Good time band brings skiffle to Whanganui

Hot Potato are (back from left) Steve Duggan, Colin Luttrell, Paul Curran, and front row, driver's seat Kerry Hagan, passenger seat Geoff Follett. Photo / Supplied

Skiffle is a musical style known for its relaxed, No 8 wire attitude, and is often credited with having paved the way for rock and roll in the UK in the 1950s.

Broadly speaking, it's a style of folk music, played with often improvised instruments.

But it's the character of skiffle, rather than the tea chest bass, spoons and lagerfone, that marks the Whanganui band called Hot Potato.

The semi-acoustic five-piece good-time band plays a variety of music from rock and pop to country and blues, in fact anything able to be given the skiffle treatment. There's Kerry, Steve, Colin, Paul and Geoff.

Geoff Follett, keyboardist and vocalist, says skiffle music started in the 1920s with makeshift instruments as well as traditional piano and guitar.

"Then there was a big explosion in the 1950s, pre rock and roll. The Beatles started off as a skiffle band."

Geoff says things were tight financially after the war so any instrument at hand, or anything that could be made into an instrument, became the tools of the skiffle trade.

"We do traditional skiffle stuff as well as taking other tunes that have become famous since, and 'skifflising' them. Like a skiffle version of Paint it Black [Rolling Stones] … it could be skiffle rock, skiffle punk, with an acoustic feel."

Hot Potato started about three years ago.

"We've all been playing in different bands over the years – rock, punk, country – and we decided to do the same songs but do them skiffle.

"Colin Luttrell is involved in the Ukulele Orchestra and he and Paul Curran, who is a folkie, talked about a band: and I'd been talking to Colin about that kind of band – so we all found ourselves in the same place at the same time. Paul brought in Kerry [Hagan] and we needed a bass player and there was Steve [Duggan].

"It's an eclectic bunch of people. Two Kiwis, two Brits and an Oz: it's like a Commonwealth act."

With a Facebook page, a website and access to some of their recorded music on line, Hot Potato are showing how to play good music with skill, while giving themselves and their audience a good time. The word 'fun' is definitely part of the modern skiffle style.