Reviewed on Friday October 26 (photo by Ashley Mar)

If audiences could speak. Friday night, it seemed like the lockout was in full effect and had funnelled all those would-be king-hitters into a packed, sweaty Hordern Pavilion to take part in some sort of cult ceremony for gods-of-the-moment Hilltop Hoods. The out-and-out veneration started early. Even as local boys Thundamentals proved that alongside writing some of the best songs in Aussie hip hop, they have the live chops to back them up, a boozed-up, shirts-off, ragtag bunch were already calling out to their Adelaide heroes and throwing up gang signs I didn’t know existed. A lazy DJ set did nothing to quell the Passion of the Hoods, and when the rhyming duo, Plutonic Lab, DJ Debris and a three-piece horn section finally arrived on stage as Hilltop Hoods, the raucous response was appropriately religious.

More importantly, unlike those pesky religions with deities not worth their weight in salt, the Hoods, from the outset, lived up to their hype. Regardless of the great strides the hip hop genre has made in Australia in recent years, there is no denying the fact that MC Suffa and MC Pressure retain the heavyweight title; no mean feat across a career now spanning seven studio albums and almost 20 years. It was the latest of these, the solid Walking Under Stars, which lent its single ‘Cosby Sweater’ to the name of this tour, but the Hoods took an impressive trip down memory lane, taking in classics like ‘The Hard Road’ and ‘The Nosebleed Section’, to make staggeringly obvious the indelible mark they’ve left on Australian hip hop to date.

For a rowdy crew of mostly young’uns, the attentive bobbing on slower, more introspective cuts from Walking Under Stars was remarkable (as was the number of lighters in the room), and they took their cues from the impeccable Suffa (bounce, clap, jump, wave) with ease. Astounding, too, was the way the two MCs dominated affairs from go to woah. Their stellar reputation was well evidenced across an expert ‘I Love It’, oodles of stagecraft and chemistry and an amazing, a capella ‘500 Feet Tall’. By the time the namesake jumper made an appearance and Thundamentals and labelmate K21 resurfaced for cameos on the single, the whole room was bumping, swinging their shirts and yelling “Hill-Top!” T. Cruise would approve: these hip hop idols are worth jumping for.

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