about fupper

Fupper (Simon Hughes) is a purveyor of slipstream, lo-fi, wabi-sabi soundtracks.

Nostalgic guitars and found sounds wander over loose rhythms while distant vocals and harmonicas weave in and out on a journey that celebrates imperfection and transience.

A brief story of …….

Its was about 1994, and I was living in a horrible suburban town in the south of England that I choose not to name.

I was overworked, averaging fourteen-hour days six days a week in a crappy job living in a strange town where I know nobody.

I had a rare weekend off, so went for a walk.

I wandered into a second-hand store and stumbled across a reel-to-reel tape player and a box of used reels next to it, £10 for the lot.

I had only ever felt this excited three other times in my musical life. One, discovering that I could record myself onto a portable cassette player and creating radio shows and songs in my parents basement in a suburban house in a very different suburban town, in Canada. Two, being 16 years old and discovering my first four-track cassette recorder and the magic of overdubbing. Three, finding a 1973 (same year as me) Epiphone Crestwood ET-275 guitar in a second-hand store in another suburban town in another part of the home counties that I still choose not to name.  

I still had the four-track and the Epiphone and the same passion for recording, but now I had the magic of loops.

I had learnt how to splice tape and had read how EPMD used to cut up recordings of beats into loops to rap over. So I ran with the same idea, but to play guitar over and occasionally read or sing.

The tapes in the reel to reel box were pre-recorded, mostly from the late fifties and early sixties, and they were recordings of the radio shows from the time. I flipped the tapes over to the other side and plugged in my cassettes player and ran off my favourite beats and pieces and cut them up into loops. Doing this meant that I retained the original recordings on the other side, and there lay great mysteries and a whole aesthetic that has stayed with me since.

I didn’t want to be a “dance” or “electronic” act, in fact I didn’t have ambitions to be an act. I was no longer in a band as working life had taken over, and I’m not even sure I really suited being in one. I was bored, lonely and desperate to fill my mind with the exploration of music and words. I just wanted to make loops to play along with and record onto the four-track and take these sounds and songs as far as I could take them within the limitations of the equipment I had.

The imperfections of the loops and their b-sides played through a delay pedal, pitch controls on the four-track, doubling up vocals for harmonies, lyrics that explored a form of magic realism influenced by the books and writing I filled my time with, pitch shifting guitar to sound like a bass, using tremolo, wah and delay to explore a similar nostalgic guitar sound that I heard on the b-sides of the loops and from years of listening to my fathers record collection, cheap keyboards played through a flanger and delay pedal. The possibilities were endless especially as the only audience was myself, and I set about making a world that was mine and that I could stay in for the rest of my life.

That was over twenty years ago, and I thought I had taken these approaches to new places by adding computers, samplers, loop pedals, harmonicas, drums, bass, dictaphone field recordings, different recording techniques, different vocals styles, different writing techniques, plus a decade in bands in the middle; but in my 45th year I dug up my 4 track and recorded a few songs and realised it was all still the same. I played the same, I sounded the same, and I realised one very very simple thing, this was me, and I am eternally grateful that I have been given the chance to find this out.

Love from Fupper.