Live Review: Deltron 3030 Kid Koala Eloquor Sinks

Local rapper Sinks is supported by a drummer, DJ and back-up lyricist as he makes his way to the front of the stage.

Though the cursive combination and interplay of sampling, scratching and rap spitting is enough to grab our attention, it’s the crisp, measured drumming that maintains it. The necks in the audience, already nodding away, feed the four-piece’s growing swagger. With an accent like The Crocodile Hunter and moves like the godfather of soul, Eloquor struts around the stage like a young, Australian James Brown. It’s endearing enough but in truth it lacks much of the eccentricity and inimitability we’ve already seen tonight.

Perhaps the least immediately recognisable member of tonight’s supergroup, DJ Kid Koala, introduces himself to us with an entertaining monologue and an incredible, genre-spanning warm-up performance. Dressed in a koala onesie and without his mixing headphones, the Canadian manoeuvres THREE turntables with an amazing fluidity that belies his charming, comical, cuddly appearance. He finishes by leading the crowd in a dance that goes with his contribution to children’s TV show Yo Gabba Gabba and another amiable monologue. Brilliant.

Amid flashing lights, a spacecraft rumble and enough weed smoke to evacuate a small skyscraper, Dan The Automator and Del The Funky Homosapien soon join Kid Koala on stage to fill out tonight’s headliners: conceptual hip hop supergroup Deltron 3030. Allegedly coming from the outer regions of the universe in the year 3030, the trio, backed by a live band, waste no time in making their intoxicating, futuristic-tinged nostalgia felt. 3030, Things You Can Do, Virus, Mastermind and Nobody Can keep us fixated, trapped in reverence for the group’s magnetising, pulsating grooves. It’s almost as if they’ve implanted us with mind control devices from 3030, their time, in order to control us from within, sending us climbing The Hi-Fi’s curved walls.

Set up across the stage in three separate areas, there’s composure to the left, energy to right and the resulting balance in the middle is pure, hip hop bliss. Dan The Automator is coolness personified, Kid Koala is doin’ his thing and Del The Funky Homosapien, is, well, Del: faster than a speeding MF Doom, more powerful than a Big L punchline and able to outshine most in a single verse, he is underground rap’s ultimate Superman. Though the group share the spotlight with one another, each maintains the set’s fast-paced, boisterous energy. Three legends: each one at the top of their craft.

The group close with Memory Loss, Do You Remember and Gorillaz classic Clint Eastwood (on which the trio all worked) to send us into one final moment of delirium. They exit the stage to return back into the year 3030, leaving us with enough superlatives to talk about this gig for months. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough space to write them all out.