Project Description

Interview with

MC Pressure (Daniel Howe Smith)

from

HILLTOP HOODS

Interviewer – Karen Lowe

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FIFTH CONSECUTIVE #1 ALBUM DEBUT

RECORD SIX #1 ALBUMS

RELEASE COMPANION VIDEO FOR ‘EXIT SIGN’ FEAT. ILLY & ECCA VANDAL

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Hilltop Hoods first released music back in 1997 and turned the Aussie Hip Hop scene upside down. They have won 9 Arias, toured internationally and sold out Arena shows with their Unstrung Tour. They have just released their seventh studio album The Great Expanse and Karen Lowe spoke to MC Pressure (Daniel Howe Smith) about Ruel, happy pants and Aussie Hip Hop.

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You guys are just about to release a new album, The Great Expanse. How did the recording process go and are you happy with how it sounds?
Definitely happy with how it sounds to start with, we wouldn’t put it out if we weren’t. It got made over about two years, sort of written and recorded. We always recorded from our own studio but we worked out of two studios this time that are both in our homes. It was write a song, tinker with it, record it, record it again and work at it at our own pace. We did a little bit less of the production this time but more of the song writing and less sampling.

For this album, you guys collaborated with a few different people, including 16 year old Ruel. How did that all come about? It’s also quite a dark song. What was the inspiration behind it?
We’d heard his music as he’d been working with some producers we know through the hip hop scene. His manager is actually an old friend of ours, he’s a DJ that we came up with and basically said to us “we’d love you guys to jump on a track with Ruel. I don’t know if you remember but he came here to one of your shows when he was 10 and he’s still got a photo of you guys with him.”
We immediately said we’d love to do a song with the kid. He’s got an insanely great voice. So he came and hung out in Adelaide for a couple of days with us, so we got to know him first. He is a super switched on dude. He was 15 at the time 16 now and he’s got a really worldly head on his shoulders. We just kicked it off with him, threw a few ideas around and ended up writing the song with him and his co-writer, because he works with a co-writer called PJ.
They both flew down here and we wrote and recorded the song together. As far as the song itself goes it’s a bit of a sort of reflection on; it’s social commentary I guess, on the way that everybody seeks approval.At the start they worship the people they follow online and always look like they’re having such a good time but you never know how tough someone’s actually got it. Everyone puts on a brave face in the world of social media and we live in an age where idol worship is so big and bigger than it’s ever been. It’s easy to forget that they are real people with real problems as well.

In what is probably the scariest statement I have uttered recently, Hilltops have been around now for 25 years and you took home your 9^thAria last year for Clark Griswold. When you guys first started out, did you ever expect to be as successful as you are now?
Definitely never expected to be as successful as we are. It’s one of those things I gotta stop and pinch myself every now and then and go shit I’ve been making music now for… well, if you ask Wikipedia apparently I was a professional musician at the age of 10. It’s one of those things we never tried to make it a career. We just loved making music and we made it for so long we had to give up our day jobs a long time ago because we were too busy touring. It very organically took off.
No, never would have dreamed that I would still be 20 years later making music, doing it for a living and have all the beautiful accolades that we have. I’m very thankful how it all panned out.

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You have also released the Re-Strung documentary where you guys played arena shows with an orchestra. If someone told you when you first started that you would be doing things like this, what would you have said to them?
I would have laughed if someone had told me I would have got on stage and done a remix album with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. When I was younger, I would have thought that was very uncool. Now as a career musician, I love mixing it up. I love pushing at the boundaries to challenge ourselves; to challenge the genre.
Working with them is such an eye opener as well – a real insight into how other people make music. We came up making sample based music inspired by, I guess, a lot of it 90s rap music and it’s such a polar opposite world.
Hip hop going to the classical world, it was a massive eye opener we learned so much from it. And loved it which is why we went back for it a second time, for the second remix album.

There has been a lot of nostalgia for the 90s lately. What are some of your best memories from the 90s? And what things are you glad that remained in the 90s?
Don’t have a lot of good memories from the 90s. Did high school in the 90s and I was terrible at high school and did not have a good time. Having said that I made a lot of friendships. One of the things I’m most glad of is probably the friendships I made in the 90s was Matt and Barry (Suffa and Debris). Those friendships have lead us down a path to where we are now.
I didn’t have a good time in the 90s, I was in trouble a lot. I decided to make rap music instead of going to school which was a terrible decision according to everyone at the time but somehow it turned out ok.
Best memory of the 90s happy pants… there you go. They can stay in the 90s though. I’m not trying to bring them back (laughs).

