HAMILTON HILL’s Charlie Mgee is on a mission to save the world — with a ukulele and fresh beets.

His Formidable Vegetable Sound System has taken out three WAMI awards and been performing to pumping crowds at festivals home and abroad, including Glastonbury (UK) and Boom in Portugal.

A new album in the pipeline, Radish Beets, is aimed at kids, “helping [them] learn about the power of positivity, growing their own food and cultivating healthy lives”.

The electronic, world-dance music album is full of foot stomping sounds that won’t let you sit still, with songs such as Grow Do It! Break it Down and Free Range.

“I wanted it to be rad, but it turned out radish,” Mgee puns.

A long-time adherent of sustainability he’d been playing music around Fremantle but became disillusioned: “I thought what was the point? Music is not going to cut it.”

So he enrolled in a permaculture cours and when he had to do a class presentation used what he knew best — music.

“[Everyone] said ‘you should do a whole album’.

“So it all had meaning again,” Mgee said

His quest to live more sustainably has seen him convert vehicles to run on waste vegetable oil, forage for edible weeds, and dumpster-dive (jumping into grocers’ skips for food, both for his chickens and himself).

Former John Butler Trio drummer Michael Barker is a member of FVSS, and the group will play with Butler at the Boom Town Fair in the UK next month, before heading to Europe and South America.

In the meantime Mgee is hoping to raise funds to produce Radish Beets through crowdfunder pozible.

You can check it out at http://www.pozible.com/project/198488

by JENNY D’ANGER