With the funk 45 epidemic as widespread as it is, you’d imagine that hip hop’s beat-digging elite have been raiding rare sevens for years. Not necessarily true – ask Malcom Catto, one of London’s foremost authorities on the matter. “In 1994, I went to the states with some copies of Third Guitar to play at the New York Fair,” Catto recalls of the hip hop-holy grail known to fetch over $1000 on eBay. “All these big named rappers and producers are hanging around, I said ‘Fuck it, let me play this brilliant piece of music.’ It finished, and they go ‘What, where’s the break?’ They slagged me off! They said, ‘What would I want that for, that’s my dad’s music!’ ” Luckily, Catto followed his own father’s musical taste and it put him well ahead of the funk curve. Listening to the progressive New Orleans jazz of Professor Longhair as a youngster primed him to ask the right questions when the fledgling drummer fell into the late-60s punk of The Stooges and Velvet Underground. “I wasn’t listening to any funk drummers, but I always knew there would be funk out there,” Catto reflects. “I was like, ‘I wonder what Professor Longhair was doing in ’69; I wonder what black music was like then?’ ” The answer came through hip hop, which lead him to well-known pieces like Jimmy Smith’s Root Down and later to the seven-inches that would trademark his obsession. “I’d see Marva Whitney’s It’s My Thing LP for, like, 70 quid but the single would be 15,” Catto offers. “So I’d buy the single. The best track always seemed to be on a seven.” Now he maintains a collection that rivals nearly anyone’s – including old chum DJ Shadow, with whom he has engaged legendary swaps with nigh-impossible to find pieces by Billy Ball and The Upsetters and The Majestics at stake. And like the post-Brainfreeze Shadow, he’s seen a once scoffed-at hobby turn into quite the commodity. “Funk’s finally come around, but I think the music is about sticking to your guns,” he states, then laughs. “I mean, (Shadow) ain’t going to come out with a swing-beat album, we stick to what we love.” And what Catto loves embraces all of the musics influenced by James Brown’s rhythm revolution. While 45s released with his group The Soul Destroyers stand as some of the best new funk released, his apocalyptic one man band Popcorn Bubblefish turns traditional funk on it’s head with syncopated drums tying up ’60s psychedelia and free jazz noodlings into chaos-on-the-one. His solitary LP came out on the now-defunct Mo Wax Records in 2000. “I really didn’t think there was an album in the stuff I gave to (Mo Wax boss James Lavelle). I was carrying on doing stuff right to the end,” he remarks. “But now I’m ready to do something good. What you have there – a demo, that’s what it is.” Since the release of the Popcorn Bubblefish LP, Catto has been busy with UK used-record kingpin Gerald Short’s funk reissue series. He’s the one responsible for tracking down seemingly impossible-to-find funk legends like The Universouls, Soul Excitement, the aforementioned Majestics and The Roadrunners so that he can legitimately license their forgotten parcels for a new generation. The two CD/LP compilations he’s compiled with Short – Texas Funk: Black Gold From The Lone Star State 1968-1975 and Midwest Funk (the latter with Dante Carfagna) – stand as the definitive documents of those funk-breeding grounds. Yet, in between all of this action, this renaissance man found time to tour the world with Shadow, sit in with The Keystones to record drums for the Bloods Haul OST, break Stones Throw’s Madlib off with drums for his “Suite for Weldon Irvine” and Sound Directions project, and contribute a track to Egon’s Stones Throw-released Curse of the Evil Badger LP. In 2007, Egon's Stones Throw sub-label Now Again, released the much acclaimed debut album Out There by Malcolm's 60's psych free-jazz project The Heliocentrics. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.