St. Paul & The Broken Bones | Young Gun Silver Fox | Nils Landgren Funk Unit

Nils Landgren Celebrates His Funk Unit’s 30th Anniversary

The Nils Landgren Funk Unit was founded in 1994. When Siggi Loch offered me the chance to join his new label, ACT, the first thing he did was change the band’s original name, “Unit,” to “Funk Unit.” When I asked why, he replied succinctly: “Because you play funk”—and he was right. The rest is history.

After 30 years, eleven albums, countless tours, and everything that goes with them, I thought it would be great to record our anniversary album “Raw” (Release Date: June 28, 2024) at a special location.

As luck would have it, my good friend Johan Lundgren—who was my trombone student many years ago—has built a fantastic recording studio in Palma de Mallorca together with another friend, Fredrik Thomander. I thought it would be a great opportunity to record our new album in a relaxed setting where we could fully focus on our work and celebrate our 30-year history as a Swedish funk band.

I pitched the idea to my bandmates, and everyone was thrilled. So was Andreas Brandis, the current head of the ACT label, which has released all my albums since 1994. Now all I had to do was book the flights and the studio, organize accommodations for all of us, and find a way to
.

And then there was one more little thing: We all had to write music for the album. Right up until the first rehearsals shortly before we left for Mallorca, no one knew who had written which songs. I myself had worked hard in my free time and had five tracks ready. We listened to the demos together and then worked on them as a group until they sounded like they were all of ours. Each of us contributed, and it was truly wonderful to hear our compositions come to life.

When we landed in Palma at 2 p.m. on my birthday, February 15, we went straight to the studio to set up the sound. We just couldn’t wait. Most of the setup had already been taken care of by the studio crew and some dedicated volunteers, and faster than anyone had thought possible, we were able to start recording, with the fantastic sound engineer Shades overseeing the entire process.
From that moment on, we knew this was going to be a special album.

Everything fit together like a glove. The atmosphere in the studio, the sound, the way the guys in the band played, the coffee on the roof during breaks, the wonderful dinners we shared. To finance the recording, we’d decided to give house concerts on the last two evenings after the sessions. Although this meant even longer days for everyone involved, it was a wonderful feeling to test out the new songs in front of a live audience that was practically sitting on our laps.

It was so satisfying to get direct feedback from the people who came to these shows. And a film crew led by our dear friend Dan Sermand documented the whole thing.

We all left the island on February 20 with a sense of deep satisfaction, knowing that we had given it our all and that our best might have been more than just good enough. Only one man remained behind in Palma: Magnum Coltrane Price. Aside from being a magnificent bassist and singer, he’s also the only person by my side who has been part of the entire Funk Unit journey, from *Live in Stockholm* to the present day. We had decided to mix the new album in the same studio where we’d recorded it, but Shades wasn’t available again until a week later. I think Magnum enjoyed his time off in Mallorca and the subsequent work with the master.

The result is this album: “Raw.”

It embodies our honest and authentic way of playing handmade music that touches the body and soul. And I think it makes one thing clear: We’re not just any band. We’re the Nils Landgren Funk Unit.

With their 2015 debut album “West End Coast,” Young Gun Silver Fox celebrated the AOR sound of the radio era of the last millennium like hardly any other contemporary band. The genre is often called soft rock, and even those who
call it “yacht rock” aren’t entirely off the mark.

Andy “Young Gun” Platts and Shawn “Silver Fox” Lee have now reached their fifth album: “Pleasure” will be performed live for the first time in Germany on May 23, 2025, at the mojo club.

With the show at the mojo club and the release of “Pleasure,” Young Gun
Silver the tenth anniversary of their live debut, which also took place in Hamburg. At the show at Knust, the setlist consisted of tracks from “West End Coast”; the band had just been formed. Today, Platts & Lee can draw from the extensive catalog of their subsequent albums “AM Waves,” “Canyons,” and “Ticket To Shangri-La.”

“The London-based band Young Gun Silver Fox evokes the yacht rock of great role models like Steely Dan. And they do it magnificently. You can’t get much further from the real world than this,” wrote Andrian Kreye in a remarkable feature in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about the Paris show at the New Morning two years ago, which Young Gun Silver Fox had to follow up with a spontaneous midnight show because the crowd was simply too big.

In the Netherlands, YGSF now headlines festival stages, and their last U.S. tour was nearly sold out. Let’s see what happens with “Pleasure”: On May 2, 2025, the album will be released on LP, CD, and in the usual digital formats via Légère Recordings. “I honestly think this album could be our best one yet!” Shawn Lee gushed on social media the evening after the master was delivered. There are serious rumors in yacht rock circles that he might be right.