Back to the Old School With New Zealand Hip-Hop Legend DLT

Born and raised in Napier, Darryl Thomson moved to Wellington in the 1980s at the age of 16 and began to explore the four elements of hip-hop with the Upper Hutt Posse collective and as a solo producer under the name DLT. 

He has since gone on to become a trailblazing hip-hop producer and one of the most identifiable figures in the New Zealand scene.

DLT's chart topping work consistently stood for disenfranchised people in New Zealand, many of whom he encountered as a youth. It's his affinity with Aotearoa's marginalized that gives his music validity, and also makes him a well versed historian on the socio-economic structures that lead young New Zealanders in the 1980s to hip-hop music, both as listeners and performers.

To further understand the culture surrounding New Zealand hip-hop's inception, we spoke to DLT and asked him a few questions about the early days.

I grew up in place called Maraenui, which is in Napier, and was a 70s state housing type neighbourhood. Most of the people there were of Maori descent, and a high percentage were of the Ngati Kahungunu tribe.

It was probably 50/50 Maori/white. There weren't many Islanders, in fact I could count the number of Islanders at Napier Boys High School on one hand.

The white folk were quite happy, and the Maori families were, I'd say, financially struggling, but they made up for it in other ways. In my grandfather's time all his land was taken from him. So my family went broke really fast, and I'd say it'd be the same story for a lot of other families there as well.

Since the land act and the likes, we were disenfranchised. My mother is Maori and my father was a Pakeha, so my mother came from a time where her family had owned thousands and thousands of acres, and then by the time I came along, we were living in a state house with nothing. My mother and father split up and my mum raised me and brother, and then my sister, by herself while she was on the benefit.

Maori people don't really get by on blaming people, though, they just make do and get on with it.

My mother listened to white rock, glam rock… she listened to a whole lot of stuff. In 1977, she came home with a Kraftwerk album, so I met hip-hop far before she was called hip-hop, so to speak. The whole style of the 70s that was fed to us by the television - remember in those days there was one TV channel - you either were watching The Waltons or Walt Disney, or stuff like that. All of the shows I remember being influenced by as a young kid was anything that had brown folk in it. Good Times was about a black family and was like the black version of all the other shows that were about white people; My Three Sons and shit like that. There were shows like Sesame Street though, and those shows were interesting to me because they were full of variety, it wasn't just a one-eyed view of the world that we were being fed by the TV and the radio at that time.

As a kid growing up in Napier, we had Bay City radio, and they played Neil Diamond, Seals and Croft, John Denver… I can remember this shit clearly. We had no access to James Brown, to Parliament, to any of that stuff until I went to school, to discos and stuff when I was young. I think that's the first time I heard, like, ten black songs being played in a row by a DJ. The point I'm making with this is that we got into the dance.

Of course there was Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 and the Silvers; Saturday Night Fever came out and black music got centre stage for a minute with the disco buzz, otherwise we were getting little hints of black music via the Bee Gees and commercial stuff like that.

The people around me listened to AC/DC and stuff. Like I said, Maori people don't hold grudges. They like, and they still do like (because I like) music with guts. General Maori like hardcore shit, that's why Led Zeppelin and stuff were so popular in my neighbourhood. Personally, I was offended by it, because I felt in early funk music that I heard and a lot of soul music, it made you feel good, not angry.

My mum listened to heavy as music. Black Sabbath, Moody Blues, Deep Purple… , she loved that shit. They were kind of - and I'm not sure how to say this without offending people - they seemed to be turning their back on the problem. They were trying their hardest to deal with trying to raise us in a place where they weren't welcome. They weren't welcome in the workforce, they weren't welcome in the education system, there was no such thing as Maori cops, no Maori doctors, no Maori lawyers, none of that shit. We were factory workers, we were slaves to the factories. It was the freezing works, or forestry… these were my options for a career as a kid, and I chose to go the opposite way, wherever it was; just, walk away from that shit.

In this time though, we were happy, because as kids we didn't know the politics of a white male Western world. We just thought that teachers were assholes because we were poor. The hospitals and the doctors waiting rooms were full of my people because we didn't know how to look after ourselves. This is how you had to look at shit when you were young. It wasn't until my teenage years, when I started listening to reggae music, that it all changed for me.

As a 14-year-old, hearing Up Wairika Hill, albums like that. And of course Bob Marley's Survival. Because the lyrics were on the back of the record, I made sense of them and what they were saying. Reggae was a foreign language to us as kids. All the records we had listened to were of black people trying to be white, but reggae just flipped it on its head and went in another direction. I was attracted to the frequencies in reggae… when it was turned up loud, you could feel stuff; so between Lee Scratch Perry's production and Bob's words, things changed.

Around the summer of 82, I left Maraenui because it just wasn't happening. I could see a cycle and I wanted to get out. I hadn't heard rap music until I got to Upper Hutt, which is where I first heard Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks", Grandmaster Flash's "The Message"… "The Message" just changed everything. The very first hip-hop track that I heard would have been "Planet Rock"… a friend of mine sent away to England through a magazine called Blues and Soul, and he would look at this magazine and choose music from across the spectrum that he would order, and it would be shipped from England to Upper Hutt, and the bro would receive a package with 7" records and cassettes and stuff, and one of those records was "Planet Rock". It was called hip-hop by then, "Planet Rock" was a B-Boy record, but I had already heard Kraftwerk, so through the samples I felt a bond with it, even though first listening to "Planet Rock" freaked me the fuck out because it was a digital record. It didn't have a waveform like a normal song, it just hopped on the beat and stayed there… all those natural rhythms that you'd learned to trust in music; "Planet Rock", threw that all out the window and was just robots on.

The problems of the people in Wellington were way worse than those back home. Napier was like a summers afternoon for eight months of the year.  In Upper Hutt and it was all southerlies and  a rainy hole. But out of all my older cousins who I looked up to as my role models, my coolest, oldest cousin lived in Upper Hutt and I rang him and asked if I could come and stay with him, and he said yes. So I hitchhiked down to Upper Hutt and it was amazing; I spread my wings.

But the average urban Maori kid I met in the city was kind of mentally beat down; a lot more timid than the kids where I was from. So it was up to kids like myself, kids who gathered a group of poor dudes around and shook them by the scruff of the neck and said "let's do something about it". And then I met other like-minded kids who became the Upper Hutt Posse. You have to remember at this time the Upper Hutt Posse was a bunch of teenagers who hung out together… there would have bee easily 16 to 30 of us. We didn't have a letterhead, we weren't an organisation, we were just kids from the neighbourhood.

We'd sit around and cypher hard about things for months, and if you agreed with the korero that was going down you stayed, and if you didn't you moved along. It slowly got tighter and tighter, but we were just kids who were listening to music that was helping to enlighten us. Songs like "The Message", no matter where you go in the world, the poor folk love that shit, because it's the same movie, different location.

Illustration: Ben Thomson

Nov 21 - 27 is NOISEY New Zealand Hip-Hop Week. Head here for more NZ hip-hop content.