The Hilltop Hoods - Yet another string to the bow

The Hilltop Hoods have reworked their number one album The Hard Road into a stunning, experimental masterpiece starring the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. The musical reinvention is aptly titled The Hard Road: Restrung.

The Dwarf was curious to find out about a recent gig the Hoods staged to celebrate the remixed album’s drop. It took place on the 12th May at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, according to Pressure, the gig went off without a hitch. “We had over 7000 people there, it was a really good vibe and the show went well.”

Let’s stereotype for a moment shall we? You’d think orchestra enthusiasts would be a little older than you’re average Hoods follower so it begs the question, who exactly attended the gig? Maybe it was an eclectic mix of parents and their teenage children…or maybe not.

“I think it was a little different. We’re not used to crowds that big, full stop, so I guess new people had to be there…just to make up the numbers and I think that seeing as we played with a symphony orchestra probably attracted a slightly different crowd as well. I think we had our core contingent plus that so it was a good mix.”

Just how difficult was it to incorporate an additional 31 people into a Hoods performance? “Quite difficult. Most of the hurdles we overcame before the show itself of course. The biggest challenge came in post-production after recording it as we had to make the new music that we had from the orchestra fit with the old stuff which pretty much ended up with us stripping back most of the sounds to bare drums and the lyrics on the original tracks and adding the orchestra as the entire musical piece for it…That’s how it translated to stage at the end of the day, the engineers had a very big job mixing that live as well.”

Watching a seated 31-piece orchestra share a stage with the extremely energetic Hilltop Hoods sounds like a dichotomy that wouldn’t necessarily lend itself to the live arena. But Pressure assured The Dwarf this isn’t the case. “It makes for a bigger and more intense sound so I guess that translates across the stage to the vibe of the crowd as well so it works well.”

While the unique performance was an incredible experience for the Adelaide hip hop masters, they have no intention to take the orchestra on the road. “For us it was something we wanted to do as artists; it was a fantastic experiment, we had a lot of fun doing it and it worked out really well, but it’s not something we’re going to do constantly…I hate to think of what it would be like to try and take an orchestra on the road.”

The orchestra wasn’t the only new addition to the album. US freestyle champion Okwerdz made an appearance on the reinvention of ‘Conversations from a Speakeasy’. The Hilltop Hoods met him when he was touring Australia last year. “He was interested in coming back to Australia so we kept in contact with him over the net and told him about our project and that we were looking for a guest rapper on one of the tracks…The three of us are big fans of his…so we asked him to jump on a track and he was real keen.”

Restrung also includes new verses from the Hilltop Hoods and a brand new bonus track titled ‘Roll On Up’. The Dwarf couldn’t help but wonder why the Hoods didn’t just start from scratch and work on their fifth studio album. “We are currently recording a brand new album but we wanted to do a remix album of The Hard Road. About six months after we released it we said we should do a remix of it. We had a lot of producers working with us at the time like Simplex, Trials…Plutonic Lab and a few others. Originally we were going to get them to do it but then we started working with a quartet as something different to do live so we decided to remix the album with an orchestra instead.”

You’d think that recording an album with an orchestra would take a substantial amount of time but The Dwarf was shocked to find out it only took three days. “They are actually really efficient. They get their sheet music and they play it pretty much perfectly the first time by just reading off the sheet; that’s the nature of orchestras and apparently that’s how they work. They were very efficient luckily because they weren’t cheap!”

We’re sad to report it was the Hilltop Hoods who were the weakest link in the re-recording process. It took them two months to get their act together. “Probably three months actually if you count the editing. Once we got the record back we had to chop it all up and make sure it was in time and tune.” If only they had sheet music and could perfect their parts in three days, they could potentially churn an album a week complete with orchestra. Now that’s efficient!

Of course a lot of time is presumably spent waiting for inspiration. I mean the Hoods are good, but can you really expect them to nail a rhyme on demand? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind…or you could just take it as a no. “Sometimes I just get inspired and I sit down and start scribbling on a bit of paper. I could be anywhere on a train or a place somewhere or just at home. I guess it’s different every time. Sometimes just the occasional line comes in and I have to write it down on a piece of scrap paper and I dig it out a month later and put it into a verse somewhere.”

Is there any subject Pressure would avoid like the plague when writing lyrics? “There are plenty of things I wouldn’t write about (laughs) but not anything in particular that comes to mind. A lot of the time we are very open in our opinion of things, so if I think something I will say it in a rap and I won’t hold back in any way, shape or form when I am writing a verse. I guess we wear our hearts on our sleeves so to speak.” It’s an attitude that could one day land the Hoods in hot water. After all, do you Powderfinger ever thought they’d by close to committing contempt of court when they penned their latest album?

“There is no topic that we would be afraid to approach in a song if we wanted to. If we felt strongly about something of course we wouldn’t censor ourselves…Hell no!”

Aussie hip hop has made a name for itself as being fearless and not afraid to speak its mind “well yeah, hip hop in general, well I guess you’ve got that more commercialised brand of hip hop that is coming out of the States at the moment which is a sort of generic sort of record company money-making machine but underground hip hop has always been that strong voice of the people. It’s people’s views or opinions in the rawest form and that’s the beauty of hip hop.”

The Hoods have helped push Australian hip hop to new levels in the past few years. They were the first Aussie hip hop artists to achieve gold sales with their third album The Calling and have paved the way for up and coming acts in the Australian music industry. Though they’d never admit that!

“I think hip hop has a huge future here. It’s becoming more and more popular with youth, which is really showing at the moment with the amount of new artists that are becoming established making quality music. People buying albums, turning up to shows and young faces in particular…are sure signs hip hop has a massive part to play in the culture of music in the near future of this country.”

The lads will be heading off to London to perform to a bunch of Australian expats in the coming days. On the Hoods return to Australian shores they plan to release a DVD documenting their time with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and their 2006 touring efforts. They will then lock themselves away in a studio and lay down the rest of their new album, which if all goes to plan, shall hit record store shelves in 2008.

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