Funked up

George Clinton has been to the edge of the universe and back again, so far out that he's now more in than ever. He's tamer now but will never lose the groove, the father of funk promises Jim Carroll as the mothership prepares to land in Dublin.

George Clinton is trying to remember the good old days. Back then, he was one wild cat. Back in the good old days, Dr Funkenstein had an appetite for destruction and a thirst for the funk. Back then, Clinton arrived in town and the town put up the shutters, battened down the hatches and nailed the cats and dogs to the floor. You could feel the P-funk vibes miles away.

Clinton was the Funkadelic and Parliament bandleader who set the dials on his mothership for the extra-terrestrial car-park in the sky and didn't stop spinning until he got there by funk means or foul. Fronting a travelling freakshow, featuring dozens of musicians and sporting the kind of eyesore outfits Elton John in his most addled cocaine prime would have balked at, Clinton pushed Afrocentric sci-fi tales like no other ex-hairdresser in the game.

Hits? He's had a few. When it came to psychedelic brews that took your head off, he was the only one who had a licence to thrill. Clinton set his stall out with freewheeling funky mothers like Free Your Mind . . . And Your Ass Will Follow, One Nation Under a Groove, America Eats Its Young and Chocolate City. You met these of a night and you just had to move.

Hits from the bong? He's had a few of them too. "Every so often somebody shows me a video of some show or TV appearance from back then and I'm like 'Oh my God, that guy's pitiful'," says Clinton of his '70s bad self. "I see myself sitting around tripping on acid and I feel sorry for myself. I was a state back then. How did that guy make it through? Man. I can't remember what I was thinking with all that."

Clinton chuckles. These days, the wild man of funk prefers to let others embrace the madness.

"I've become tamer in recent years because I'm older now, my bones start acting up when certain things happen or it gets damp, but I have enough fools around me to keep me going. A few members of the band take up the slack because the group is forever. I'm the one in the band who mellows things out nowadays. Before, I was probably the one provoking all the hassle."

For the last 40 years or thereabouts, Clinton has been funk's most outlandish and entertaining figure. Turning left when everyone else went straight on, in his heyday Clinton made music that connected mind with booty like no one else. If James Brown was the godfather of soul, George Clinton was the father of funk.

These days, he hears the funk every time he turns on the damn radio. Same as it ever was, he reckons. "The funk will never become obsolete." Thing is, though, the name has changed. "All these different names - slow r'n'b, urban, whatever - don't disguise the fact that it's the funk. We try to keep it from changing names, but it's never going to go away. It was here long before we started doing it and it will still be here no matter what they call it."

Clinton started out as a doo-wop boy. When he wasn't cutting hair at the Uptown Tonsorial Parlor in Plainfield, New Jersey ("one of the best hairdos I did was the Finger Waves - my hair was so cool it made you seasick when I walked by") or trying to be Mister Big Stuff with a local street gang, Clinton and his buds did the soulful barbershop doo-wop thing as the Parliaments. He sang high, he sang low and Motown came a-calling.

The Parliaments didn't strike it rich in Motor City (just one hit, Testify, in 1967), but Clinton kept his eyes open as he strolled through Berry Gordy Jr's empire.

"Motown was my high school. I'd be there, watching all these different artists going into rooms, coming up with their songs and producing hits. Standing in the Shadows of Love, Reach Out for Me, Stop in the Name Of Love, Signed Sealed Delivered: it was amazing to watch it happening."

He also really liked what the house band were doing. "They were the ones who named the funk, the Young Funk Brothers. That was the funkiest band ever." It gave him a few ideas, and the slick soul which The Parliaments were pushing evolved into sprawling jams and funky rhythms.

"By the time we had our hit on Motown, doo-wop was getting old - that was my mother's music. Everybody was playing rock, so what we did was take the mid-tempo funky stuff and made a thing out of it, just like rock'n'roll is pop with funk and the blues."

As if one band wasn't enough to be keeping him going, Clinton also assembled Funkadelic, his psychedelic rock outfit whose far-out guitars, booming basslines, sci-fi sound effects and cosmically-charged ravings defined funk for many.

