What do Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse have in common? Well, Dylan doesn’t have an unfeasibly large beehive hairdo, and Winehouse hasn’t written countless lyrics that define her generation. So it must be the Dap-Kings. The largely unheralded Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings have quietly become the hippest band around by playing old-school soul and funk. It’s the Dap-Kings horn section you hear on Amy Winehouse’s Rehab (and much of the rest of her album). It’s the whole Dap-Kings band who have remade Bob Dylan’s Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) as the remix single from the new Dylan three-CD set. Meanwhile, the band’s singer has been busy, too; Jones has been singing backups for Lou Reed, and filming with Denzel Washington. But, most recently, the band have put their side projects back on the side and concentrated on their own music. Their new album, 100 Days, 100 Nights is released on October 29 on the Daptone label.

If you drove past the Daptone studios in Bushwick, Brooklyn, it might remind you a little of the original Motown studios, in that it looks just like a regular house on a regular street. The similarities go deeper than that. “Back in the day, with labels like Motown and Stax, you knew what you were going to get. We think that’s important,” says Neal Sugarman, co-founder of Daptone and saxophonist in the Dap-Kings. “Daptone is genre-specific,” he adds, meaning that when you buy a Daptone record you’re going to get old-school soul or funk.

The musicians in the Dap-Kings have been together in various groupings for a dozen years, originally recording on the Desco label. When Desco ceased operating, Daptone was formed in 2000 by Sugarman and Gabriel Roth (producer and bass player with the Dap-Kings). To begin with they operated out of Sugarman’s apartment, but then found an abandoned house they could afford to rent and turned it into the Daptone studios.

“We built the studio ourselves,” says Roth. “We did all the wiring, all the carpentry.” When it came to the highly technical and usually prohibitively expensive operation of “floating” the studio – isolating it from the surrounding structure to improve the acoustics – Roth and Sugarman used old car tyres. It sounds an endearingly ramshackle approach, but as Roth points out: “We recorded Amy Winehouse here. We’re making hits here.”

The Dap-Kings feature on six of the tracks on Winehouse’s Back to Black. She liked their work so much she took them on tour with her; producer Mark Ronson liked it so much he hired the horn-section to work on his own Version album. “Working with Mark gets our name out to people and brings in some money to help pay the rent,” says Roth. “He’s a great guy to work with; he’ll come in with something very raw and we turn it into a Dap-Kings song.”

As Roth is hinting there, the band are a lot more than just a horn-section for hire. Take their extraordinary remix of Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way – not really a remix at all, more of a complete makeover. “It’s not a traditional remix; it’s really a cover,” says Roth. “Mark came in with the original four-track tapes, but all he kept from those was Dylan’s vocals and harmonica, and we did the rest. What you hear is the Dap-Kings playing a new version with Dylan on top.” Sacrilege to some Dylan fans, of course, and Roth admits, “it was pretty intimidating – the sanctity of the thing. But we knew we were doing it on spec, that Dylan had to approve it. It was great when we got word that he liked it”.

While working with Ronson has stretched the Dap-Kings into wider musical territories, they have also recently been recording with Al Green, taking them right back into their old-school soul heartland. Similarly, Sharon Jones has played with the celebrated Stax musicians Booker T and the MGs, but has also found herself asked to operate outside her comfort zone. When she first found out that Lou Reed wanted her to sing with him, she was confused. “The only Lou Reed I knew was Walk on the Wild Side. I’m thinking, he just wants me to go Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo,” she says. “But then I found out he wanted me to sing on his tour of the Berlin album. That’s a deep, dark record.”

She appeared on some of Reed’s acclaimed Berlin tour, but then hit a scheduling clash with her role acting and singing on the soundtrack for the upcoming Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters. Jones had to pull out, but ended up singing with Reed again. “He even gave me a couple of verses of Sweet Jane to sing,” she says, “and that song is his baby.

“If you’d told me a few years back that Lou Reed and Denzel Washington would be fighting over my time, I would have said you were crazy,” adds Jones. When she describes her career as “a long, hard struggle”, it’s no exaggeration. She spent 15 years singing in a wedding band, and has worked through various day jobs, including as a prison officer at Riker’s Island and an armed security guard for Western Union. For most of her life, her dreams have been shattered – “they used to tell me I was too short, too fat, too dark-skinned, and then after a while they told me I was too old, too” – so she’s enjoying finally being in demand. “My next goal is Oprah,” she says. “I’m on a roll now, so I might as well keep on wishing.”

The band’s momentum keeps rolling along, but while they are happy their sound is hip, they bristle at the idea they are retro. “The studio does have a unique sound,” says Roth, “but it’s not about using vintage gear to slavishly get some retro sound. All we do is keep it live, so that the record is something that actually happened. And we put all our energy into trying to make the right thing happen.” The raw soul of 100 Days, 100 Nights proves that when the Dap-Kings are in the studio, the right things just keep on happening.

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