The Bondi Hipsters

“When you boil it down we’re being dickheads onstage playing other people’s music – and then we’re being dickheads on camera,” says Boshier.Luckily he and Van Vuuren aren’t nearly as annoying as Dom and Adrian. Given their unconventional entry into the “ahcting” world, their down-to-earth humility about the Bondi Hipsters project is not all that surprising.

Van Vuuren first rose to prominence as The Fully Sick Rapper in a series of YouTube videos he made while in quarantine for a rare strain of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. To stop himself going insane, he recorded rap tracks about his six-month-long solitary confinement, which went (ironically) viral. When he was finally released from hospital, instead of returning to his job in marketing he teamed up with his brother Connor van Vuuren and Boshier, one of the minds behind another viral YouTube series, Beached Az.

Since recording ‘The Life Organic’ as Bondi Hipsters in 2012, they’ve been gaining a fan base and plenty of accolades for their comedic talents. Lately, things have been getting even busier. They had a recent stint hosting breakfast on triple j, are embarking on a national DJ tour and also promoting their upcoming ABC2 show Soul Mates. “It’s a Seinfeld-y take on cavemen. More observational and less ‘ooga-booga’,” explains Boshier.Co-written and directed with Connor van Vuuren, it weaves together four stories of best mates throughout time. And yes, it features Dom and Adrian. “With Soul Mates, we actually start to take them on the actual journey of trying to launch their own fashion label,” says Christiaan.

“Christiaan and I are used to making whatever the fuck we like,” Boshier adds, “and with the ABC we have to take into consideration some of their editorial policies and their notes.”

Not long ago, they posted to Facebook a screengrab of one of those ‘network notes’ from the ABC. It read, “Seriously, I have said this before and you have ignored it… Don’t use ‘c***’ in your scripts.” Has it been hard for the Hipsters to sell out like that? “Frankly, they’re perfectly reasonable,” says Boshier. “Like, they really let us be as creative as we like, so it’s really, really cool.”

While preparing for their debut in the television world, Boshier and Van Vuuren also had a crack at DJing for commercial radio, taking over breakfasts for a week at triple j. At first, the response from regular listeners was a little mixed.

“When you hear a new breakfast host, it’s a hard one to get your head around – it’s like having a new girlfriend or boyfriend,” Boshier says.

They decided not to do the whole thing in character (“We wouldn’t put anyone through that”) and instead went in as themselves. Even with their combined experience on YouTube, a fertile breeding ground for vexatious internet trolls, nothing properly prepared them for the triple j text line.

“Fuck, it was pretty fun,” says Van Vuuren. “I didn’t think any audience feedback could be more intense than YouTube, but on the triple j text line you get 3,000 texts in three hours.

“You know if you make a mistake the text line fills up with, like, ‘What is this shit?’ and then if you say something funny it fills up with, ‘Oh, you guys are amazing, never leave.’ There were a couple of those [on Friday], which was really awesome.”

When we turn to the subject of Bondi Hipsters’ latest DJ tour, they’re quick to proclaim themselves the first-ever “USB-Js”. Under possibly the greatest stage names in EDM history, ‘DJ Enzyme: Breaking Shit Down’ (Adrian) and ‘DJ Oedipus: The Original Mother Fucker’ (Dom), it turns out that they aren’t actually very confident at the turntables. “We pretend to turn more knobs than we actually turn. We push the occasional button,” says Van Vuuren.

“We’re shitty DJs,” Boshier confirms. “Adrian does a lot more dancing. Dom just kind of stands and gets nervous. I tend to lose my shit a bit; I literally tend to lose my brain.” Literally? “Literally I sometimes go a bit crazy.”

While a lot of what Bondi Hipsters do is poking fun at a particular group of people living in a particular place (with a very particular ahccent), the fact the videos are set in Bondi was never meant to be the central theme. But attaching the characters to such a globally recognisable place ended up being a successful move.

“We actually originally just called it ‘Hipsters’ and we went to a seminar with a guy who said the best thing they did on Bondi Rescue was to call it Bondi Rescue,” Boshier says.

Underneath all of the satire, though, is a genuine affection for the characters. It means that, as irritating as Dom and Adrian can get, they are also relatable – at least occasionally.

“I think mostly I’m criticising myself,” says Boshier. “The Adrian character is not so far from me. I am less morally ambiguous and maybe slightly less sexually ambiguous – but I eat all that [health food] shit, I’m hypocritical.”

“The joke was always more about two guys, two people who think they are making the world a better place but who are actually part of the problem,” says Van Vuuren. “I definitely think that it’s a parody made with love.”

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