Still Rockin' It - Cheryl Lee
Join Cheryl Lee That Radio Chick on Still Rockin' It for news, reviews and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.
What are they up to at the moment? Let's find out .......
Still Rockin' It - Cheryl Lee
What have Furnace & the Fundamentals been up to lately? OR Wiggles for Adults with Toys
Join Cheryl Lee - That Radio Chick on STILL ROCKIN' IT for news, reviews, music and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians.
Get ready for a musical extravaganza as we bring you an episode packed with energy, excitement, and eclectic performances! We kick things off at the Mundy Mundy Bash in Broken Hill with none other than Furnace and the Fundamentals. Ever wondered what a "Wiggles for Adults" show feels like? Furnace (Elliot) and Digby spill the beans on their vibrant stage antics, sharing how they blend hits from The Beatles to Beyoncé, ensuring every concert is an unforgettable experience.
Tune in to discover the backstory of their quirky name and how they've managed to captivate audiences across the globe with their theatrical flair.
Providing an eclectic blend of the best songs ever written, delivered with all the character of the original and twice the energy, Furnace and the Fundamentals give the people what they want – better than they remembered it.
With combined sales of over ONE BILLION records, their immense repertoire spans countless hits, performed with their incredible musicianship and a stunning stage presence. From The Beatles to Beyonce, Queen to Daft Punk, The Lion King to Dirty Dancing and everything in between – this band is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
Hundreds of thousands of fans across Australia, the UK, Europe, Asia & New Zealand have seen Furnace earn their reputation as bona fide party starters, including show-stopping performances at Falls Festival, the British & Australian F1 Grand Prix, Lost Paradise, Edinburgh, Adelaide & Perth Fringe Festivals, Zomerfestival IJmuiden, St Kilda Festival, Big Red Bash, Mundi Mundi Bash, the Super Rugby Finals, NYE at Sydney Harbour and countless packed club shows, including sold out performances at Sydney’s iconic Enmore Theatre, Brisbane’s Tivoli and London’s Electric Ballroom.
What have Furnace & The Fundamentals been up to lately? Let's find out!!
Get out when you can, support local music and I'll see you down the front!!
Visit: ThatRadioChick.com.au
That Radio Chick Cheryl Lee here. Welcome to the Still Rockin' it podcast, where we'll have music news, reviews and interviews with some of our favourite Australian musicians and artists. We have been so lucky to attend the Mundi Mundi Bash at Broken Hill with a line-up of the likes of James Reyne, Jon Stevens, the Living End, ian Moss, Daryl Braithwaite, Diesel, Tim Finn, Baby Animals, Vanessa Amorosi, Mark Seymour, Tex Perkins, Tim Rogers, Richard Clapton, Casey Barnes, Chocolate Starfish. Other amazing activities, including the Nutbush World Record Attempt, raising funds and awareness for the Royal Flying Doctors Service. The Mad Max World Record Attempt set in 2022. The record for the most Mad Max characters gathered in one place. The Big Blue Day, where we created a new world record and raised a lot of money for Beyond Blue. We set the new world record for the largest human image of a country. And, of course, the Mundi Undi Run, also raising money for the Flying Doctor Service and absolutely hilarious.
Cheryl Lee:This next band, for me, has been the find of the bash, providing an eclectic blend of the best songs ever written, delivered with all the character of the original and twice the energy furnace and the fundamentals. Give the people what they want better than they remembered it, with combined sales of over 1 billion records. Their immense repertoire spans countless hits performed with their incredible musicianship and stunning stage presence. If you love, from the Beatles to Beyonce, Queen to Daft Punk, the Lion King to Dirty Dancing and everything in between, you're going to love these guys as much as I did. Hundreds and thousands of fans across Australia, the UK, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand have seen Furnace earn their reputation as bona fide party starters, including show-stopping performances at Falls Creek, the British and Australian F1 Grand Prix's, Edinburgh, Adelaide and Perth Fringe Festivals, Big Red Bash, of course, Mundi, Mundi Bash, the Super Rugby Finals, New Year's Eve on Sydney Harbour and London's Electric Ballroom.
Cheryl Lee:I won't tell you too much more about them. I might let the boys tell you themselves. You can see all the fun and photos on the Cheryl Lee Crabtree Facebook page, or go to Still Rockin' it, that Radio Chick on YouTube for some artist performance videos as well. To catch up on podcasts from other favourite artists, simply go to thatradiochick. com. au. You're with Cheryl Lee that Radio Chick. I'd like to welcome you to the Green Room. We are at the Mundi Mundi Bash and I would like to introduce you to Furnace and Digby from Furnace and the Fundamentals. Now for those that haven't heard of Furnace and the Fundamentals. I don't know if there's anybody out there who hasn't so many, but would you like to introduce the band to us? Furnace, since it's named after you?
Furnace:Sure, we are Furnace and the Fundamentals. We are a party covers band. We do a bunch of mashes. We've turned it into a bit of a show. We dance around, we do a bunch of theatrical dumb stuff. It's basically Wiggles for Adults, is how it's been described before, Inflatable dolls, inflatable flamingos, dancing, drumming, sing-alongs, all your favourite music, just a big party.
