It’s Friday night at the Powerstation and the urge to party is so strong you can taste it. More than one tribe of Auckland is represented in the heaving crowd and most of them aren’t fancy people. They’re the ones who bought their tickets on the day it was announced that Home Brew would be playing in their home town for the first time in years. The show sold out that same day and the air of expectation is manic.
Home Brew is the group Tom Scott formed in Avondale in 2006 and the scene of various crimes. The band’s self-titled debut album was released in 2012 and became the first local hip-hop album to top the national charts since Scribe’s The Crusader, nearly a decade before. A four-LP vinyl version released in 2014 by a European label now changes hands for more than $700, and a 2023 re-release – the premise for the tour that concluded at the Powerstation at the end of October – is selling.
By the time Home Brew came out, the band was already scattering and Scott had begun on a series of other projects – most notably, Avantdale Bowling Club, whose ambitious, jazzy 2018 debut album earned Scott the Taite Music Prize, a Silver Scroll, the Album of the Year award and a degree of respectability that might once have seemed unlikely. The vivid Friday Night at the Liquor Store, from the follow-up album Trees, was a Silver Scrolls finalist this year. But it’s Home Brew the people are here for tonight.
The first few songs – Alcoholic, Benefit, Yellow Snot Funk – are tales of misspent youth and a release for the raging energy in the room. It’s not unlike the occasional 45-minute festival sets the band has reconvened to play over the years.
But this longer show shifts gear more than once. There’s a political section, a woozy weed interlude, a singalong to White Flowers (a cautionary tale about eating datura and losing your mind) and, most remarkably, an intro to Bourbon & Coke, a song about departed friends where Scott urges the crowd to voice their own losses: “Say their names. Say their names!” he calls out. “They live with you now.”
People shout out names like they shout out nearly every line of every other song. Fans are very, very invested in the words, but also in the meaning of Home Brew.
Afterwards, Scott’s old friend and co-founder of the band, Harry Huavi (better known as Haz Beats) signs a few things and chats to people at the merchandise stand.
“I went to sign some stuff for some fans and they said their parents had given them our CD when they were 12,” he says. “Then I met a couple of older folk ‒ I think they were the parents ‒ and they were frothing more than their kids.”
Everyone goes off into the night happy and with some news: there is a new Home Brew album on the way.
It’s personal
Tom Scott can see the irony in it all. The success story that came with the Avantdale project was not just artistic and commercial, but personal. The enfant terrible, the guy who was too wild and impulsive to deal with, had matured as an artist and a man.
“This was the thing that the whole Avantdale Bowling Club thing was about: look at this beautiful journey of Tom, he’s found his family, he’s got this new life,” he says. “I didn’t want it to end, I wasn’t trying to demolish it for the sake of art or anything, but it ended.”
Scott separated from his partner Whitney Wainui, with whom he has two children, at the beginning of this year.
“I did have it together. It’s weird to talk about now, because I feel like I’ve come through it all. I really have. I’m quite proud of myself, to be honest. But can’t act like that wasn’t a huge shake-up of my life. I was so happy in that era of Avantdale and having my family together. It was the first time I’ve truly found solace, truly found contentment and happiness in the purest form. There’s no happier time than holding your kids. I’m really into the idea that happiness is found in fulfilling your responsibilities. Feeding your plants, packing your kids’ lunches, paying the bum outside the supermarket. That’s legit.”
Scott shares parenting of their two children and is in a new relationship, but the new Home Brew album, Run It Back, is largely about going off the rails on the way there. Drinking in the Morning, Probably and Tears Gone Dry are reflective, sad, funny (“And I spent all my money to self-medicate/I drunk so much wine they ain’t got no more grapes”): songs about finding yourself on the cusp of middle age – Scott turns 40 next year – back in the place you used to be.
On the title track, he surveys the messes he’s made over the years, both public and personal. He’d do it differently, but they’re part of who he is. “For a night like this I’ll take a hangover,” he croons. “For a life like this, I’ll pay the debt.”
