The iconic local group delivered the goods for longtime fans, writes Liam Rātana.
I remember the very first time I listened to Home Brew. I was a senior in high school in the early 2010s and a friend asked me if I’d ever heard of them. “Listen to this, I reckon you’ll like it,” he said.
“Hello, thanks for joining me,” is how the track started. It was the introduction to the band’s 2006 EP Vintage. As an impressionable 16-year-old, that song changed my life.
While I had long been a fan of mainstream New Zealand hip-hop, I had never heard anything like Home Brew. The group’s frontman Tom Scott and fellow rapper Lui “Silk” Gumaka weren’t rapping about how cool or popular they were – but instead how they were so underground “you might need to scuba dive” to hear them. Combined with the sample-based boom bap beats of Harry “Haz” Huavi, the music was a breath of fresh air. From that point on, I was hooked.
I followed Scott’s peripatetic musical journey closely – there was Home Brew, Max Marx, @Peace, Average Rap Band, Avantdale Bowling Club and more. I witnessed the rise of Scott’s YGB label, which evolved with him, shifting from Young, Gifted, and Broke in its early days to Years Gone By in later times. I trawled Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages, received links to tapes now lost to the ether, and attended various gigs at venues that no longer exist.
Yet for all my fandom over the last 15 years, I had never seen Home Brew perform live. It was the one thing I had always wished for but for various reasons, had never got to experience. However, last night, I finally got to cross seeing Home Brew perform live off of my bucket list in the most epic way.
A sold-out Auckland Town Hall played host to a one-off concert that was everything a true Home Brew fan could have hoped for. The concert was a celebration of the band’s debut EP Last Week – a collection of seven tracks (one for each day of the week) that are prime examples of the band’s ability to turn relatable, relatively mundane events into head bopping bangers. With the EP first released in 2008, the concert was clearly designed for hardcore longtime fans of the group.
Walking into the Town Hall, where concert goers are usually quite restrained and relatively well-behaved, my cousin and I were transported to a movie scene. It was like we were watching Biggie Smalls perform at Madison Square Garden in the 1990s. People were dancing, rapping along, smoking joints and having the time of their lives. It was unlike any concert I had seen at the Town Hall.
The stage set-up paid homage to the band’s roots, elements from various album covers that had been used for the EP over the years across streaming sites were brought to life. There was a fridge with the magnetic letters spelling out Home Brew on the stage, with beers inside being drunk by performers and support crew on the stage. Egg cartons hung in front of the Town Hall organ. A vintage style couch, box TV, and neon bar light completed the living room vibe. As a long time fan, it was a thing of beauty.
The band performed Last Week front to back, delivering a refined yet authentic experience. Scott was a maestro, and has perfected the art of entertainment and performance. To see his decades of experience and artistic evolution used to transform something as raw and rustic as the Last Week EP into such an accomplished live show performed with a full band was a true delight.
Home Brew mixed in transitions that spoke to their eras and transformations. The dialogue between the band members and references to lyrics in the songs were the crackle on top. “I prefer ket,” Huavi half-joked as Scott told the crowd they should give their drugs to the band’s producer. Among these more fun interactions were more serious monologues from Scott, talking to himself about how “nothing was real”. There was also a scattering of political references from Scott, nodding to his propensity to use his platform as a medium for political activism. In the end, he simply told people to enrol to vote.
After performing the Last Week EP, the band sung several more of their classics, including ‘Plastic Magic’, ‘Alcoholic’, ‘Datura’ and ‘Bad Bad Whiskey’. Throughout it all, Scott and Gumaka interacted with the crowd, ensuring energy levels stayed high for the entire nearly two-hour set. The crowd was singing from start to finish, and I couldn’t help but sit back and admire the spectacle from the 180 degree view we had from the back of the theatre.
From the dude butt naked in the toilet stalls begging for help as he tried to dig himself out of whatever drug-fucked hole he was in, to people hot boxing the Town Hall, to walking out and seeing three cop cars right by the entrance, this was a classic Home Brew concert that I felt privileged to be a part of.
As the band members are now traversing their own musical journeys, they don’t perform together as often as they once did. We might not ever get the chance to experience Home Brew like that again. Whatever happens, I’m glad I can say I saw Home Brew at the Auckland Town Hall in what feels sure to be an iconic performance for decades to come.