Cheryl Lee:And your members. You on vocals, yeah.
Digby:Digby. I play guitar and saxophone and occasionally tap and whatever triangle this year Triangle Whatever the odd thing is, I'm on it.
Cheryl Lee:I've got a very important question Do you need a tambourine player?
Digby:Oh, I mean, we've always got room for a tambourine player.
Cheryl Lee:There's always room for a tambourine. Because you know I'm very expensive, but I'm good.
Digby:As long as you're good, as long as you can dance to that tambourine, you are good, absolutely, and the rest of the band.
Furnace:So we've got Pluto on keys, we've got Marcus on bass, Tom on the other guitar rhythm and Mike on drums.
Cheryl Lee:All righty. So my next question is where did the name come from? So the first part, we know that's you.
Furnace:Yeah, come from. So the first part, we know that's you. Yeah, so I mean the first part. To give it context was just a nickname that my brother's friends gave me. You'd have to ask them why. It's probably got something to do with my hair colour, skin colour oh, hair colour.
Cheryl Lee:Oh, so your real name's not Furnace.
Furnace:No, no, my real name's Elliot. Finally enough, not as good a stage name Elliot. Uh, the the rest of the name is quite boring. It was literally just. Uh, we had our first sort of name show coming up and we had to send them. It was a festival uh, I think the Deni Ute muster and we had to send them a name, and so we were just sending emails back and forth being like about this name, this name and flash cat phoenix yeah, there's so many were thrown out there and we landed on Furnace and the Fundamentals, which was that felt like the best option when we were running out of time, if I'm being honest, and I believe I believe Marcus said Elliot and the fundamentals, which was just like why wouldn't you go with Furnace?
Digby:so then we that's how we landed on that and then we thought, look, we'll just change it after the gig when we figure out something better. Yeah, exactly, and here we are still, as now it's too late, obviously so pretty much any meaning mine could have been anything.
Cheryl Lee:That was the one that we all agreed on yeah.
Digby:So that was the main thing. We were like yeah, that sounds cool, that's memorable his name's furnace, I tell you what you don't get any other result in google, so it's very googleable.
Furnace:You know, I seen some band names. It's like you put that into Google and there's a million different things, like live glass, like lots of stuff Mammoth.
Cheryl Lee:Yeah, well done Marketing 101. There you go, exactly Right, eo. I'd like to know the origins of the blow-ups.
Digby:Oh, okay. So when we started doing this show as a covers band, we had to think of ways to make our show more identifiable and different. You know, unique, because it's not our music. So, aside from doing these unique mashups that we would do, we wanted to do something more theatrical and visual and we wanted to have like a balloon drop. But we didn't want to just do a balloon drop, so we were trying to throwing out ideas. I think some of the ideas were like helium heart balloons for Whitney Houston, so they went up, you know.
Furnace:Wouldn't it have been for Lovers in the Air? Oh yeah, I see.
Digby:No, no, yeah, it was for I Will Always Love you.
Furnace:There were all these ideas thrown out.
Digby:Then I came up with the idea of us selling underwear as merch and thinking about Tom Jones, how women would throw underwear at him, and somehow that got me thinking oh, you know, what could be a bit. I didn't know if anyone would go for it. But so what if we dropped like inflatable sex dolls from the sky for it's raining men, but not sexual ones, like maybe, just like if we can find like a cool thinking that everyone would go? Well, I think that's a bit much. Everyone was like, yeah. I was like, oh great.
Digby:And then I ended up being the nervous one when it ended the first time I was scared that people might be a little offended by it. But then we saw lots of people walking home with the dolls under their arm and we're like, okay, this is the thing that we should keep doing. And then it became so popular we couldn't not do the show. So when we sing It's Raining Men on the first chorus, we release the blow-up dolls with some extra fluids. It's harder to do here because we don't have a roof, so we kind of just have to chuck them.
Furnace:Awesome, and now the biggest importer of male sex dolls in Australia.
Digby:That is not a joke. I bet. How many do you order a?
Furnace:year 500. It's probably 800 every few years, so maybe more like 300.
Cheryl Lee:And when the delivery comes, the postman goes oh, these are a kinky lot.
Furnace:Well, they get sent to a warehouse now, oh clever, so I don't deal with that anymore.
Digby:What's it do? It's a bunch of sex dolls, yeah.
Cheryl Lee:So how did you likely lads all meet and form a band in the start.
Furnace:Well, that's an easy question. Four of us were schoolmates and that's effectively how we started. The original drummer was also one of those schoolmates and we used to just write songs for each other on our birthdays Insulting songs, very insulting, as boys do, exactly Lovingly insulting songs. We all kind of wanted to make use of our skills, if I'm being honest. Like I wanted to have an excuse to sing, these guys wanted to have an excuse to play guitar, and so it was just kind of us having fun and we played originals gigs. We started doing the covers thing on the side to sort of make money, and then it kind of took off, um and we, our current drummer. We used to play gigs with his other band, so that's how we knew him. And when our drummer had a baby, he had to leave, and so we picked this guy up and our keyboardist we met through our manager.
