Talking Smack by Andrew McMillen

Author:Andrew McMillen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2014-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Tim Levinson

New Year’s Eve 2000. A hip-hop group named Dase Team 5000 is playing a show at a warehouse in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Alexandria. Completely improvisational in nature, the band is composed of a bassist, two rappers, three members poking at laptops and, occasionally, a singer. On this night, the group is down an MC, so a solo rapper is tasked with handling vocal duties. His birth name is Tim Levinson, but most in the crowd know him by his stage name, Urthboy. At the age of twenty-two, he is growing in confidence as a writer and performer; so confident, in fact, that he pops an ecstasy pill prior to taking the stage. This decision fits with the occasion: hell, it’s New Year’s. The mood in the room is euphoric, but it soon becomes apparent that there’s one big problem: overcome by the effects of the drug, the rapper is unable to rap.

‘I just resorted to wishing people a Happy New Year, and making terribly cringe-worthy sentiments of love to my new girlfriend, Anna,’ Levinson recalls. ‘It was the best thing that happened when I was a kid: I learnt enough to know never to do that again, because that was just a baaad look. But I don’t regret it, because it was a great lesson to learn.’ Luckily, there were two hungry MCs in the crowd of four hundred who were only too willing to relieve the faltering rapper of his duties. ‘It was probably the only time I’ve been happy to see other MCs hitting me up for the mic in my entire music career!’ He laughs.

Though his performance that night was rubbish, musically speaking, Levinson’s outpouring of emotion towards his new lady evidently went some way towards sealing the deal with Anna: the pair married in 2003. When I visit their apartment in Sydney’s inner west after the rapper picks me up from Marrickville Road in his white hatchback, we discover that a heavily pregnant Anna is wearing fewer clothes than socially acceptable. She isn’t expecting a visitor, but averted eyes and a quick dash from the kitchen to the bedroom solves that problem with good grace. Her husband and I sit on a leather lounge and talk, while the afternoon light slowly fades and James Blake plays softly through the speakers. The New Year’s Eve anecdote comes up after I ask Levinson – whose short-cropped, ginger hair is offset by a bright-green shirt – how taking drugs can influence live performances.

‘It’s terrible,’ he replies. ‘Weed’s a shocker for me. Weed is one of those things where you can smoke and perform, and probably three times out of ten it’ll enliven it; it’ll make things more exciting. I know lots of people who smoke before every gig. For me, it’s everything from not being totally clear, to second-guessing myself – a terrible thing to happen on stage – to desert mouth. That’s happened many times on stage, particularly in the early years, when you’re just partying.

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