Beautiful Days Festival star Funke and The Two Tone Baby to headline Edge of The Wedge, Southsea

​Yes, it’s a huge stage and someone needs to be first on, but it’s also the point where many festival-goers are hungover and/or exhausted – yet to get into gear for the last big push, and day ticket holders are yet to arrive on site.

But that was the situation Funke and The Two Tone Baby found himself in at last August’s Beautiful Days festival.

However, Funke – real name Dan Turnbull – was not going to let the situation beat him. He ended up drawing the biggest ever Sunday morning crowd to the stage.

‘That's not just me saying that it’s the biggest crowd, that's official,’ he tells The Guide with more than a hint of pride.

‘(Musician and journalist) John Robb was the compere for the event and he said he'd been compering this event for about 10 years and he’d never seen a crowd that size this early on. I saw the band in the same slot on Saturday and they can't have had more than 50 people there. I had about 3,000, it was ridiculous!

‘But I do put an awful lot of effort into it. I've been playing that festival for about seven years and the crowds have been getting bigger and bigger each time – 10 deep out of the tent, and then all of the way up the hill – so when they gave me the set at 11am on Sunday morning, with the greatest respect I thought, that's a terrible time to do a gig!

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‘I do a song called Not Enough Bonobo, so I started this thing online of trying to get the monkey army down, and did a big push for it. Loads of people turned up in monkey regalia – it was bizarre.’

Funke is a one-man phenomenon – mixing folky singalong anthems with blistering blues riffs, juxtaposed with fat bass, big beats and sub kicks. He is a frenzied amalgamation of organic and electronic.

Over the course of three albums and nigh on 1,000 gigs he has amassed something of a cult following.

‘This is my 10th year – I've technically been going longer. I started when I left university which is actually 13 years ago. I was playing even before university, but I count it from when I was out gigging as my living – I've been gigging outside of Kent and nationally for 10 years.’

Home is still in Kent, a village ‘about 15 minutes from the M25 which is handy for getting my way around the country!’

In all those hundreds of gigs he can only recall one visit to Portsmouth before – at the Birdcage. Obviously not the Birdcage of the 1960s which played host to some of the biggest names of the day, but the space above The Festing Pub in Southsea which adopted the name for a while rather more recently.

’I played up there a long while ago,’ he recalls, ‘I think someone invited me to it and I was quite out of place because there were quite a lot of angry punk bands playing. I'm not an angry punk... man! he laughs at the memory.

As a support act, Funke has played with a diverse range of acts – from jazz to the aforementioned punk, with the likes of Skinny Lister, Dutty Moonshine Big Band, Comet is Coming, Beans on Toast, Hazel O’Connor, Hayseed Dixie, and many more – but he claims he has always won the audiences over.

‘I'm quite loud and energetic and quite frenetic and will get the party started, to coin a phrase. It's quite nice now to get to the point where I'm touring with bands who do have a bit of balls, I can drive things up to that level – it's a lot of fun.’

This 16-date tour Dan is about to start, which swings by The Edge of The Wedge in Southsea on March 12, is a pivotal one for the performer.

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‘This is the final tour of an era for me, essentially. The last tour I was on in autumn, the final day of the tour, I went into the studio the next day for 14 days to record the new album. So on this tour coming up, I'm revisiting songs from my old records.’

The new album will be his first since 2018’s Denizen, and life has been tumultuous for Dan since then.

‘I had some quite personal tragedies. My mum died, then Covid happened, then my girlfriend died. It's not been the best five years...’ he lets the last comment hang in the air. ‘I spent a lot of last year getting out of my grief.’

While Dan often tackles political and personal themes in his music, he’s not a ‘woe is me’ singer-songwriter-type.

‘It's been very hard to attempt to write an album which isn't crushingly depressing. It's hard to write positive stuff when you're not feeling particularly positive, and it's taken me a long while to get into the correct headspace to finish something which I think people would want to listen rather than me going on a rant about my woes. Admittedly, I do touch on that on the album!

‘I started writing stuff about the pandemic and then I realised people probably didn't want to hear about that, and then I started writing about all of my woes, and realised people probably didn't want to hear about that either.

‘I've been shifting direction and I spent a lot of time last year doing that. And then there's stuff I started writing and had to abandon because of the thought of me then having to play that for the next 10 years…’

The album is now in its final stages – the weekend after we talk Dan is heading over to the studio in Oxford to make his ‘final tweaks’.

‘I have seven pages worth of notes! It's all been recorded, had its first draft of mixes and then I have my little say at the weekend, then it's to the executive producer and off to get mastered – then we're done.

‘The grand plan is for a release around September/October time, with singles around May/June.

‘I've just signed to a new booking agency, I've got a new album coming out and I've got some of the biggest festivals I've ever had by a country mile.

‘This is big year – a very big year for me, I'm absolutely bricking it,’ he chuckles. ‘It's a substantial step up.’

So what kind of vibe does the album have in the end?

‘Oooh, it's quite angry!’ he laughs. ‘Yeah, that's essentially how it ended up being. I've only just had the first opportunity to listen to it in its full glory and, yeah,’ he pauses fishing for the right word, ‘it's quite abrupt, but I think that's very reflective of the space that I was in.’

He has also changed the way he works.

‘Since my last album I've updated a lot of my processes and how I work. On my previous albums I was beatboxing a lot, now it's been palmed over to a drum machine, which developed an immediacy to the songs and a power that was never there before, just by default of the equipment I'm now using. It’s a lot dancier, a lot more immediate than my previous work.

‘It's going to be very interesting putting it out into the world, but to me it's a natural progression.’

When playing live Dan is a one-man operation – although he has tried touring with a band in the past.

‘I tried touring with a band on my last album. It was a three piece, me on half of my gear, then a drummer, and I palmed off the melodies to a trumpet player. It was great... but it was also the first tour where I've ever lost a substantial amount of money!

‘And it lost some of the essence of what it is that I do. Part of the attraction of what I do is that it's being produced by me, it's quite a powerful thing that I knock out. When you've got a band behind you it might be equally as powerful, but it's also diluted because you've got more people playing.’

While there are obviously other loop-based acts out there, there are few, if any quite like Dan. Watch one of the many videos online – or even better go see him live – and it soon becomes clear.

‘What I do is unique – no one is making music quite like I do, which is baffling to me. Looping and sampling technology has come on so much in recent years and there are a few people out there doing it, but no one particularly in the mainstream is making computer-based loop music, whereas I quite like the hardware element. There is a lot of danger in doing it – if I press the wrong button it will all just unfurl!

‘That's been 10 years of practice, 10 years of constantly adding things. The second I feel I've reached a peak with what I can achieve with what I've got, I've added something else. If another musician was to get hold of my rig as it currently stands, I think they would be baffled as to how it works.

‘I show very competent musicians what I do and they have no idea how I'm doing it, but to me it's been such a natural progression over the years that, yeah, it's great. It's juggling 10 things at once.’

But he admits that cuts both ways: ‘There's another loop artist called She Robot, a lady called Suzy Condrad. I went around her house in Bristol when I was touring and she showed me her rig and I showed her mine – we were both completely baffled as to what the other does!

‘And I think that's part of the joy of the technology – it's a completely blank slate, you can create it and diversify it and go off on as many tangents as you want, which makes it completely personal to you.’

Funke and The Two Tone baby, supported by Fugitive Orchestra is at The Edge of The Wedge on Sunday, March 12. Doors 7.30pm. Tickets £10. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.