Digby:He was also doing original stuff, looking for money-making things. So once he joined it was like that last piece of the puzzle. We were like, wow, this really opens up these extra sounds that we can now do that we couldn't. We actually used to some of our first gigs elliot would do the keys on like a 150 dollar casio keyboard and we had this one particular sound called bright, or was it bright? Or 16? 16 just had this very generic organ sound and we used it for everything and I don't know how we even got away with people enjoying the show, seeing how we moved so quickly. Once we got like a proper keyboardist with proper sounds and we could imitate the songs, it was like how did how do people enjoy you get away with that?
Furnace:I can tell you I'm not good at keyboard. Well, I certainly wasn't back then. I'm better now. I was bad back then, so it was crazy.
Digby:You could play Call Me Al, so that was enough.
Furnace:Yeah, I did Call Me Al.
Cheryl Lee:Righto Now, the songs are amazing. How do you pick the songs for the set list? Because how do you pick out all of those?
Digby:So it's interesting because in the beginning we didn't know what the best way to do it was. So everyone would kind of throw in these ideas. We kind of just try everything until we kind of worked out what was best. And over time you start seeing that there are certain songs that win every single time. So it's almost like the longer we've done it, the more scrutinizing we've been over what can stay in and what doesn't.
Cheryl Lee:What works, what the crowd loves.
Digby:And I think with the internet these days it's pretty clear like the top ten songs for white people.
Cheryl Lee:You know, like Journey, Bon.
Digby:Jovi. You know, Sweet Caroline, all that kind of stuff and that's funnily enough, as funny as it is, it always goes well. And I think Furness kind of came out. Elliot came out with this kind of structure to how we would do mashups over time that always seemed to work better than the others. We used to kind of go into one song, go back to that song. You know there were certain sets that would just work better than others, so we kind of based the next system on that one.
Cheryl Lee:So you've got a bit of a formula now.
Digby:Yeah, yeah, but I'm always on the side of I don't want to get too formulaic because, I'm always scared it's going to get boring. So it's always trying to find that middle ground where all six if you can get six people to stand there and go I like this there's a very good chance that you'll win. It doesn't always. We can spend months on a song that we all you know, okay.
Furnace:But I think, ultimately, the audience is our, is our master the measure. Yes, that's how we measure everything.
Digby:We still want to have fun, so that's always going to be in the back of our minds. But ultimately, if the crowd doesn't dig it for what we're doing, I mean we need to keep them entertained. We need to keep them on their feet. We don't want them to stop Right.
Cheryl Lee:I've got one last quick question. I think the couch might be required is it? I just want to know what you guys listen to. You play such a varied and amazing list of different songs, but when you're alone in your car, what do you like to listen to?
Furnace:I mean, it varies a lot for me personally. You know, I kind of A lot of what we do is music. I love the stuff we don't do, that I still of. A lot of what we do is music, I love the stuff we don't do. That I still love. I used to love ELO and I find myself coming back to it every now and again and just being like oh yeah, I've enjoyed some of. I've been getting into Tay-Tay recently.
Furnace:Yeah, I know. Otherwise, I've been listening to, like I'm getting old, like I was listening to the radio reading service that just reads out these you know news articles and I'm like Van Halen interesting, Darkness learning and like so I don't know, I'm changing.
Digby:I've gone through various phases of my life, so at the ripe old age of 38, kind of looking for new music all the time. But I'm more like my top top bands like van halen, the darkness, um. But I also really like 90s, early 90s hip-hop, late 80s hip-hop. But I really like J ewel Leaper at the moment she's really fun and really cool. Bruno Mars I really really like his writing and style, but I'm always a sucker for rock music. So if I can find I'm not so into the super heavy stuff that's really popular at the moment. I like really strong melodies and things like that. So that's why I tend to be into my 80s. 80s is a really easy genre just to kind of pick and go. This is what we like, because often, even if it's a different genre, there's always a strong melody or hook to it that we latch on to, so we're not really too picky on what the style is.
Digby:If Queen sounds good, yeah I think we can all agree as a band that Queen's probably the most likely band that we'd all listen to, do you?
Furnace:reckon Queen is definitely the most universal band globally in our experience yeah, you can play queen anywhere and it works yeah, whereas most countries have their own little nuances. Queen's worldwide Queen is, so world domination.
Digby:Yeah, yeah, really. They know how to stay relevant. That bad.
Furnace:Let me tell you a lot of American stuff doesn't work in the UK and I'm sure vice versa. But Queen works everywhere, yes.
Cheryl Lee:Alrighty, well, welcome to the Mundi Mundi Bash.
Digby:Thank you for having us.
Cheryl Lee:You're here twice.
Digby:We are tonight and tomorrow night.
Cheryl Lee:So we shall see you down the front two times. Yes, alrighty, thanks for chatting with us.
Digby:Thanks for having us have a great gig. Thank you, thanks, guys.
Cheryl Lee:You're with Cheryl Lee, that radio chick. Thank you so much for joining me on the Still Rockin' it podcast. Hope to catch you again next time.