Tasman Keith‘s emotional breakthrough that led to debut album A Colour Undone
A surprising cameo on a national tour with Midnight Oil was a major artistic inspiration for this Bowraville-raised hip-hop artist.
It was in the final song of Midnight Oil’s performance that the night’s biggest surprise arrived. Blindsiding everyone, a young hip-hop artist named Tasman Keith returned to stage midway through the Sydney rock band’s biggest hit to detonate a lyrical smart bomb.
Filled with potent imagery and delivered with breathless urgency, Keith’s fresh verse was injected into Beds Are Burning and gave new life to a well-travelled arrangement, in a concert held near Brisbane in February last year.
All up, the rapper was on stage for barely five minutes all night, including an earlier appearance in a track named First Nation, but that was all it took for him to steal the show and signal the arrival of a major new talent to the audience.
Appearing on this tour was a strange and potentially uncomfortable inclusion for the band’s audience, which tends to skew older and might well have turned up their noses at the sound of this hip-hop intrusion. But Midnight Oil’s decision to cede the spotlight in its signature song points clearly to the high esteem in which the rising star is held by artists old and young.
Speaking with Review in September 2020 about their first meeting, in a 2019 writing session for his guest verse in First Nation, the band’s drummer and songwriter Rob Hirst said, “Tasman’s hip-hop royalty because of his dad. I looked at the work he’d done and realised he was such an intense and strong performer. He came in and literally sat there with a loop of that groove for an hour, scribbling – then after an hour he said, ‘I’m ready’, and went out there and delivered that rap all in one hit, perfectly.”
“The great thing was, it was a learning process for us, too,” said Hirst of a track that was released as a single from the band’s chart-topping 2020 release The Makarrata Project. “We were going, ‘Wow, this is something!’ An hour ago, this guy hadn’t heard this song, and it suddenly took on a whole different flavour, and a much greater urgency and an anger.”
When Keith was later invited to join Midnight Oil on its Makarrata Live tour in early 2021 as one of several Indigenous collaborators, alongside the likes of Troy Cassar-Daley, Alice Skye and Dan Sultan, it was an easy “yes”, not least because that run of outdoor shows put him in front of the biggest crowds of his life, with about 40,000 tickets sold across six dates.
Behind the scenes, though, all was not well in his world as he grappled with a series of deaths in his family. Born Tasman Keith Jarrett in Macksville in 1996 and raised in nearby Bowraville, a small town on NSW’s mid-north coast hinterland, the musical influence from his father – who performed as Aboriginal hip-hop pioneer Wire MC – connected strongly.
Keith began writing lyrics and first performed on stage with his dad at age eight, and those early experiences set him on the path he treads today.
During his adolescence, the Australian hip-hop scene was chiefly composed of white artists, and so the Gumbaynggir man gravitated towards the sounds of black American performers such as Lil Wayne, 2Pac and OutKast. His passion and determination to succeed as a songwriter and musician strengthened with each passing year.
In 2018 he issued his debut EP as Tasman Keith, titled Mission Famous; it was followed by a string of singles and a 2020 mixtape, all of which he and his cousins recorded in a makeshift studio inside Bowraville’s youth hub.
It was on the Makarrata Live tour in February and March 2021 that the concept for his debut album began to take shape. At the same time he was dealing with a personal tragedy, having recently lost his cousin Knox to a heart attack at the age of 27, capping a devastating period where he estimates he went to 12 funerals in 12 months.
“It was a lot of travelling with those guys and spending a lot of nights in hotel rooms by myself, because I didn’t have any of my crew with me,” Keith tells Review on a video call in mid-May.
“After performing in front of 10,000 people alongside Peter Garrett and the Oils, who were playing classic joints, I’d go back to the hotel and be like, ‘This is cool, but damn, my uncle, my aunty and my cousin ain’t here to see this’.”
Struck by the intensity of these unresolved feelings of grief, there was one night in particular where he sat in silence, without distractions, and finally allowed himself to cry.
“It wasn’t even to deal with it; it was just to acknowledge that it’s there,” he says. “After probably one of the hardest nights of my life, personally and mentally, the next night I went to bed and I woke up with the rough outline of what I wanted the album to be.”
With a laugh, Keith admits that he had always doubted such stories of unconscious artistic inspiration – such as Paul McCartney composing the melody to Yesterday in a dream – until it happened to him.
“It literally woke me up out of my sleep at 2am,” he says. “I wanted it to be this sonic journey through the middle ground that I walk; there’s a lot of moments in my career thus far that have been right next to tragedy, and I wanted to figure out how I could represent that journey of not getting too invested in the highs or the lows.”
The result is A Colour Undone, an absorbing 14-track work that reveals Keith as a multifaceted artist who’s just as capable of hard-edged hip-hop menace – as heard in the opening bracket of Watch Ur Step, Sharks and Cheque – as he is of emotional, vulnerable pop songwriting where his voice scales impressive heights.
The best of these latter cuts is titled Love Too Soon, a stunningly propulsive, bass-driven track that’s all the more impressive given it marks Keith’s very first attempt at writing a catchy pop song.
It’s paired with a beautiful music video, filmed at Kerferd Road Pier in South Melbourne, where Keith and dancer Hena Memish undertake a highly choreographed single-take performance at sunset, to the bemusement of passers-by. With award-winning director Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore behind the camera in fading light, they filmed six attempts and ended up using the fifth.
Asked whether he could have written such a song or given such a movingly unselfconscious dance performance prior to that mid-tour hotel room breakthrough, Keith, 26, shakes his head.
“I don’t think so,” he replies. “Even though there were very vulnerable moments in my music prior, it was very much, ‘What’s going on in my community?’, or ‘What can I hide behind a concept?’ – whereas after sorting through some trauma and asking what I like and don’t like about myself, with that came the freedom of, ‘Okay, this is who the f..k I am. Let me be that person to the fullest extent’. And that’s who you see in Love Too Soon.”
When the music video was finished, the artist showed it to one of his cousins, and her response was telling. That doesn’t feel like Tasman Keith to me, she said; it feels like Tasman Jarrett, the kid I grew up with.
That was the kid who shot around the lounge room in Bowraville with a huge smile on his face, doing the same sort of stylish, fluid, Michael Jackson-style moves.
Today, the man we see dancing on the pier in the video is proud to have found the key to unlocking that doorway to his younger self.
A Colour Undone is released on Friday, July 8 via AWAL, with album tour dates to come.
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