Scott has never been shy about talking about his feelings, and his determination to name the feelings gives his words a universality. Which is perhaps what makes it a Home Brew record as against the more tightly autobiographical themes of his Avantdale work. Everyone’s been there some time.
The sentiments are set against a new musical backdrop, however. Huavi’s productions are suffused with classic soul – there’s not a big gap between these and the sumptuous R&B tunes he’s been making with the singer Miloux – and Scott is singing as often as he’s spitting rhymes. The two old friends both came into the recording process off relationship break-ups.
“And I don’t think either of us spoke about it the whole time, because we talk in music. I understand him more than anyone on Earth when he plays his music. He doesn’t say nothing to me, he’s always saying so much. He knows exactly what frequency to play to get me to feel comfortable, to bring something out of me. I sound like I’m over-analysing it, but I know what it is. We’d just be sitting in the studio and just having conversations about things that we weren’t literally having conversations about.”
There was a sense of unfinished business about Home Brew, Huavi acknowledges, “I mean, we just left it and kind of parted ways to do our little projects. We never kind of ended it properly.” Scott feels that, but also perceives a duty to the people who just kept listening to Home Brew.
“I think one revelation I had after the success of Avantdale Bowling Club was that I was making this music in Avondale about the things I was going through, not being able to pay the rent, my drug addict friends and my addiction, working class issues – and then I was turning up to the shows and I wasn’t seeing anyone from Avondale.
“I’m walking down the street, and people are driving past playing Melodownz – or playing Home Brew. That was the stuff that was touching the people. And I think, as a musician, if you’re not speaking for your village, then you kind of feel that you’ve failed a bit. Not that I’m not grateful – I’m always grateful for anyone that wants to listen. But I started realising that this music resonated with people on a different kind of level.”
He relates a story from Dead Forest, the young rapper he asked to open for Home Brew at the Powerstation.
“He said, ‘We were homeless, and we had a CD with nine Home Brew songs on it that we used to play ... under the bridge.’ That’s worth more than any number of streams or revenue I’ve ever made. And that’s when I started realising, fuck, I think this music’s a bit bigger than me and my ego and what I perceive as success. I’d rather have some kid saying, ‘Bro, I was off my meds and you talked me off the ledge with that shit,’ you know?”
Ironically, he’s not yet sure if this new Home Brew will be what the people want when the band tours again this summer.
“If we can do these new songs, that’ll be an honour – because you know how it is when people go, ‘We got a new one.’ And if they don’t, I’ll be happy to play those other songs and just have the one Bob Dylan moment. I won’t do a whole Bob Dylan!”
Making a living
In between the Powerstation show and the album release, Scott has been back with Avantdale Bowling Club, playing a one-off show in London, the city of his birth, to follow up dates they did there earlier this year.
It’s all part of the practical life that began in 2018 when he was taken on by artist manager Lorraine Barry (also Dave Dobbyn’s manager), who he refers to as “my other mum”. Barry is ferociously protective of Scott’s wellbeing and has effectively provided the structure that lets him conduct the balancing act that is making a living as an artist in New Zealand.
That’s something Scott canvassed in Don’t Give Up Your Day Job, his 2019 documentary about Young, Gifted and Broke, the collective of artists that formed around him and his work.
Some of them have made it through: Esther Stephens, who came back to sing on the Home Brew tour, is best known to the country as Ngaire Munro in Westside, among her other stage and screen roles. Huavi makes a living out of DJing, songwriting and producing for several artists (“I had to make it work because I didn’t want to go back to welding,” he says).
Being able to pay the rent feels “insane”, says Scott: “I can sit in the room and be a weirdo. I don’t know how long there’ll be a living in it, I’m not planning for it to be forever. But I’m happy for now.”
And if it does all end one day? “I’ve been thinking about being a counsellor. I’d love to try that one day.”
It’s not a stretch to picture Tom Scott helping young men process their feelings. It’s basically what he’s been doing since this whole thing started.
Run It Back is released on December 8.
