360: Rapper finds utopia

‘‘I like coming to Newcastle,’’ Colwell said. ‘‘Every time I’ve played there it’s been crazy. I get a really good response every time. It’s been mental.’’

Colwell has visited often and said he always had a place to stay. 

‘‘I’ve been heaps of times. I come up to stay with Daniel Johns,’’ he said. 

‘‘The last few times I’ve made a bunch of music with him.

‘‘His house is like a kingdom, in the best part of town, looking out over the water.’’

Utopia is Colwell’s third studio album, and it’s doing pretty well.

‘‘It’s been out for a while and we’ve done a big tour already,’’ Colwell said. 

‘‘We did really big venues with 5000 people, the biggest tour I’ve done yet.

‘‘During the January tour we’ll be scaling it down to places that hold 500 to 1000 people.

‘‘We want more intimacy and to go to places that don’t usually get big performers visiting.’’

The tour will take Colwell to every state in Australia but will skip the Northern Territory.

‘‘It’s 17 dates in a month so it’s pretty full-on,’’ he said. ‘‘We’ll fly to Perth and drive to Port Headland and all these other places. 

‘‘It’s going to be intense but I reckon it’ll be fun.’’

The controversial but kindhearted hip-hopper has been in the business for half his life, starting out as a 14-year-old skater boy and moving up the ranks pretty quickly.

‘‘I used to be a skateboarder and it’s sort of a product of my environment,’’ he said. 

‘‘All my mates’ older brothers – we sort of looked up to them and all they listened to was Wu-Tang and rap.

‘‘We used to steal their CDs and listen to them when they weren’t around and then we started rapping and trying to do it ourselves.

‘‘I got into freestyle rapping during school so I entered  competitions in Melbourne when I was 16 and I won a bunch of them and that got my name out, and then I started writing songs and putting them out on the internet.’’

And, as Colwell said, the rest is history.

Rapping for a living is a career many young people can only dream of,  but Colwell said he’d experienced a lot of hate as a result of his success. 

‘‘What’s wrong with my  deserving of all this shit?’’ he asked. 

‘‘All I’m trying to do is make positive stuff and help out people and some people seem to hate me. It’s really weird.

‘‘I think it’s that typical tall poppy syndrome. Once someone becomes a huge success they just get angry. 

‘‘They should be proud of it.’’

But it isn’t just jealousy getting Colwell in trouble.

 In 2014 he suggested the Australian flag had been turned into a symbol of racism to people overseas.

‘‘I copped a lot of negativity for that as well,’’ he said. ‘‘I became the target of the media for about 2 weeks. 

‘‘People were saying that the comments I made about the Australian flag were disrespecting the Diggers and anyone who fights in the army, but what I said had nothing to do with that.

"It's so annoying how people took what I said on Q&A the wrong way.

"People are coming in - like real passionate Australians - posting pictures of war vets with flags on their wheelchairs, saying things like 'are these guys racist'?

"Come on now, you've totally missed the point."

Colwell said the negative comments were always the ones with a lasting effect.

"You can have a post with people saying the nicest things and then someone says something negative.

"It's really weird, like, why not just completely ignore that and take in all the positives, you know?

"I don't even read my Facebook comments any more because Facebook is full of f--kwits.

"I still talk to my fans on Facebook and Twitter but there's a lot of stuff I post where I don't read the comments."

One of the gigs that stuck in Colwell's mind was 2014's Splendour in the Grass three-day music festival.

"[It] was so incredible and it was something I needed as well because this was my third album," he said.

"The first album I dropped wasn't successful at all, but the second album I dropped was a freak success - like, I don't think anything in Australia has come close to that success in years.

"We rocked up and the crowd was like 20,000 people front to back.

"It was completely chockers and it was kinda cool, so to go to a show and then have that kind of response and everyone singing every word, that was pretty amazing and made me just realise, stop listening to these negative f--kwits on the internet."

Pouring a lot of soul into his lyrics, Colwell said he had favourite tracks.

"I love Purple Waterfalls," he said.

"I think that's my favourite song - I don't know why - I think it's such a different kind of Australian hip-hop.

"Australian hip-hop, to me, has a very similar sound and there's a bunch of new artists who are trying new things, which is great, but the majority of it has an early '90s hip-hop sound and we really wanted to make it a real international sounding album."

But Colwell said he didn't have a specific message in his music.

"I'm trying to show people that I go through the same shit that they go through," he said.

"I think that's why I have a lot of fans the way I do, because I make music and the shit that I talk about, they wouldn't expect someone who's a successful rapper living the dream to go through.

"They feel a connection to it and a lot of the stuff I write is very personal and that's good.

"It's a good feeling."