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Hilltop Hoods.
 Sure, the Hilltop Hoods might well be the most successful hip-hop group the country; but they're not immune to the trials and tribulations of we lesser mortals. "He had a tooth ripped out yesterday and he can barely talk," chuckles MC Pressure, explaining why he's doing this interview instead of DJ Debris. "He's been coughing up blood, he's not in a healthy way."
He assures me that this out-tooth-ripping was performed by dental professionals rather than in, say, some DJ battle gone unexpectedly physical. "He's one of those guys who's in at the dentist every month getting something done: he's been addicted to chocolate bars since he was five."
It's no surprise that Debris hasn't had time to brush: the trio have been spending every waking moment in the studio working on their forthcoming album. "We were meant to be finished by Christmas," Pressure laughs. "But it will be out in March. We've been seriously in the studio since April-May, when we came off the road from touring. We've only done one or two shows just to break up the monotony of the studio, but we've been hard at it - and very seriously hard at it for the last three months, when we realised that we were very behind our due date."
Those few shows have done little to quench people's enthusiasm for the band: although the 'Hoods won the Best Local Band award in the Advertiser's poll and (more prestigiously, of course) took out the Best Live Dance Act in dB Magazine's Reader Awards, South Australian audiences haven't seen much of them since their Big Day Out appearance last year.
"We've done that deliberately, actually," Pressure explains. "We did so many shows at the start of last year and all of the year before and you don't want to kill it: we tried to change our show up every time we visited new places, but we started to think that we'd done enough and we didn't want to push it to the point where people were sick of us, so we came off the road and started working on new stuff."
The main reason for our chat is that the 'Hoods are set to tour with the BDO again. I had hoped to see their set last year, but gave up after pushing my way through about 60 metres of packed crowd without even getting under the Atrium roof. "Yeah, that was a bit of a nasty crowd crush. It was like that in every city, and Adelaide was the biggest stage we played in. This year we're on the main stage, which we're stoked about. Adelaide always turns out in full force."
Local pride has always been part of the 'Hoods mentality ("I'm from the mean streets of Blackwood!"), and Pressure reckons our burg has a lot to be proud of. "Adelaide's doing well at the moment, there's quite a lot of bands coming up - and more that are making great music that haven't had their due yet. It was very quiet two to three years ago, but we're making a bit of noise down south at the moment."
To prepare the ground for the new album the 'Hoods also released 'The Calling' DVD late last year. "It got a bit out of hand, actually," he laughs. "We had this idea about 18 months ago and being that we weren't even experienced at making film clips we thought it would as simple as filming a few shows and putting out a DVD. And we learnt the hard way that it's a massive amount of effort. But we're very happy with the end result."
In fact, they're already preparing for the next one. "We filmed a little bit in the studio and we've got some guest rappers that will be on the next album that we managed to get on film as well. The first one's with Braintax and Maestro, two London rappers, and the second one's a big collaboration with all our favourite Australian artists. The third is a guy from LA called Omni: he was doing some tracks with Australian producers, got in touch with us and came and stayed at the studio, and that came up pretty cool. But there's no live footage yet because we haven't done any shows."
If only there was some sort of large national touring festival the 'Hoods could get on where they could film a bunch of gigs in different cities.
"Well yeah, we could do one of those..."
Andrew P Street
 | The Hilltop Hoods play at the Big Day Out Orange Stage at 4.20pm on Fri 3 Feb and their new single Clown Prince is out now through Obese. |
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