Some people are very hard to pick.
There's a persona 360 has cultivated of a brash, obnoxious, unapologetic stalwart of Aussie hip hop that permeates its way through every public appearance and every syllable spoken on a track. To be honest, before chatting to him on the phone it was this persona that I was expecting to encounter; I was bracing myself. In the end, it turns out he doesn't even answer the phone as ‘Sixty’; how did I not already know his name was Matt?
"Everyone sees a successful artist or musician and thinks they must just be living the life, everything must be amazing. But there's so much other shit going on behind the scenes that people don't know about. It's really hard to deal with suddenly going from that dude on the street that no one would look at twice to suddenly getting harassed a lot in public for photos."
Sixty isn't generally one to plaster his issues across the public space. Even having his photo taken in public has been something the rapper has had to come to terms with.
"This was in my time when I was not a very healthy person. I was a little bit anxious. [But] I still struggle with that shit. When everything first happened we had a gig in Perth. I went to a General Pants store before the gig but I didn't realise that it was just when school had finished. Someone came up for a photo and I was like ‘Yeah, no worries’. Next thing I look back and the whole shop is packed, full of kids waiting, just waiting. I had to go out the back door 'cause I couldn't really deal with it."
Sure, public relations can be tough, but at this point I wasn't convinced that Sixty actually had that much to deal with. I asked him what else was going on. I was not expecting to hear he was going blind.
"I've got a disease in my eyes. I had a transplant in my right eye, and I can't see really out of that at all. And now my left eye has just started going. So it's just a matter of time and then I'm gonna have to have another transplant and then I'll have fuck-all vision. I don't think it'll be 100 percent blind, it'll just be about 80 percent. I'll just see colours, it'll look like I'm underwater. That's what it looks like if I use my right eye. It's all good though, man! It could be a lot worse.
“I'm in a very good place now. There's no drug abuse which there was for the last four years. That shit's like a rollercoaster 'cause it's so much fun. It'd be a lie to say that it's not fun to do it but it slowly creeps up on you and becomes something that swallows you and becomes part of your life. You battle with it so many times. It's a fucking nightmare to really go through it. But I feel like a changed person. I've gotten off everything apart from marijuana because I don't think that's that bad."
Perhaps brighter days are ahead, even if Sixty has had to accept the prospect of living them in darkness. He's been keeping himself busy, excited by the prospect of a follow-up to 'Falling And Flying'. His next album will be even bigger, he tells me, even after I remind him he's talking about an LP that went platinum four times over. And then there's the elephant in the room, an elephant by the name of Pez.
“We've always planned to [do an album] together. So the plan is for his album to drop at the end of this year, my album to drop early next year and then for us to work on a Forthwrite album for next year as well. It's definitely gonna happen. One hundred percent. It's just depending on when it comes out, it depends on how long it takes to work.
"Me and Pez are very different in the way we work. It's actually really good. Pez tends to put a bit of time into his shit. Sometimes he puts a bit too much into it. He's such a perfectionist, that's just what he does. I'm the opposite of that; once one thing's done, if it sounds good I just leave it, I don't go back to it. But then when we're together we bring the best out of each other. I get him to just chill out and he gets me to become more of a perfectionist.”
Written by James Pearson
We are porting the best of our previous site, scenemagazine, to scenestr. This story first appeared on scenemagazine.com.au in September 2013.
