The Fire Pit

Trip Hop quasi Jazz from the B-Boy Soul duo Matt Henshaw and ReggiiMental coming at you in 2011 on a whole 'nother flex ! You ain't seen nothin' yet ... b-b-b-baby ... you just ain't seen it ...

Hands down my favourite B-Boy Soul song. It is unfortunate that it's possibly the least commericially viable tune we've ever done. The whole idea of The Fire Pit was to record a second album as a follow up to The Deepest Cellar, a collection of darker, more esoteric songs that reflected the socio-political zeitgeist, Jimmy's upcoming court appearance and my own personal battles post-Censored and pre-The Deepest Cellar. We did indeed record a whole album, you never know, you might get to hear it in it's entirety one day. But we abandoned it due to pressures from all over the place.

What emerged in February, March or April of 2011 was The Fire Pit - EP. I can't even remember when or why it came out. A collection of 5 demos essentially. There were untold mix-ups. Everyone was everywhere and no-one was really steering the ship. The tracklist was finalised at the last minute featuring 3 very soulful demos, the title track and possibly Joey G-Zus' best piece of work, still a rough recording though. It makes for surprisingly pleasing listening all things considered but it could and should have been a bigger step musically and artistically following the Can't Hold Back EP.

The artwork was changed multiple times and at the last minute a picture of me and Reggii sitting in a KFC in Nottingham Hill before a show with Jessie J at the tail end of 2010 was chosen and flipped on the back cover with the tracklisting, song titles still only working titles. With pressure and mistakes from a PR company a sizeable amount of blank CDs with the worng artwork went out to a few hundred DJs, producers and magazines accross the UK, which I'm sure didn't go down too well.

But, the music, what canI tell you? The title track, The Fire Pit, is a hip-hop, jazz-soul fusion piece with hints of psychedelia and scat singing. Jimmy producing 16 bars of some of his best prose and I was experimenting with layers of vocals that I think turned out quite nice. With a penchant at the time for doing illy sound affects in the booth I think a few of them still feature on the record. Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and the Wu-Tang Clan were on heavy rotation at this time, did we really expect to record anything sounding any other way than this ?!? Probably not !

Following it's release we put out a video we recorded in Jimmy's back yard with a bonfire - the night before Lovebox !!! - which I'm sure following the breezy summer stylings of Can't Hold Back came as quite a shock. I'm not sure "what on earth are these wierdos up to now?!" is ever really a good reaction to a release. But, anyways, like I said, I love it, and if I was going to sit down and listen to my own music at anytime ever, The Fire Pit is always what I would put on first. If only to try and work out what planet I was on when we were putting it together ... flanged sax anyone ??

Anyways, considering the mix-ups, mess-ups, prison sentences and my own personal vanishing act the EP still contains my favourite song, the most previewed and downloaded song of mine on Amazon, a song featured on a dance and electronic compilation in Germany that hitnumber 2 in the charts (outselling David Guetta), 4 of my most watched videos on YouTube and, as I said, Joey G-Zus' hardest, heaviest and most lucid piece of writing,his best bits, most evocative and thought-provoking of them all. I find myself thinking on a daily basis, The World's Gone Mad.
lyrics
Take me down ... down to The Fire Pit
credits
from The Fire Pit - EP, track released 03 April 2011
Matt Henshaw and ReggiiMental ... written and recorded by ... production from RJ Rizzle