Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings are the unrivalled frontrunners of old-school soul and funk music. And they are coming to Australia for Sydney Festival – gird your loins.

Sharon Jones was once told that she didn’t have ‘the look’. And, if we are using the standards set by saccharine, faux-sexual pop tarts, she still doesn’t. Jones, and her slammin’ band The Dap-Kings, are like relics of a lost era. It is as though they have emerged from a time machine. Together, they have spearheaded the revival of 60s and 70s soul and funk – as it should be done – and are hitting our shores as part of Sydney Festival’s ‘Festival First Night’ celebrations on  January 10, along with the legendary Grace Jones and Santogold.

    “We love the fans we have in Australia – I can’t wait,” Jones tells AXN from her home in Queens, New York. “We usually like to come back with a new album or something, but we’ve been on the road so we haven’t had time. But that’s okay; we’re working on a few new songs so we’ll have something new.”

    Jones has been with the The Dap-Kings’ studio and its label, Daptone Records, from the start. “They knew no major record label would take me,” she remembers. “But they were looking for funk and soul, and when they got me in – boom!” Their first album, 2002’s Dap-Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, made plain their intentions – to play soul and funk, pure and simple and steaming, Stax and Motown style. Their dedicated use of vintage analog equipment in a digital age continued on 2005’s Naturally and the 2007’s 100 Days, 100 Nights, and now everyone is taking notice.

Indeed the Dap-King were called in to play on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, including the hit ‘Rehab’, and Jones has collaborated with Jay-Z, The Roots’ Questlove, Lou Reed, David Byrne and Rufus Wainwright, not to mention her recent turn as a juke-joint chanteuse in The Great Debaters, a film starring Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker.

“I’m going to be doing more stuff with different bands and some other things, just for me being creative,” Jones says. “We’re still going to put out our funk and our R&B – we’re still going to be who we are. I did something with David Byrne last month, and he wanted me to do it the way he wanted it. And usually a singer is supposed to go in and do what a producer tells them. But when you’re Sharon Jones, you get me in to do some funk and soul. You don’t ask me to sing Will Young!”

To Jones, who incidentally once worked as a prison officer and an armed guard for a bank, fervently shuns the term ‘soul revival’ when it’s applied to her music.

“No ‘retro’, no ‘revivalist’,” she says. “We never up; we never left. We’re not trying to bring it back. I’ll be 53 on May 4 – you’re not going to hear no pop coming out of my mouth. But when they say we’re retro and we’re bringing back soul, I let them because I’m not going to argue! But I never left it.”

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings will play at the Days Like This! music festival on Sunday, January 4 at the Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park, Sydney. For more information and tickets, visit dayslikethis.com.au They will then play Sydney Festival’s ‘Festival First Night’ celebrations on Saturday, January 10. For more information, head to sydneyfestival.org.au