First up, can you describe your style of music?

I hate to, like, categorise stuff because, you know, I can say its ‘hip hop’ but there’s so many different levels to it, ya know?  I mean, you’ve got your nerd rappers, your ganster rappers,  and you’ve got your kind of abstract stuff,  so I think we kind of cross them.

We’re very much about self-expression and defiantly on the party-side. I mean, Day of the Dog, which is our new album, has got party vibe, but not corny. Not like a Jessica Simpson party song. We’ve got a song on the album called ‘Party At My Place’, it’s about beers at my place, no room to move, steaks that we stole from Woolworths on a barbie that isn’t even ours. It’s all very much our lifestyle.

So the style is very much about ‘real life’?

Yeah, absolutely.

After your first album, Flowers in the Pavement, you started getting much more airtime on radio stations and really were brought into the public eye. Was is easy to react to that kind of exposure? Was it a build up or did it just jump on you out of nowhere?

I think with any group starting off, they want to have their music heard. As much as artists are ‘underground’, and what they say may not be a very popular topic, I think in the long run everyone expects their music to get heard, and they want it to be heard.  It was more of a relief that it was picked up straight away, and we didn’t have to put out 3 albums before they realised we have skills on the mic.

It was awesome, I mean you look back on stuff like that and go ‘those are the building blocks of where we are today’. We’re absolutely grateful for anything that radio’s picked up.

With the full length album, were there a lot of steps you had premeditated or did everything just run together smoothly?

To tell you the truth, the album was pretty much made at the time we had to make the decision between Obese (Records) and Illusive, so it wasn’t an album where we just went to Illusive and made a new album, it was pretty much the vibe we were on.

We only signed to Obese for one record, and there is no bad blood between us, we are down with all the Obese crew members. We became friends before anything, so yeah, it was all sweet.

Your lyrics are very varied, and very involved. Where do you find your inspiration?

Well, we’ve all been into hip hop for a very long time, I mean, I met my idol who was, well, I’ll lay this down really fast, I don’t know if you’ve heard this story:

When I was five years old, I had no connection to hip hop at all. I was living in the Blue Mountains,  you know, it’s just bush. So there was no connection except for this dingy little video store down the road, and they had this video called ‘Breakdance’, and then they brought out a second one called ‘Electric Boogaloo’.  This is like 1985.  I’d watch this, and there was this dude who could do these crazy things with his body, and he was my idol. His name was Ozone.

Anyway, I wouldn’t stop watching this movie, and then my dad is like ‘we’re going for a trip to LA’, so I went to my mom and I’m like ‘where does Ozone live?’, and she’s like ‘um, Hollywood?’. He could have lived anywhere, you know?  So I asked her to give me one dollar American, so I could give it to Ozone when I get there, cos in the movie he’s trying to raise money to keep a youth center alive.

So I have no doubt in my head,  I don’t know that the movie isn’t real, I think its his real name, I have no idea. Sure enough, we go over there and after like two weeks, on the day before we leave, I’m like ‘Where’s Ozone? Where’s Ozone?’, and I’m going to Disneyland and keeping myself involved. And then on the last day, we’re driving along the freeway and my mum is like ‘stop the fucking car!’.

There’s a car accident on the side of the road, with two dudes, and turns out one of them is Ozone. So I jumped outta the car, ran along the sidewalk and grabbed him. He took us to his restaurant, pulled out photos of breakdancing and signed em to me. My parents were like freaking out afterwards, and im like ‘What the hell, I told you I’d see him’.

Positive thinking, you know what I mean?

I think that’s what we’ve carried on with our music, we knew we could do it by studying and listening to hip hop as much as we could. It was like school just went in one ear and out the other, and hip hop just stayed in there. I’ve got this catalogue of every MC and every album in my head, and it’d be a shame to let all that go to waste.






Now you’ve got Day of the Dog out there, and you guys have just finished a massive tour…

Yeah mate, its been bloody horrendous. Every show has been unreal, it’s like Tassie: Sold Out. Adelaide: Sold Out. It’s been unbelievable. But there’s no break.  If you get sick on tour,  you just gotta get up the next night and perform.  We didn’t drink as much booze as we normally would, keep ourselves in form.

So it lived up to everything you expected?

Oh, more!  I mean, you can go on tour with 50 (cent) and Lil’ John like we did,  and you get these 20,000 crowds, but you know who their coming to see.  And so it was great for us to be able to play in front of a wide audience, and convert some people who don’t even know there is Australian hip hop,  but it’s a whole different feeling when you’re the headline for the show,  you know what I mean? You’re the reason why people come. It’s a bit of a mystery, like are people going to turn up? But it proved me wrong man, I mean like everyone came out. It was just amazing.

With the new album, you’ve got production names on there like Suffa from Hilltop Hoods and Weapon X. Was it easy to work with everyone involved to get the final result?

Absolutely man. Absolutely. Since you’ve got crews like Hilltop Hoods, Weapon X, Phrase, you know they are putting out product. And they’re putting it out fast. It means they are getting to work fast. I mean, you’ve got these kids saying ‘I wanna rap’, and they’ll take six or seven years to make a demo of four songs. I mean, these are cats who are actually getting busy, they’re in the studio 24 hours a day making beats. You can’t not get inspired.

Cos there is three of us we all have a different style of hip hop we listen to,  and so we all have a different opinion. So we all have to agree on a beat, so all of our beats vary.

But it’s been easy man, it’s been wonderful.

Being your second release, have you learned any important lessons after the first one?

A lot of breath control. It’s a huge important factor, especially if you drop an album and then go on a huge tour, you have to portray what you’ve done in those tracks perfectly the same on stage. When your lyrics get too complex, and your flows get too complicated,  it becomes hard for the audience to understand if you can’t pull it off right.

I think we kept our lyrical skills in Day of the Dog, but we kind of felt that we’d ease back on trying to make something so complicated.

I mean, even on live shows around the country with Cypress Hill and Xhibit,  we watch these guys and see how they do it. They’re professionals, they’ve been doing it for 15 or 20 years, you know? I’ve defiantly caught tips. It’s all a learning process. We’re always tryin to keep building.

With your photo shoots and album artwork, do you have any input into what they look like and the final visuals?

Absolutely. Our photographer is an old-skool friend from high school. A lot of the shots, we just want people to see what we’re really like. We’ve got 100% creative control with what we do.

For any of our readers who want to get into the scene, who would you recommend as a good cross-section to introduce them to it?

I would say to deal with less complicated lyrics at first. Atmosphere, Mack Lethal, Outkast,. I mean Andre 3000 man, his old stuff, I based my soul on him.  And a bit of Mos Def, you can’t go wrong.

A massive new album, a huge tour, so what are your next steps from here?

I’m talking about a dirty, low-down, filthy mix tape by DJ Izm, it’ll be all new tracks. September, I don’t know if I can say this but we are planning on a re-release of the album with a new song, different beats. A DVD early next year. We never stop. As soon as this album was out, you can’t just kind of sit there and watch people, they’ll want something else.

Ok last up, if we were to throw a party at our place, what would we need?

A fridge full of beer, a barbie full of steak, an open mind and theory, and a balled-up fist for fuckin’ freedom!