GOOD FOXY – ‘Good Foxy’ The album

Good Foxy is George ‘Banksy’ Banks (Lead Vocals / Guitar), Henry Crabtree (Guitar), Freddie Bruhin-Price (Bass / Vox), Callum Sykora (Drums), James Robinson (Keys / Harmonica / Vox).

ON Friday, September 25th, 2015, Good Foxy played to a packed out audience of 400 people at the launch party of their self-titled debut album at The Grand, Clitheroe. It topped two years of relentless gigging to growing audiences across the provincial North.
Picking up new followers every step of the way, this wide-eyed five-piece have been gloriously entertaining haunts of all sizes, from regulars of Lancashire pubs to revelers at the region’s hippest festivals.
The hard yards have been worth every strained sinew for this musically malleable band of brothers. They have ripped up the rulebook and produced a debut album of startling elasticity, drawing on a hubbub of influences and feelings, some deeply personal, some more irreverent. The resulting 11-track record is ambitious, fun and occasionally bruising; full of bright ideas, reverent tones and memorable motifs, engineered with dexterity by Tom Peters and Elliott Dryden at The Grand Studio, Clitheroe. Rewind to 2013….Still in the vestiges of their teenage years, Banksy, Freddie, Callum and Henry gathered around the ‘jam night’ of a local hostelry. Banksy would sing Neil Young’s ‘Old Man,’ an unassuming spark of creativity ignited amidst the smalltown inertia that surrounded them. The jams moved from the pub to the attic of their sound recordist buddy (now live sound engineer) Elliott. Jams went down. Demos were done. Sparks flew. The songs written in these early sessions would become lasting tunes of the Good Foxy cannon. The epic ‘Seek’ expanded from its raw form to an obvious album opener, albeit preceded with the darkly atmospheric opening gambit (Haze In) that introduces it. Side B’s game-changer ‘Beneath the Weeping Sky’ also arrived in these early sessions, another wave of lyrical inspiration from Banksy beneath the East Lancashire heavens opening on the studio roof. ‘Tastes Like Sugar’ was penned the day before it was performed to winning acclaim at a regional battle of the band competition. This track has since been polished into the album’s penultimate number, influenced by the band’s most recent addition Robbo, whose arrival with keyboards and harmonica injected an authentic R&B feel to a number of tunes and arrangements. Good Foxy’s first experiment in another friend’s recording studio unearthed the incendiary ‘Hi Watt’ a fast-paced foul burst of a debut single (September 2014) which mirrored the momentum of the band’s live shows. Its rolling rhythm section disintegrates into a beautifully show-stopping ambient breakdown before the song kicks back into life with a mosh-inducing finale. An instant live classic.
The Grand sessions saw Good Foxy lay down the lighter mood of The Days Never Change, the surrealist indie prog of Down the Rabbit Hole and the brooding Hip Noesis, where progressive and classic rock tendencies spa with emotive keys and Robbo’s just-below-the music mutter. Pigpen is poet Freddie’s ode to the Grateful Dead lead singer’s untimely death in his mid 20s, aptly followed by the power-station riff behind the behemoth ‘Gone West’, where the album reaches its dirge zenith, Henry’s pedal board and dueling guitar never sounded so good.