Aussie Hip Hop has a unique way of either unifying people or causing all out war as people either tend to absolutely love it or hate it. What drew you to hip hop in the beginning and why do you think that it has such a polarising effect on people?
What drew me to hip hop? I guess it was a voice that was so different to every other music that was coming out at the time. I was in a really formative stage of my life when hip hop started coming to the shores of Australia, at least to my attention.
I was in my late primary school early high school years when I first started hearing groups like Run DMC and Public Enemy. It was such a strong powerful voice, I don’t know maybe it was the unrest that was within me as a kid that drew me to it; connected me with it. I just loved the rebellion, I loved the attitude and the power that was behind the voices that were devilishly screaming. It was something so revolutionary for music and for the world at that point in time.
I gravitated toward that heavily, and gave up the other groups that I was listening to, which was mainly glam rock at that time. It resonated with me. It was so different that I gravitated towards it and from the early 90s onward, I decided I was a hip hop goer.  I just started collecting every mix tape and album that I could.
The older generation I used to catch my bus to school with, they used to give me demo tapes,because back then that was the only way to illegally transfer music was on a cassette. They gave me all this music that I’d never heard of – all early 90s stuff like De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and NWA  –  all these big common names now that were pretty underground back then and there was only like, one or two stores in Adelaide city that you could get this music from.
I love the culture behind it. Hip hop definitely does have a polarising effect on people. It always has and I think possibly, always will be an attitude held towards the whole genre that either you love it or you hate it. There are a lot of people that are pretty opposed to it and there’s a lot of people very passionate towards it. I think it’s because it’s such a strong genre. It’s spoken word. When a rapper is rapping, he’s saying so much more. There’s more verbal content in a song then there would be in say, a rock song or a pop song just because the amount of words that go into it.
It’s a music that started as a revolution in the Bronx in the late 70s early 80s. It’s always held that grit; that attitude; that strength; a message. It unifies some people but it drives others away for sure.

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So many hip hop artists seem to turn to auto-tune these days. What are your thoughts on it?
We don’t use auto-tune but that’s ok if others want to. Auto-tune has almost become a sound – more than it is for people who can’t sing. You listen to vocals in modern (not even just hip hop) but the vocals on a modern pop song and the bridge between those two things is pretty narrow in places like the US at the moment.
A lot of their commercial hip hop is just mainstream pop now and most of them are using that auto-tune effect. It’s almost like a sound effect that gives it that electronic, crunchy sound which people, at least the younger generation I feel, like that sound because then that sound is how modern hip hop should sound because they’ve grown up listening to it.
For the older generation, when auto-tune first came in everyone was like ‘yuck what is this?? This person can’t sing, why do they need auto-tune?” It’s a bit of a clash of opinions there for me. We don’t use it because it’s not our sound. We’re a bit more of an old school hip hop sound.
When we do sing or when we do rap vocals they are pitched or in key but whatever works for people. I don’t have a strong opinion on it. Each to their own. It shows up live whether you can sing or not anyway.

Throughout all of your albums, you’ve had a common character, Armageddon, appear. How did he start out? Did you always intend to have him in each album or did he just develop a life of his own?
Armageddon started out as a sketch that a friend of ours (who is a sketch artist) drew for us so long ago that I couldn’t tell you the year or how many years but he gave it to us as a kind of a gift and we were like “this is sick! Let’s use it in some of our artwork.”
We made an EP in 1997 called Back Once Again and the caricature on that vinyl which was a limited release, which, thank goodness ha all but disappeared. It was the first thing we ever put out and we put this character on it with swords and he had money hanging out of a sock and we thought it was fantastic.
So we asked him to draw illustrations for our first release after that and he did so. He just started doing all our artwork. It became this reoccurring character and we named him Armageddon at some point after that and it just stuck and now he’s part of the whole journey. He’s part of the look, I guess, for our artwork. We’re not particularly handsome characters so we don’t want our faces all over our artwork anyway so he’s a diversion.

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What bands do you currently have on rotation in your CD player? And are there any bands that you just didn’t get until you saw them live?
Bands on rotation… I just handed in an album so as sad as that is I’ve finally taken my own album or demos from that album out of my car so I’m letting that go finally. I realised – I said this to my wife the other day, I don’t think I’ve listened to any music in the last 6 months because I’ve literally been locked in a studio making my own music and it’s kinda depressing so I went and listened to the hottest 100 the other day and I was like ahh think I’ve missed all of this.
I went back and made a playlist of about 20 or 30 songs that came in there. That’s what’s on rotation on my playlist at the moment. I’m doing catch up.  It’s like doing time, making a record. When you get to the last 6 months, we were so frantic in the studio, 7 days a week, 12 hour day. I feel like I lost 6 months of my life.
With bands that I didn’t get, there are heaps actually. Being an artist that performs a lot of festivals, I inevitably discover bands who I didn’t necessarily even not get from their recordings, I just didn’t know who they were. So I kind of discover a lot with that.
One in particular has been a life long love of mine that I saw, well I didn’t mind but once I saw them live I absolutely fell in love with a very long time ago was Jurassic 5. That was the first festival I ever went to as a punter. It was a big day out and I went and saw them. They were one of two hip hop groups on. I was like oh, yeah they’re alright and then I saw them live and ended up with somebody on my shoulders moshing in a pit by the end of the set.

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HILLTOP HOODS
‘The Great Expanse’
album out now and available
HERE.

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Groovin The Moo
Dates and Venues below:

Friday, 26th April – Adelaide Showground, Wayville
Saturday, 27th April – Maitland Showground, Maitland
Sunday, 28th April – Exhibition Park, Canberra
Saturday, 4th May – Prince of Wales Showground, Bendigo
Sunday, 5th May – Murray Sports Complex, Townsville
Saturday, 11th May – Hay Park, Bunbury

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