21 years on, Fat Freddy's Drop enters a new era

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 21 years since Fat Freddy’s Drop released ‘Based on a True Story’, their first album, featuring anthems like 'Cay’s Crays’, ‘Wandering Eye’, and ‘This Room’” - songs that a certain bracket of music fans listened to on iPods, or ripped from dad’s CD copy onto windows media player.

‘Based on a True Story', the album that helped turn Fat Freddy’s Drop from a Pōneke/Wellington institution into one of Aotearoa’s most beloved live exports, is now two decades old. Released in 2005, it remains one of the country's highest-selling albums by a New Zealand artist of all time, a benchmark that still underpins the band’s global legacy.

The band has just recently come off a run of sold-out Australian shows in March, with Aotearoa/New Zealand dates set for May, before a wider tour across the UK and Europe through June, September and October.

Still, when I sit down with saxophonist Scott “Chopper” Towers and drummer Cory Champion ahead of the band’s latest run of performances, it’s clear this moment carries a different emotional charge, one of nostalgic return and the beginning of a new phase.

Last July, the group lost member and sonic architect Chris “MU” Faiumu, whose role in Fat Freddy’s Drop stretched far beyond his legendary onstage performances. For Towers, the scale of that absence is impossible to separate from the band’s current reality. These shows, he explains, were already in motion before MU’s passing. The group had been building toward them while also navigating another major emotional and physical shift behind the scenes: moving out of their longtime studio after the building was marked for demolition, finding a new space and beginning construction all over again.

It is one of the most precise ways you could describe the delicate task now facing Fat Freddy’s Drop. The songs are familiar, but the emotional challenge is not simply to replay a catalogue that has already earned its place, but to rebuild the chemistry that lets the music breathe.

That process began a few weeks after MU’s death, the band met and agreed to continue the project and honour the touring plans already in place. They also knew they needed to move fast in securing the people who would help carry that next chapter. Drummer Cory Champion amd bassist Johnny Lawrence, were high on that list.

Born in Wellington and now based in Naarm/Melbourne, the drummer and composer leads electro-acoustic neo-jazz project Clear Path Ensemble and DJs and produces under the alias Borrowed CS.

Lawrence, meanwhile, is a cornerstone of Wellington’s jazz circuit, an in-demand session player and bandleader with deep roots in the local scene.

Both Lawrence and Champion’s paths into the band had started earlier, first through sessions for the band’s vocalist Dallas Tamaira’s solo material, and later through work on ‘Slo Mo’, Fat Freddy’s Drop’s most recent album. By the time the current lineup came together, the trust was already established. Still, stepping into a band with this much history, particularly at a moment like this, is not exactly casual admin.

In the early stages, Champion describes his role as largely supportive, helping realise arrangements that had already been carefully sketched out, while finding the best way to serve the songs. But onstage, he says, the dynamic opens up. There are transitions left deliberately loose, sections built for improvisation, and room for the set to evolve night by night. That elasticity has always been central to the Fat Freddy’s Drop live show, and it is now becoming the place where this new version of the band can discover itself in real time.

So much of the band’s long-held power has come from a kind of internal telepathy, the slow accumulation of instinct, timing and trust that can only be built over years of playing together. Towers speaks about that kind of creative partnership with both admiration and grief. “That creative partnership has been in place for a quarter of a century,” he says, “it’s a lot of flying time.” There is no shortcut for that kind of shared language. But there is movement, patience, and the willingness to let a new one form.

The fact that Champion and Lawrence already share a musical bond helps. “They’ve brought their partnership into our partnership,” Towers says, a line that gets to the heart of how bands continue the legacy of members passed: not by replacing one exact chemistry with another, but by allowing new relationships to alter the shape of the whole.

That porousness has always been part of Fat Freddy’s Drop’s DNA. When the conversation turns to Wellington and the broader New Zealand music ecosystem, Towers describes a scene where genre boundaries have never been especially rigid. In smaller musical communities, people are rarely sealed inside one lane. Jazz musicians play with rock bands; dub techniques bleed into soul, dance music, and experimental forms; the cross-pollination is a necessary elevation of the craft.

“Very few people are just in their lane,” he says. “The musical rules aren’t adhered to very strictly. People just grab whatever they like, smush it together.”

It is as good an explanation as any for how Fat Freddy’s Drop came to sound like Fat Freddy’s Drop, a band formed in a novelty era of eclectic styles, and those sounds were already in active conversation. Towers also points to dub and reggae as a particularly deep current in Aotearoa’s musical bloodstream, tracing a line through Bob Marley’s 1979 visit and the influence of local group Herbs, whose social and political sensibilities resonated strongly with Māori and Pasifika communities. That lineage matters. So does the way the band continues to carry it without calcifying into heritage act territory.

There is already talk of where the music might head next, of what else could be pulled from the catalogue, what future sets might emphasise and what fresh material could emerge. Towers laughs at ideas being tossed around for more up-tempo, dancefloor-focused directions, “What if we just did a disco techno set?” You get the sense that, for a band relearning itself under pressure, almost everything is back on the table.

That includes the emotional terms on which they perform. In November 2025, the band were on hand to open an exhibition celebrating the group’s history, packed with instruments, flyers, footage and fragments from the band’s long arc. Organised by the Te Waka Huia o Ngā Taonga Tuku Iho Wellington Museum, it is a fitting reminder that Fat Freddy’s Drop has always been bigger than a single album cycle or configuration.

Inevitably, MU’s absence hangs over all of this; it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. His omnipresence comes through most strongly in speaking with Towers and Champion, and they speak of him with utmost care, momentum and a sharpened sense of impermanence.

So the music keeps moving. Across anniversary shows, across rebuilt studios, across new players and old songs, across grief and muscle memory and whatever comes next. Twenty-one years on from Based on a True Story, Fat Freddy’s Drop are revisiting the past and testing what it means to keep faith without becoming trapped inside it.

And maybe that is the more interesting milestone anyway.

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Farah Azizan is a freelance writer & DJ based in Naarm/Melbourne. Find her on Instagram.