Briggs is halfway through BIG NOTER’s first-ever show when he spots Tom Morello watching from behind the desk at Melbourne’s Forum.
The set is already a test of nerve. It is the first time the band has played the songs to an audience and the first time its members have performed facing out to an audience rather than looking at one another in a room.
Then, one of heavy music’s most recognisable guitarists appears in Briggs’ eyeline.
“Ah, fuck,” he remembers thinking. “Better get back to work.”
After the show, Morello finds him downstairs.
“Man, I thought you were a rapper,” he says.
“I was, or I am,” Briggs replies, before explaining the band he is building.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
The exchange could almost serve as BIG NOTER’s origin story. To anyone who knows Briggs primarily through hip hop, the project may look like a sharp turn. To Briggs, however, it is a homecoming of sorts. Hardcore is not a costume put on after two decades elsewhere. It is part of the terrain that formed him.
“I’m kind of surprised that people are surprised,” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
BIG NOTER’s debut, Songs in the Key of Wrestling, arrives next month with Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Morello and IDLES frontman Joe Talbot among its guests.
Loud, funny and built for the stage, it carries the same moral architecture that has always guided Briggs’ work.
“There’s no redrawing of the blueprint,” he says. “There’s no change in my approach. I think there’s just a change in my reach to my audience.”
Briggs regards none of his work across books, comedy, film or television as a departure. BIG NOTER is just another way to paint the picture.
“My moral compass and my values are well intact, and they carry through everything I do because I don’t know how to be someone else,” he shrugs. “I only do things that reflect that.”
The morning we speak, a test pressing has just arrived in Briggs’ kitchen. He is eating a banana because he has heard potassium might offset too much coffee.
How much coffee has he consumed? “Too much coffee,” he says, moving the camera to reveal the machine in his kitchen. “I’m a coffee nerd.”
Within minutes, the conversation has moved through wrestling, mortality statistics, systemic racism and the cost of touring Australia.
Briggs invented the album’s title on the spot, then “reverse engineered” its meaning. Wrestling represented his inner child and the gloriously obnoxious entertainment of his youth, when rap, metal, punk, movies and professional wrestling bled into one another.
“What possible opportunity did I have to not be affected?” he asks. “My hands were tied.”
Wrestling is a spectacle, but it is also a travelling circus. “Cirque du Soleil could never,” he deadpans.
That combination of fun, combat and moral clarity gives Songs in the Key of Wrestling its framework. Briggs says each track could be understood as a wrestling song, especially “B.M.F” (for ‘Bad Mother Fucker’), which he describes as being about “stomping out Nazis”.
“In this kind of era, this time we live in, [there’s] not a lot of songs about stomping out Nazis,” he says. “Not enough, even.”
It is a punchline with a serious target. For Briggs, humour makes the argument cut deeper.
On “F.M.D” — ‘Fuck Me Dead’ — he dismantles the claim that First Nations people receive extraordinary advantages over other Australians. The song centres around a phrase Briggs often mutters while driving his child to school and hearing something on the radio. Then he asked what made him say it most.
“The math isn’t mathing,” he says. “If we are getting all this free shit, how are we still the most disadvantaged people in the country?”
He points to the gap in life expectancy and disproportionate rates of diabetes, suicide, heart failure and kidney disease. If the supposed advantages are so great, he argues, their outcomes are remarkably difficult to find. Even “free healthcare” as an Indigenous benefit collapses on inspection.
“All Australians get free healthcare,” he says. “The math doesn’t math.”
View this post on Instagram
Briggs understands the force of repetition, the usefulness of a joke and the value of controlling a room.
Humour comes from his family. “We’re a funny bunch. I think that’s how we’ve dealt with things.” Comedy ran “neck and neck” with music among his early obsessions, with Bernie Mac, Patrice O’Neal and Richard Pryor among his favourites.
“You look at Richard Pryor’s early stuff, the ability to deliver a message with humour cuts through,” he says. “It’s always just been a part of my protection of myself.”
When it is suggested that people sometimes laugh because the alternative is crying, his answer is immediate: “Sometimes you do both.”
“If it’s just angry, it gets a bit tiresome,” he says.
“I speak about anger as a freedom,” Briggs says. “The freedom to be angry, the freedom to scream.”
“It’s like you might not be able to do that at your work. It might not be the best place to do it at home, but with a bunch of like-minded people, you might feel like you can finally express yourself as you need.”
