Rip It Up

The Tongue Interview

Words By

• Nina

When Suffa from the Hilltop Hoods says ‘yes’ to guesting on your album, you know it might not be an embarrassing output after all. Also featuring fellow South Australian MC Jimblah, as well as Ellesquire, Illy, Sky’high, Thundamentals and more, The Tongue’s third album Surrender To Victory could just be a classic, as the Sydney rapper certainly hopes so.

“I definitely think it’s my best record, my aim ever since I started making music has always been to make a classic record,” the MC – real name Xannon Shirley – claims. 

“However, that’s always really decided by the people, isn’t it? The good news is that the response I’ve heard so far has been good and strong, so I definitely feel in the ballpark at the moment, even though time will really tell. I know that when Suffa said he’d feature on this album I kind of realised that I may be onto a good thing after all, people may actually wanna hear this! Suffa was always a huge hero of mine and a big inspiration when I first started getting into hip hop. For me it was like, ‘Well, if this guy can do it, maybe I can do it too’, so having him on this album was a special moment. It was very ‘full circle’. Plus, he doesn’t get on tracks with just anyone, he’s picky, so it’s a huge compliment.”

Working with one of the top producers in Oz hip hop, Cam Bluff, was another special moment for Shirley and resulted in a ‘first’ for the MC – rather than employing production talents from several people on one record, Surrender To Victory sees Cam Bluff across the entire release. It took just two beats to convince Shirley he found the right man for the whole job.

“Basically, if I don’t have a producer, I can’t write a song, which is why throughout my whole career I’ve had different producers,” Shirley explains. “On top of that, I just haven’t been able to find that one person who I felt had enough skill or had a diverse enough approach to music that it wouldn’t get boring after a while. Cam is the most exciting hip hop producer in Australia. I knew that because, after the first two beats, it was like, ‘This is the guy! This is the person I’m looking for!’ It was one of those amazing moment where you know you’ve found the right person at the right time, with the right attitude. Cam didn’t wanna talk. He didn’t wanna plan stuff. He just said, ‘Let’s start making songs’. The cool thing is that it was a bit of a ‘first’ for both of us – he’d never done a full-length release for someone either, so it was exciting.”

That wasn’t the only ‘first’ for Shirley in recent times – last year the MC made history as the first ever hip hop act to perform in Cambodia at the Tiger Translate Festival. Not only that, but he enjoyed a superstar moment after being joined on stage by Cambodian celebrity Preap Sovath.

“It was totally bizarre!” Shirley laughs. “The people are so poor over there they can’t really afford to support the music industry, they don’t have $30 to buy a CD, so it’s hard for artists to exist over there. So when we got over there the organisers were like, ‘Look, they’ll love you but they’ll be a bit confused by you, they’ve never seen anyone rapping and they don’t understand where the music is coming from, everyone here speaks Cambodian!’ They decided to have an international culture mash-up thing where they got us hooked up on a collab with this guy called Preap Sovath who is the only pop star and movie star in Cambodia. So when he came out on stage the locals went nuts – it’d be like having Russell Crowe come on stage with unknowns in Australia. I guess at that moment they were like, ‘Oh okay, these guys must be good then…’”

WHO: The Tongue
WHAT: Surrender To Victory (Elefant Traks)
WHERE: Rocket Bar
WHEN: Sat Jul 6
TICKETS: Moshtix