Hilltop Hoods remember Melanie, the late folk singer sampled on 'The Nosebleed Section'

Hilltop Hoods (L-R): DJ Debris, MC Suffa, MC Pressure (Supplied: Ashlee Jones)

They’re established as Australian hip hop icons now, but the song that first truly changed Hilltop Hoods’ fortunes was ‘The Nosebleed Section’.

An anthem now all but cemented in the Great Australian Songbook, the breakout 2003 track famously samples ‘People in the Front Row’, a 1972 track by Melanie Safka.

An American folk singer who first became a star at Woodstock festival, Safka passed away in late January at age 76.

“I was really sad to hear she passed away, a lovely person and a very huge talent,” Hoods MC Matthew ‘Suffa’ Lambert tells Double J’s Tim Shiel.

Suffa says he got the chance to meet Safka “about 10 years ago” on a previous Australian tour.

“She played Adelaide Festival Centre,” he recalls. “She actually invited me to come down, which was lovely.

“She played the song, I’m not sure if she always played the song [in her setlist]. In Australia she’d be more inclined to play it.

“She played it and I got a shout-out, she called me cheeky for sampling it without clearing it,” the rapper chuckles.

“But we didn’t clear it because we didn’t know it was going to be a thing.

“Then we tried to clear it and it turned out her publishing had been sold several times and there were fights over who owned it. Then we finally got it cleared maybe a decade later.”

Despite the legal wrangling around what would become the Hoods’ signature tune, there was no bad blood with the song’s crucial source.

“I met her backstage and she was lovely. She’s got this huge musical history behind her,” Suffa adds.

“Meeting her was really special to me, being that – whether she liked it or not – we made her part of our history.”

“She was a kid that the Woodstock promoters had to ask her mum if she was allowed to take a helicopter in to play [the festival].

“She’s credited with being the person that inspired people to start putting their lighters in the air at music festivals.”

Melanie’s hit ‘Lay Down (Candles In The Rain)’ was inspired by the sight that greeted her looking out at the 1969 Woodstock crowd, lighting candles while it began to rain during her performance.

Suffa originally discovered the flute-driven hook of ‘People in the Front Row’ after picking up a second-hand copy of Melanie’s album Garden In The City on a weekend out of town with his partner.

“It was a thrift shop in Hahndorf, and what attracted me to it was it was 50 cents and I’d never heard of it before,” he remembers.

It turned out after the fact that he might have heard it “through osmosis” – his parents had owned Melanie records. In any case, the rapper nearly left his newly purchased LP behind.

“I was having lunch and the guy from the store chased me down with a pile of records that I bought at this thrift shop and said ‘you forgot this’. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have happened.”

In a further sliding doors moment of serendipity, Suffa wanted to leave ‘The Nosebleed Section’ off Hilltop Hoods’ 2003 album The Calling.

It took band mates MC Pressure and DJ Debris to convince him they had something special.

“I was thinking it didn’t fit in with the other songs,” Suffa told triple j back in 2012.

“We try to make really cohesive records where every track feels like it comes from the same place and maybe that one stuck out a bit, but it stuck out in a good way.”

Following the song’s success, Suffa made a vow.

“Whenever I see a copy of Melanie’s Garden In The City, I just have to buy it. I’ve got a few now.”

His most treasured pressing? An autographed, scratch and sniff edition. “You scratch it and you can smell the garden in the city.”

‘The Nosebleed Section’ helped its parent album, The Calling, become the first platinum-certified Australian hip hop album and crashed in at #9 in triple j’s Hottest 100 of 2003. A coup for an independently signed trio from the Adelaide Hills.

“We did not expect the response we had to that song,” Suffa remarks.

“At the time, it wasn’t like if you come into hip hop music now, where it’s the possibility of a career in Australia. So, having that moment and having to quit our job in order to tour, and getting in the top ten of the countdown that year was very surprising. Still is.”

The song’s success allowed Suffa and Pressure to quit their concreting day job.

“I’d like to say we came in and threw everything on the ground and told [our foreman] where to go, but we got along pretty well. They were pretty happy for us.

“They actually let us come back and shoot in the factory for ‘The Hard Road’ video where we talked about working in the factory.”

Suffa remembers that turning point well, “because it felt like a bit of a gamble.” The Hoods had been touring up to that point “but we kept taking time off to the point of frustration for those guys.”

They quit under the expectation that they’d return to their day jobs, rather than becoming the nation’s most popular hip hop group.

“…to spend my life doing [music], which I’m really lucky to do because I’d probably be back in that same factory.”

The Hoods have been a fixture of triple j’s annual countdown ever since that 2003 debut.

Last year, they made Hottest 100 history by taking the lead with the most song entries ever and extended the lead last month when ‘Laced Up’ came in at #37, bumping up their tally to 24 songs across 20 years.

That gives Hilltop Hoods a comfortable lead ahead of previous record holders Powderfinger and Foo Fighters (tied at 22 entries each).

However, the likes of Tame Impala, Kanye West, and recent Hottest 100 record-breaker G Flip are all nipping at their heels (tied at 19 entries each).

Although, the Hoods plan on defending their title.

“We’re finishing a new album that will be out this year,” Suffa reveals of the follow-up to 2019’s The Great Expanse.

It’ll certainly be a step-up from producing The Calling on his mum’s computer, “which had one speaker. That’s why a lot of that album was in mono.”

And you can bet he’s no longer doing up tour flyers, CD layouts or HTML coding for the band’s website himself, as he did in the old days.

“My mum’s computer got a work-out in those days.”

Check out plenty of hip hop interviews from the archives over on the ABC listen app.