10 Best Red Hot Chili Peppers Albums - Ranked!

Freaky Styley was the band’s second studio album.

Produced by funk icon George Clinton, it feels more technically mature then their first record, and you can hear the Funkadelic mastermind’s influence all over it, with layered backing vocals, horn and trumpet sections, straight-up psychedelic guitar riffs and even vocal performances from Clinton himself. Founding member Hillel Slovak had returned to the band at this point, and his guitar fills the space between Flea’s funked-out bass melodies and drummer Martinez’s driving rhythms.

George Clinton had been a huge influence on the band, with Flea in particular stating that he felt a true affinity with the music of Funkadelic, recognising the bravery of making such out-there music at a time when it would never get any real radio play. In the 1988 documentary, Europe By Storm, he was quoted as saying, “We’re too funked out to get on white radio and too rocked out to get on black radio”.

During the recording process of the album, the band moved in with producer Clinton. In Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography Scar Tissue, he describes the experience as initially difficult, given his ongoing struggle with heroin addiction. This particular difficulty was supposedly mitigated by the huge piles of cocaine Clinton kept around the house.