After the massive success of ‘The Hard Road – Restrung’, Adelaide’s favourite sons The Hilltop Hoods are about to do the same thing to the national Big Day Out tour: they’ll be hitting the main stage with a string quartet in tow! ITM gets the story…
Matt Lambert (aka MC Suffa) is feeling a bit nervous. The Hilltop Hoods (made up of Suffa, fellow MC Pressure and DJ Debris) are going in this afternoon to take a look at their newly completed DVD City of Light for the first time after it was completed (and it has since hit the stores, just in time for the Christmas rush). The DVD is a combination of footage from the recording of The Hard Road and The Hard Road – Restrung, together with concert footage and interviews.
“It’s weird, you know? I’ve been rapping half of my life, but I still hear myself on the DVD and think; ‘Do I really sound like that?’”.
The Hilltop Hoods are still buzzing from their recent win at the 2007 ARIA Awards for ‘Best Urban Release’ for Hard Road – Restrung, which has been a gold selling album for them. The album is a reworking of the tracks recorded on The Hard Road that saw the hip hop boys from Blackwood, South Australia working with Jamie Messenger and the complete Adelaide Symphony Orchestra on a striking orchestral revisioning. The resulting album is one that crosses many boundaries, creating a well-layered and intricate quality to the Hoods classic selection of hip hop rhymes. But the win came as a bit of a surprise to the Hoods.
“It was awesome. We weren’t expecting it, and we didn’t have a speech prepared or anything so we forgot to thank heaps of people”, Matt says.
So has it been actually a ‘hard road’ for the Hilltop Hoods? Does Aussie hip hop have anything in common with the American urban ghetto culture from which it originally sprung? For Suffa and his fellow MC Pressure, it was more the fact that hip hop represented a culture of rebellion and youth that appealed so strongly to these middle class teenage boys from the burbs.
“We were into graff[iti] and we were skaters that listened to hip hop, and basically we were shit at graff, so we had another outlet”.
Creating sample-based hip hop tracks, the Hilltop Hoods raided 30-year old Matt’s parents’ extensive record collection to revive some classic old tracks for their reworking skills such as Melanie Safka’s People in the Front Row (on Nosebleed Section) and Leon Russell’s Out In The Woods (on The Hard Road). “I heard all this different stuff growing up”, Matt says, “In one room I had my brother who was into Reggae, in the next room my other brother would be playing bands like The Cure, then there was metal coming from another room and my mum is into folk and my Dad loves blues and jazz. In fact, the album before The Hard Road was made almost entirely from my Dad’s record collection”.
About to embark on the Big Day Out tour this January, the Hilltop Hoods are bringing along a string quartet and possibly a few surprise guests as well. “Big Day Out’s funny, it’s sort of different from all the other festivals. It’s sort of unique. There are festivals, and then there’s Big Day Out. I think because it’s been around for so long, and for a lot of people it’s like, a given, you know? People just go to Big Day Out and it’s all shits and giggles. In Adelaide it’s on a Friday, so we call it the Big Day Off”.
The Hilltop Hoods released their live DVD City Of Light through Obese in December. They tour Australia as part of the Big Day Out in early 2008…
Sun Jan 20th – Gold Coast, Gold Coast Parklands
Fri Jan 25th – Sydney, Sydney Showgrounds
Mon Jan 28th – Melbourne, Flemington Racecourse
Fri Feb 1st – Adelaide, Adelaide Showgrounds
Sun Feb 3rd – Perth, Claremont Showgrounds
Alida says...
I believe that the Hoods grew up in Blackwood, but it's much of a muchness.