The intro to Chic's Good Times, played on 2 different basses

Fender Jazz

Status Matrix

Rehearsal tape - direct to stereo, warts & all

Woman That Got Away

Playin' in the Dirt

Empty Arms

Cold Shot

Things Have Changed

This is a sampler/demo showing the diversity of our music.
Recorded at Punch Studios (http://www.punchstudios.co.uk/) in July 2012.
Engineered by Gavin McKenzie

02 Roll Away

Playin in the Dirt

Lucky I Guess

Louisiana is a long way, in every dimension, from the bucolic Suffolk village of Combs, home to two out of four of Loop Garoo, a distinctive band of musicians who owe much of their style to that laid-back, southern state.

Like the USA in miniature, Louisiana is a cultural mélange, mixing musical styles like ingredients in a Southern soup pot. Arriving there at 19, to work on the oil rigs, aspiring musician Simon Feasey, found the music of the region like its attitudes, segregated. “I used to get in a lot of trouble for hanging out with black people. You don’t even think about it, coming from England, but at that time the race riots in the South were fresh in the memory.”

Perhaps because of that it wasn’t easy to get to hear the kind of music that influenced Simon’s early musical heroes, E. Clapton and K. Richards: “There was a lot of Southern country – in all the [mainly redneck] bars – but to get into clubs where blues bands were playing you needed an introduction to the black community...And then you just sat at the back and tried not to get in the way. Scary. But so good.”

Simon’s connections brought him closer to other players and gave him more opportunity to learn at first hand more of how music was played in Louisiana. “This is a terrible cliche, but I really did used to sit on the back porch and play along with other guitarists. What it taught you was partly technique, but mostly a feel for the music.”

Loop Garoo – the name taken from a song by that archetype of the bayou blues, Dr John – is a late return to the music Simon first heard in the black clubs of Alexandria, and Lafayette, LA. Delight in that music is common to the other members of the band, whose contribution to the band’s style is informed by their own musical journeys.

From rollicking New Orleans honky-tonking to birth-of-the-cool blues, “Professor” John Cox (piano/Rhodes/Hammond) leads a syncopated rhythm section of John Bailey (long-time bass player for blues favourites, The Makeshifts) and the lethargic drumming of Joe Whitehead. Together they create a subtly shifting foundation to the fluid guitar and rasping vocal of band leader Simon Feasey.

The written songs are often treated as little more than a rough framework within which the band’s music is constructed in improvised fashion, with imaginative soloing and sensitive accompaniment from all. Since all the players have years of performance and recording experience the effect is like a shabby chic armchair - crafted, but relaxed.

And although their many collective years of playing may suggest a studied side to Loop Garoo’s music, the performances present them differently. They combine good humour and a reckless disregard for convention in exploring the joyful irony of improvisation – it may sound practiced, but they are often making it up as they go along.

And as anyone in the South – or now the East – will tell you, there ain’t no better way to play.