Sydney hip hop trio Thundamentals bounces into the big time

HOW did three Blue Mountains boys make the leap into hip hop?

140614 TWAM NO REUSE FEE APPLIES Thundamentals hip hop at Bondi Pic : Chris Frape Picture: Captioned As

HIP HOP emerged in the ’70s as an expression of the black urban American experience. And for all the flashy accoutrements, it’s still a culture and a music rooted in struggle, in disadvantage.

So how did the band Thundamentals — three middle-class white boys from NSW’s leafy Blue Mountains — make such a splash? And more to the point, is their hip hop fair dinkum?

MC Tuka, in the foreground, isn’t fazed by such questions. “We’re not trying to make music about living in the ghetto,” says the 29-year-old, real name Brendan Tuckerman. Authenticity is about being true to the art form. “Poetry over a beat,” he calls it: he and MC Jeswon (sitting) do the rapping while DJ Morgs mans the turntables. Their star is rising: they’ve supported the big US acts A Tribe Called Quest and Kendrick Lamar, and their album, So We Can Remember, hit number three in the Aria charts.

Tuka’s love of hip hop began at the age of eight, when he saw Run-DMC’s Walk This Way on TV; he was electrified by the sound, the clothes, the attitude. He met the other two through skateboarding, and the weather steered them towards making music. “The winters in Katoomba are way too cold for skating, so we had to find something else,” Tuka says. They’re now based in Sydney, where they can indulge their obsession with fossicking through Vinnies for old vinyl. Recent finds? A recording of an African choir; an archive of ’70s BBC soundtracks. It’s all grist to the mill: they’ll take interesting snippets and recycle them into something fresh and exciting. That’s the hip hop way.

There’s no trickery with this photo, by the way: no trampoline hidden out of frame, no photoshopping. Tuka’s just got a leap that would make a Masai warrior blush. How does he do it? “A decade of skateboarding went into that,” he laughs.