Urthboy plays The Step Inn Saturday 1st March 2008.
When Tim Levinson answers the phone, it’s early afternoon on February the 13th. The hip-hop MC, producer and member of The Herd, better known as Urthboy, has had a pretty emotional 12 hours.
Late last night, while burning the midnight oil mixing the fourth Herd record, he found out that his solo album The Signal has been nominated for the Australian Music Prize.
“I’ve been nominated for a few awards with this album and I never seem to win any of them, so I have no great feelings of anticipation,” he says self-deprecatingly. “I generally play these things down, because that way, you’re cool either way. I’m used to being cool the bad way,” he laughs.
After that, Urthboy got a few hours’ sleep and woke up to Kevin Rudd’s historic apology to the Stolen Generations. Known as a political songwriter, he was glued to the television while this significant event unfolded.
“As soon as Kevin Rudd started speaking, I started shaking,” he says, with perhaps still a slight quaver to his voice. “I’m not the kind of person that breaks down often, but I found myself pretty overcome, and I was struck by the effect it had on me. I’ve been building up to this day and looking forward to it. No matter whether you think it’s a symbolic gesture and nothing else, I still think it’s incredibly important. So when it occurred, I was still surprised by how emotional I was.
“It’s very hard to understand people dismissing it as a pointless gesture when you can see the enormous effect it has on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. You’d have to be a pretty cold-hearted individual not to pay respect to how much of an important moment this was in our history.”Kevin 07’s apology comes hard on the heels of the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol; WorkChoices are on the way out… it seems that everything’s going well in Australia. Will there be any injustices left for The Herd to write songs about?
“Like they say, ‘Great music comes in dark times’,” Urthboy laughs when this is presented to him. “I guess if it was as simple as that, and your role as a musician was just to bark and moan and complain, then if there’s not too much to complain about maybe the potency is taken out of the music. I’d disagree with that – we’ve had nothing to complain about for a long time. We’re so comfortable. Fair enough, there are a lot of sections of the community that see no justice or get the rough end of the stick, but for many of us, we have a pretty privileged existence.
“So it’s not like I feel that everything is going good, but we are in a great moment of optimism and change and it’s fascinating being part of that. I have never voted in an election where anyone but the Coalition has gotten in, until 2007. It’s a great feeling of empowerment.”
So with all that in mind, what shape will the new Herd album take?
“We wrote a lot of it mid-last year, so it’s quiiite political,” Urthboy laughs. “We recorded it all in January, and the mixing is going on right now, so if we had wanted to change stuff [post-federal election], we could. But as songwriters, you don’t want to be too focussed on the immediate present. You have to place things in a historical context so that in five years, when people simply forget about who this particular minister was, the point you’re making in that song is still valid. Hopefully there’s enough universality in the music to get past that.”
