Sunday Morning, Coming Up

"It's equal parts excitement and nerves that comes with doing our biggest tour – but it's cool and exciting and fun,” says a cautiously enthusiastic Lupi. “But it's not all just 'Fuck! Let's get out on the road and start drinking and partying' – there's all the other elements of selling tickets and everything as well when it's your own tour. Should be good though man; we've got a good feeling about it, especially going on tour with (fellow Sydney artists) Jackie Onassis – it's the first time we've done a tour with a national support and we couldn't ask for a stronger support act. I'm a little bit biased because they are our friends and they're in our crew, but they're just kicking goals at the moment.”

Under the banner of the One Day Crew, the guys from Spit Syndicate along with Horrorshow, Joyride and Jackie Onassis have been a well known collective around Sydney's Inner West for years, and they've recently built on that collective with a monthly hip hop club called One Day Sundays at the newly re-vamped Vic On The Park. They've also just launched a monthly podcast called One Day Radio. Lupi says his association with the guys in the crew goes way back before any of them thought they'd be doing this for real.

“I actually went to school with the boys (from Jackie Onassis) as well as the boys from Horrorshow. So we've been aware of their talents for a while and Jackie Onassis only really came into fruition over the past year or so. It's something that people I know who are involved in other types of bands or other genres of music or whatever often comment on about hip hop – this whole idea that we have crews with three or four acts in the crew, and the crew kind of helps put the others on and looks out for them. It's like a skill-sharing kind of thing. I think the whole crew idea comes from our background in graffiti where it's individual graffiti writers but they represent a crew that they put at the end of their tag. It comes from that – Spit Syndicate, Horrorshow, Joyride and Jackie Onassis are all doing own thing musically, but this is like a banner that we all ride under.”

Lupi has a lot of love for the Inner West of Sydney where he and his crew hail from, littering references to I Dub, as it is affectionately known by the Sydney hip hop community, into their tracks and mythology.

“I work as a tour guide here in Sydney. It's not near the beaches and it's not a naturally picturesque part of Sydney. Well, I think it's beautiful, but it's not where you send tourists if they only have three days in Sydney. There's something very genuine about it and I think for the most part it lacks the pretentiousness and maybe wanker-centricity you find in some other parts of Sydney. In our sort of circle of the hip hop scene we've been representing the Inner West since we started because, you know, hip hop has these intrinsic ties to your locality and where you're from. We have rapper friends from other cities referring to the I Dub now and we're proud of flying that flag ya know.”

It's interesting hearing Lupi casually drop his day job as a tour guide into the conversation. While so many artists will go to great lengths to avoid (or at least pretend they don't have) day jobs, Spit Syndicate's album, Sunday Gentlemen, references this idea of art being practiced alongside the confines of the 9-to-5.

The title is a reference to the blue-collar author Irving Wallace's book, The Sunday Gentleman, a collection of stories and musings that Wallace wrote every Sunday, outside the confines of his more professional endeavours. Lupi says it is a good representation of the situation that they (and so many other) successful Australian musicians are in. Despite national airplay, sold-out tours and decent album sales, it's still not really possible to make a realistic living out of making music.

“We've gone to efforts to point out that there's nothing particularly unique about our situation. It's the reality of it man, it's just this double-life reality. Most people involved in bands or arts or aspiring actors, it's a reality of that. It was just cool that Jimmy (Nice, fellow Spit Syndicate rapper) discovered this book, discarded on the side of the road waiting for the council to pick it up. If he had walked a different way home then he never would have found it. The album isn't like a concept album, but I guess it's a sentiment that can be found throughout the record in that regard.”

The recording of the album was done in a studio the guys share with fellow One Day Crew members Horrorshow, and most of the beats for the album were produced by Horrorshow's Adit.

“He's working on Horrorshow stuff but he's also started in the last year or two to work on a few other projects. He's been working with other writers and singers and really workshopping songs as a collaborative process instead of just working in isolation and I think that results in just everything sounding better. It's a mad progression for him but it also means that we can work very closely with him. I mean, we've been making music with Adit for years – since high school really – so it's something that we've been doing for a while now.”

A really interesting way for fans to get involved with the upcoming tour and have a chance to meet the guys, as well as showing off their hometowns is to get in the running for the Spit Syndicate Food Safari. The guys pick a couple of fans in each city or town to accompany them for a meal and a couple of drinks while they're in town. Lupi says it worked brilliantly last time they tried it and they're really keen to make it happen again.

“It was fucking mad man! It was heaps cool. One of our favourite things about going on tour is finding the best bars and the best places to eat in your downtime when you're on the road and we just thought it would be a cool way of doing it. It's also a way of engaging with fans. It went really well (last time) hanging out with people who are aware of us or into our music, and just hanging out with them as if they're our mates. And that's not something that's hard for us to do – we're not particularly reserved people. We're quite out there and we like talking shit and kicking it with fans. It's something we're definitely looking forward to doing bigger and better with this tour.”

Spit Syndicate will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 28 March - Zierholz, Canberra ACT
Saturday 30 March - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney NSW
Thursday 4 April - Spotted Cow, Toowoomba QLD
Friday 5 April - Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast QLD
Saturday 6 April - The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 11 April - Bar 3909, Lakes Entrance NSW
Friday 12 April - Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 13 April - Republic Bar, Hobart TAS
Thursday 18 April - Jive, Adelaide SA
Friday 19 April - Prince of Wales, Bunbury WA
Saturday 20 April - Amplifier, Perth WA
Sunday 21 April - C5, Fremantle WA
Wednesday 24 April - Great Northern, Newcastle NSW
Friday 26 April - Karova Lounge, Ballarat VIC
Saturday 27 April - Movement Festival: Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne VIC
Sunday 28 April - Movement Festival: Riverstage, Brisbane QLD
Tuesday 30 April - Movement Festival: Red Hill Auditorium, Perth WA
Thursday 2 May - Discovery, Darwin NT
Friday 10 May - Woy Woy Leagues Club, Woy Woy NSW
Saturday 11 May - Waves Nightclub, Wollongong NSW