting was still a thing - back before everybody started writing their own songs. And if you look at somebody like The Beatles they had four guys and they were all writing different, and all those styles worked, so it's really cool when a group got a lot of different things they can lean on.
"I always thought of Motown as one artist with a bunch of different writers: we had all kinds of styles of producers and writers at Motown and the company was like an artist. So that's what I did with the group - different members of the band featured on each song. So whether it was Bootsy [Collins], Garry Shider, Bernie [Worrell], Fred Wesley, Junie Morrison - it didn't matter, all of them had great styles - and then there were all the other singers."
One imagines that back in his Brill Building days Clinton had little idea of the wild ride awaiting him around the corner.
"You have no idea," he guffaws. "Especially back then you were singing doo-wop love songs and we never even thought about rock'n'roll - psychedelic rock'n'roll - coming in, or P-Funk with the horns and things. And you never thought about hip hop!"
Back in the early '80s the nascent hip hop movement brought widespread attention back towards Clinton and P-Funk as DJs and rappers began mining their fertile back catalogue for samples.
"That gave us another opening to start all over again and reinvent ourselves. Because they kept the songs alive and because we were always playing them - we were always playing the songs live. Like even today we're playing as a live band while most of them have tracks - one instrument and one musician - but they don't have a whole band, so people really don't get to see a whole band so much.
"And all of those songs are on so many hit [hip hop] records, the kids love it: 'Oh, you play on De La Soul's record! You play on Dr Dre's record! You play on Tupac's record!' We don't mind if that's how they do it, but eventually they learn that we did it."
The advent of hip hop and rap opened up a whole new world of collaborations for Clinton - such as his guest spot on Kendrick Lamar's 2015 hit album To Pimp A Butterfly, through to working alongside Flying Lotus, Thundercat, N.E.R.D. and more - which in turn introduced him to enormous new audiences.
"Oh, it's amazing," he continues. "Imagine if Kendrick Lamar came and wanted to do a record! He is like the shit in this area, I love it! So when he came that made a lot of other people aware, like Flying Lotus and all of those cats - that's like a brand new set of P-Funk!"