"People used to ask us what the difference was between the groups. I'd tell them that Funkadelic was the guitar and rock side of the house and Parliament was for the singers and the horns. But stuff was always crawling over to the other side. In the early days, though, two bands did mean two paychecks coming in."

During the 1970s, Clinton kept the albums and the anthems rolling along. This was funk music you could dance to, but which also set your mind in motion, with or without the help of narcotic stimulation. Given the state of black America, Clinton's music was protest music that even made social commentary sound funky.

No one else was digging quite the same groove. "I mean, the style was basic in some ways, but really deep in others," says Clinton of what they were doing. "Everybody had different stuff they wanted to do. Different people in the band were into the blues and Jimi Hendrix and James Brown and Motown and gospel and all the rock groups at the time, you know. Even that Iggy Pop cat.

"So I decided we should throw everything into the mix to confuse people and cause chaos. When we got chaotic, we really got chaotic and put all kinds of goofy shit in."

It helped that he had some awesome players with him onstage, from the late Ray Davis on vocals to one-time James Brown boys Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley. "It was spooky on that stage!" exclaims Clinton. "Magic, just magic, the way I didn't have to say anything to them or do anything, they just had it right from the start."

If the sound didn't get you, the spectacle did: no-one else arrived in town with an enormous mothership plonked on the stage. "We had to do things no one else was doing," remembers Clinton. "If it had glitter, we had to make it glitter to the point that nobody had ever done before."

But, inevitably, the mothership would crash to earth with a bang. The 1980s brought changes. Deaths and disputes cleared the decks of various funkateers and Clinton found himself keeping more court dates than concert dates. When he did hit the road, he was plugging solo albums and assembling a funk mob termed the P-Funk All-Stars.

Of course, it all came right again. A new generation of funk fans began to hear about this bad-ass with the three and four hour jams because of the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Prince and a whole host of rappers sampling his sounds. The Atomic Dog was back on top.

"It's weird, man, weird. We were more popular in '76 than we were 10 years ago. But now we're more popular than we were in '76 without the hit record. We stayed around so long and we're down with every group. Every group that come around, we down with. If the parents say 'I hate that shit!', I gravitate towards that."

Certainly, he found kindred spirits. "Working with the Chili Peppers was cool because it was an acknowledgment of how much influence we had on them. They got us to play songs of our own which we had not played in years. Hell, I don't even remember writing those songs!"

Prince? "Man, he's carrying the torch for live funk now more than ever. He's smoking when he plays live now. Did you see that last tour? He's got a few members of my band with him now, but that's OK because he's always been a huge supporter of what we do. I remember touring with the mothership and seeing him by the side of the stage every night. He's been like a funkateer from the moment he started out."

But the real Clinton juice was squeezed by various hip-hop producers raiding the mothership's vast back catalogue. "Funk is the DNA of hip-hop," says Clinton, and the evidence backs him up. Beats, loops and samples of P-funk's greatest bits turned up on the albums of Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Missy Elliot, De La Soul, OutKast and a host of others.

He's down with sampling and produced two albums, Sample Some of Dis and Sample Some of Dat to allow hip-hop acts to borrow from the P-Funk catalogue.

Money trickled back in, but very slowly. "The artists paid, they got charged for it, but the record companies didn't pass the money onto us. We in court right now fighting to get paid." He's had a few good days in court of late. They probably make up for those 1980s days when he was cleaned out by former band members. Thanks to US District Court Judge Manuel L Real, Clinton now has regained the rights to and control of four of his old albums. It's just the beginning. "We're going to get them all back," he promises.

People might think that Clinton is a crazy old dog, but don't believe all you see. "I do that on purpose," he chuckles. "Acting the fool is my own protection against taking myself too seriously. They trying to make me straight now, but they also want me to be edgy. If I have to look straight for somebody to take me seriously, that's as silly as hell."

As always, you'll find the sanest man in funk on the road with his all-star band. They arrive in town and they'll tear it right now. This P-Funk roadshow seems certain to go on forever.

"Bring two booties to the show," he advises prospective Dublin maggot brains. "One booty won't be enough, we're going to wear one out when we come to town."