Hilltop Hoods - Boys of Summer

Summer is here, and with summer comes the festival season. 40-degree days in the sun spent watching live bands sweat it out on open-air stages. One of the bands that will be ripping up the stages is Adelaide's Hilltop Hoods.

The Hoods are certainly no strangers to the festival circuit. Making their festival debut at 2004's Splendour in the Grass, and will tour festivals all summer in what will be their last set of shows before they disappear to write and record a new album. They are getting to be old hands on the festival circuit now. “Yeah, we are,” MC Pressure confides with a sly chuckle. After all, his best festival experience as a performer was the groups first Splendour all those years ago. “It was the first big major festival we had ever played,” he says, “and it was just a great experience.”

“There's a huge, huge difference between playing a festival and playing a club date,” Pressure says. “A festival show is bigger for a start. There's a real bigger, better, louder sort of mentality to it, you get a lot of people at a festival that aren't there to see you. So you do have to work a bit harder to win the crowd over”.

So how does a small Adelaide crew move from obscurity to getting spots on the bills of some of the biggest music festivals Australia has to offer? Having combined sales in excess of 200 000 units certainly helps move you from being a lauded underground sensation to the level of success that independent labels and artists only dream about. Their two most recent albums (2004's The Calling and last year's The Hard Road) both achieved Platinum status and in 2006 Hilltop Hoods walked away from the ARIAs with two awards from five nominations for The Hard Road.

“It's a bit of an honour, I guess,” Pressure modestly states about being a part of the whole circus that is any awards event. “[The ARIAs] are voted for by people in the industry so they're our peers that we either work with or alongside. It's great to be nominated.” But with a laugh he continues, “It's one of those things that you don't really rock up to and expect to win. We are going there to have a good night. We will enjoy it even if we win nothing.” Pressure recalls one incident. “The first time we won one last year I walked off stage and was like 'Yes!' I was holding it, then they tried to take it away from me and I was like 'What are you doing? It's mine!' The one you see us given is just a show ARIA. We got sent our actual awards a few weeks later.” Apparently, an ARIA is considered usable as a lethal object. The Hoods weren't allowed to take them on the plane back to Adelaide, so the awards were freighted to them after the awards ceremony.

The Hilltop Hoods' most recent release, The Hard Road: Restrung, is a remix album of sorts with contributions from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. The result was nominated for three ARIA awards and taking one away for ‘Best Urban Release’. As Pressure reveals including a 31-piece orchestra into the mix is a live challenge “We've been touring all year with a quartet and not the orchestra, just because there aren't enough seats in the Tarago!” He laughs at his own joke and continues a bit more seriously, “[The quartet is] sort of somewhere between the original recording and Restrung so that the audience gets the sort of vibe that Restrung has about it, without the entire orchestra. It's a good sort of halfway medium for us.”

This summer's festival appearances are the end of The Hard Road for the Hilltop Hoods. It becomes time to move to newer pastures and that is exactly what these three guys from Adelaide plan to do. On December 8, they will release their second DVD, titled City of Light, which will feature the Restrung launch concert with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. After that, Pressure is not sure. “We want to tour the festival circuit and go back overseas early next year. Then we're going to disappear from the world for the next year and release an album at the end of it.”

The as yet untitled album is still in it phase one. This means, yes, they have started writing. No, they don't have a title. And no, they don't have any clues. “It's pretty early to be honest,” Pressure explains. “Suffa's been making a few beats and so has DJ Debris. We're all been writing ideas and verses and stuff, but we haven't really done any recording. We haven't gotten to that part of it yet.”

After all, anything can happen in a year. Pressure laughs, “Perhaps if the next album goes well I'll be able to buy my own island or name a star after myself or something outrageous like that.” But with things “too early to tell”, we will all just have to wait until the end of 2008 to hear what the Hilltop Hoods come up with.

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