Last Friday night (May 8th), the dancefloor inside Te Whanganui-a-Tara’s Meow Nui swelled as Tom Scott took to the stage. Dressed in understated streetwear, he let the band play for a moment before addressing the audience. Tonight, he told us, he wanted to get out of his head, be present, and have some fun. It was a fitting mission statement for his first live performance in the capital since releasing his debut solo album, ANITYA, late last year.
Over the last nineteen years, the West Tāmaki Makaurau rapper, songwriter and producer has built a career out of songs that wrestle with the distance between the brain, the body and the heart, exploring habits, contradictions, and the psychedelic qualities that underscore the mundane.
This has taken shape across a multiplicity of musical projects: Home Brew, @Peace, Average Rap Band, Avantdale Bowling Club, and, as of late, solo material released under his own name. At this point, he’s had a long enough run to see several waves of New Zealand music come and go, while remaining central. Relevance like this is never a fluke — it’s always hard-won.
Ryo Nishikawa
ANITYA is the type of album many successful musicians eventually make: a breakup record with sunrise on the horizon. Aesthetically, it draws from the arty, postmodern R&B sensibilities that The Weeknd and Frank Ocean brought into the mainstream in the early 2010s via their respective House of Balloons and Nostalgia, Ultra mixtapes, as well as his love of gritty, vintage soul, 1960s jazz-folk and ambient/new age music. Lyrically, the album is a warts-and-all confessional that can’t have been easy to commit to wax.
Opening with his slow-simmering neo-soul number “gyal like you”, Scott and his backing band worked through a run of ANITYA songs. “Till then” struck a reflective note. “Dirty talk” unfolded as a cinematic exploration of the personal and the intimate. “I just came around to say goodbye” tempered regret with acceptance, while sounding like a lost classic from the ‘70s and the ‘90s at the same time.
Track by track, Scott’s continued willingness to keep taking risks and trying new things out, while still landing the performance, came into sharp relief.
Since the early days of Home Brew, unadorned sing-along choruses have been a key feature of his work. In his ANITYA era, he’s singing whole songs. He might not always hit every note spot on, but with his heart in the right place and backing vocalists Grace Ikenaso and Vai Mahina supporting him, he always lands it when it counts.
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One of the big thrills of ANITYA is the musicians who join Scott on stage.
To the right, Max Gunn, a keyboard player, guitarist and vocalist who looks like he descended into the depths of hell and returned to tell the tale, played like his life depended on it. Chilling at the back, drummer Swap Gomez and bassist Cass Basil held down the groove. The multi-instrumentalists JY Lee and Guy Harrison were equally dependable. Scott made sure to let us know and to give them all moments to shine.
Ryo Nishikawa
Halfway through a performance punctuated by tasteful covers and the odd demo cut, Scott and the band switched modes to perform a few rapturously received Home Brew and Avantdale Bowling Club songs, notably “Run It Back”, “Drinking in the Morning”, and “Goldtops”. He could have probably gotten away without dipping into his back catalogue, but as he kept reminding us, it’s not all about him. It’s about the collective experience, everyone together.
After a few more ANITYA songs, the backing singers took on a pivotal role, in an unforgettable Whitney Houston-style reimagining of “baby-let’s-have-a-baby-before-trump-do-something-crazy”. The vibes continued well into the encore, which concluded with an extended medley of “Home” by @Peace and “Home” by Avantdale Bowling Club.
After bringing the soul artist Louis Baker on stage to sing briefly in a nod to the late great Gil Scott-Heron, Scott closed things out with a fierce a capella rap. The audience couldn’t get enough of it, and neither could Scott, almost completely losing himself in his wordplay.
Earlier in the evening, two rising stars, the rapper Savagehine and Wear Pounamu, warmed the stage for Scott and his band. Accompanied by a dancer, they presented an uncompromisingly Māori vision for a type of hip-hop and R&B that draws strength from the past while reaching into the future. Together, they set the scene perfectly for everything that followed. Scott wanted us to have a night present in our bodies. Ultimately, that was exactly what he got.
