Heady blend: Tom Scott’s love of hip-hop remains in new Home Brew album
Talking to the moshpit: Tom Scott at the Powerstation in Auckland. Photo / Tom Grut
It’s Friday night at the Powerstation and the urge to party is so strong you can taste it. More than one tribe of Auckland is represented in the heaving crowd and most of them aren’t fancy people. They’re the ones who bought their tickets on the day it was announced that Home Brew would be playing in their home town for the first time in years. The show sold out that same day and the air of expectation is manic.
Home Brew is the group Tom Scott formed in Avondale in 2006 and the scene of various crimes. The band’s self-titled debut album was released in 2012 and became the first local hip-hop album to top the national charts since Scribe’s The Crusader, nearly a decade before. A four-LP vinyl version released in 2014 by a European label now changes hands for more than $700, and a 2023 re-release – the premise for the tour that concluded at the Powerstation at the end of October – is selling.
By the time Home Brew came out, the band was already scattering and Scott had begun on a series of other projects – most notably, Avantdale Bowling Club, whose ambitious, jazzy 2018 debut album earned Scott the Taite Music Prize, a Silver Scroll, the Album of the Year award and a degree of respectability that might once have seemed unlikely. The vivid Friday Night at the Liquor Store, from the follow-up album Trees, was a Silver Scrolls finalist this year. But it’s Home Brew the people are here for tonight.
The first few songs – Alcoholic, Benefit, Yellow Snot Funk – are tales of misspent youth and a release for the raging energy in the room. It’s not unlike the occasional 45-minute festival sets the band has reconvened to play over the years.
But this longer show shifts gear more than once. There’s a political section, a woozy weed interlude, a singalong to White Flowers (a cautionary tale about eating datura and losing your mind) and, most remarkably, an intro to Bourbon & Coke, a song about departed friends where Scott urges the crowd to voice their own losses: “Say their names. Say their names!” he calls out. “They live with you now.”
People shout out names like they shout out nearly every line of every other song. Fans are very, very invested in the words, but also in the meaning of Home Brew.
Afterwards, Scott’s old friend and co-founder of the band, Harry Huavi (better known as Haz Beats) signs a few things and chats to people at the merchandise stand.
“I went to sign some stuff for some fans and they said their parents had given them our CD when they were 12,” he says. “Then I met a couple of older folk ‒ I think they were the parents ‒ and they were frothing more than their kids.”
Everyone goes off into the night happy and with some news: there is a new Home Brew album on the way.
It’s personal
Tom Scott can see the irony in it all. The success story that came with the Avantdale project was not just artistic and commercial, but personal. The enfant terrible, the guy who was too wild and impulsive to deal with, had matured as an artist and a man.