“I always try to be as humble and down-to-Earth as possible. I don’t like to put myself up on a pedestal and I feel when people do, it’s a little bit uncomfortable for me; I shy away from that a little bit,” he explains. “Obviously, I appreciate and want to broaden my listenership as much as possible but I want to take all the wank away from that.”
His fourth studio album, The Life of Riley, hit number one in the ARIA charts, taking out Best Urban Album for 2011. It was also the debut release on his own imprint, The Ayems, and solidified his position on the national stage, showing he could back up the success garnered with 2008’s Brothers Grimm LP, from which the smash hit Jimmy Recard was born.
Since then, the now 31-year-old Ridge has undergone a period of personal reflection, witnessed in The Life of Riley track R.I.P J.R, in which his Jimmy Recard alter ego of the previous LP was revisited. These days, he manages himself, has set up his own label, and has led a life of sobriety for the last two years.
“It’s been a journey; it’s been my biggest period of growth, personally, during the last three or four years,” he acknowledges. “There were a lot of things that I had to learn, on a personal level. I was just so dependent on alcohol for my career, and for about four or five years that would just knock the edge off before I played a big festival or my own show. I got to a point where I’d partied hard – as hard as anyone – using booze and other substances, and I’d just reached a point in my life where I realised my body just couldn’t deal with it anymore. It was time to grow up a little bit and put my life in perspective.”
Ridge still resides in his hometown of Perth, choosing to stay in the two-bedroom place he’s lived in for some years – although he’s now turned one room into The Ayems Studio headquarters. Surprisingly, he has plans to open an holistic café called Solomon on Mount Lawley’s café strip, which he says will open in April after the tour.
“It was an idea I came up with in Bali,” he explains. “I suffer from food intolerances and just thought it would be a great idea to open up a place in Perth that catered for people with the same problems as me.” Ridge will be as hands-on as possible in the venture, which will cater for vegetarian and vegan diets.
Ridge has just recently released two tracks, Tasty and 1990s, with close hometown friends N’fa Jones and Ta-ku – his first offerings since the hype from The Life of Riley finally died down. Some might call that a long time between drinks.
“The industry is just so fickle at the moment in regards to social media and the internet in general,” says Ridge. “You have to watch how long you are away for, and a year is a long time. That’s why I’m sort of playing with these couple of new songs – just testing the waters. I’m going back to taking all the pressure off having to produce a whole album.
“You’ve got these young artists and even older ones spending a whole year or even two on an album, and putting their blood, sweat and tears into the project – and then, when they release it, it gets some love for a week and then a week later, it’s all over. That’s absolutely soul-crushing, and not something that I want to be a part of. So I went with the approach of not writing for anyone but myself and releasing songs when I felt the need.”
Of Tasty, Ridge says he was trying to separate himself from what he sees as being a currently all-too comfortable hip hop scene. “I feel that everyone is writing to the same fucking formula within our genre, and it’s turning into some cross-genre where no-one has the intention to do anything different and push themselves as artists, because they’re comfortable within this one particular formula that’s getting radio play.”
1990s, which rides a soul vibe helped along by producer Ta-ku, originally sounded very different to the final product. “Ta-ku had this beat that had been sitting there for a while and it was actually the Back To The Future theme track, and he made this crazy beat from it,” says Ridge. “That was the original beat that we wrote. We recorded it and were set to release it and then Seth [Sentry] came out with his record and he had a hoverboard on it! It was such an incredible track that I couldn’t have people take anything away from the song, so I had to start from scratch again and marry it up to another beat and rework it.”
BY JO CAMPBELL