“We just wanted to make a bunch of songs that would be fun to play live,” he says. He wants people to leave thinking, “That was fun. I’d like to do that again.”
The instinct goes back to Shepparton, where Briggs put on punk shows, hired halls and assembled PAs with friends. He grew up on Southern Californian punk before moving into hardcore. Perhaps that, he says, is what surprises people now.
“They didn’t see me when I was a 15-year-old chubby jerk in a punk rock band,” he says. “And now I’m a nearly 40-year-old chubby jerk in a fucking punk rock band.”
He has little patience for proving he belongs.
“I slapped hands with all my favourite bands,” he says. “I don’t have anything to prove except that I’ve got a great record and a great story to tell.”
Producer Nick DiDia helped Briggs learn when to leave space for the rest of the band.
“He’s like, ‘Just let it breathe,’” Briggs recalls. “I was like, ‘What if I jumped in here and rah, rah, rah?’ He’s like, ‘Just let the guitar do his thing.’”
“It is not just rap over riffs,” Briggs says. “I’m part of the song. Whatever is going on in the song is what serves the song, and it’s not what serves me.”
The adjustment required restraint and leadership. Briggs wanted each musician to leave a fingerprint, but knew when an idea was not working, and the band had to move on. The guests followed the same organic logic. Chuck D came first, then Morello.
When it was time to bring Talbot into the fold, Briggs had useful leverage.
“I’m like, ‘Yeah, man, Chuck D and Tom Morello came back. We’re just waiting on you,’” He pauses. “That’s a pretty good lever.”
Talbot was busy touring with IDLES but found time to contribute. More important to Briggs than the calibre of the names was why they belonged together.
“Everyone on the record, around the record, was on the same kind of moral compass,” he says. “None of it feels forced.”
Morello’s appearance completes the Forum circle. Briggs could hear him on “What’s the Matter with Adam”.
“It was never about anything outside the organic idea of, ‘Fuck, wouldn’t that be cool?’” he says. “Well, let’s see. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
It worked.
Briggs hears the whole album in its opening and closing tracks.
“If you look at the bookends of the record of ‘My Genocide’ to ‘What’s the Matter with Adam’, and you just take out the whole middle and you only have those two songs, it kind of tells the whole story,” he says.
On the surface, the album is deliberately obtuse, fun and obnoxious, shaped by the music that excited him as a kid. Sit with it longer, and more conversations surface.
That layered quality may explain why Briggs can move between forms without losing his audience.
“People aren’t necessarily fans of hip hop as much as they are seeing themselves in my opinions or seeing themselves in the way that I talk,” he explains.
BIG NOTER gives those people another way in. When the band released “Identity” last year, opportunities in Europe opened almost immediately.
Asked whether he set out to change minds or document the moment, Briggs has a simpler answer.
“There was not so much a goal outside of the art,” he says. “I wanted to make something that I wanted to make. I’m very selfish in my art like that.”
He imagines the album as a signal that travels even further.
“I wonder if I send out a beacon of my own, that other bands from other parts of the world will be like, ‘Hey bro, we’re out here doing this too,’” he says.
His working theory is simple.
“If I like this, I’m not that unique or special,” he says. “I am sure at least 200 other people might like this, too.”
BIG NOTER have already taken unfamiliar songs to vastly different audiences alongside Morello, Karnivool, Amyl and the Sniffers and Suicidal Tendencies.
“They don’t know who I am,” Briggs says. “They’ve never listened to rap music. They don’t know what this is. But it’s also a lot of freedom in that of trying to win them. And I like the challenge.”
“A lot of sweat, a lot more stitches,” he jokes.
“All very generous with their time and their space, all completely professional, generous, warm people,” he says of the bands. “And to me, that’s not surprising, but it’s a welcome reminder that you can still be cool.”
After 20 years in music, Briggs has one rule for his own touring party.
“I have to be me. I have to be the biggest liability. If anyone else is more of a liability than me, then it’s not going to work.”
Then he undercuts the image.
“I’m super boring,” he says. “I do the show, and then I go home and watch cartoons.”
“Touring is difficult. It’s hard. It costs a lot of money,” he says. Getting to Perth alone costs the band $15,000.
He links that cost to the broader “band economy”, describing efforts behind the scenes with Music Victoria to help bands reach more places, including North Queensland.
“It’s difficult,” he says. “But this is what we do. It’s what we’ve done forever. So we soldier on.”
The travelling circus continues…
‘Songs in the Key of Wrestling’ is out now via Island Records.
