Combat Wombat
| Combat Wombat | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Genres | Hip hop |
| Years active | 2000–present |
| Labels | Elefant Traks |
| Associated acts |
Metabass'n'Breath Heavyweight Dub Champion Phat Logic |
| Website | Official webpage |
| Members | Marc Peckham (aka Monkey Marc) Tom Jones (aka DJ Wasabi) Marlon Ray G. Porter (aka Elf Tranzporter) Izzy Brown (aka MC Izzy) |
Combat Wombat are an Australian hip-hop group from Melbourne. The group comprises Monkey Marc, DJ Wasabi, Elf Tranzporter and MC Izzy.
The band's name came about because they used to drive around in a camouflage painted van that looked like a giant wombat.
...one day whilst we were touring around the desert with our solar powered sound system (Labrats) my mate Rufus said why don't you call your band Combat Wombat... so we did.
Monkey Marc met Izzy in Darwin in 1998 where they started up a solar powered party political sound system.
She had this whole solar-powered sound system that she had hooked-up to this old quad-bike, a four-wheeled pedal bicycle. It was basically pedal and solar-powered. I arrived with my decks and my mixer, a sampler and an 808 drum machine, and that was kind of the start of Lab Rats and Combat Wombat
Elf joined the band in 2000 after they all met whilst living together in a squat in the heart of Sydney.
The squat lasted two-and-a-half years. It was the venue of many benefit parties for the forests, land rights and Lake Cowal. It had alternative movie nights, dumpster picnics and many thriving underground and grass-roots gatherings
We had this warehouse out the back that became known as the Pigeon Poo Palace, and that's where we started jamming with Elf Tranzporter. We were doing heaps of free parties and Reclaim The Streets parties at the time. So he'd just rock up and start doing some rhymes, and we just started up this friendship
DJ Wasabi joined the band in 2002. Their first real performance as Combat Wombat was on a Channel Seven music program
Of course, it was heavily censored. The song was about four-and-a-half minutes long, but by the time Channel Seven got hold of it and cut up the footage of us performing live, they chopped it down to about a minute-and-a-half. They'd taken everything out of it, you know, there were lines about Nike exploitation of workers, Shell drilling hell and none of that was in there. But they left in the stuff about cops selling smack and stuff). It seemed fairly obvious who the program sponsors were.
This led to the release of the band's debut album, Labrats Solar Powered Sound System, and their subsequent signing to Elefant Traks. The band released its second album, Unsound $ystem, in March, 2005. Within a week of its release, Unsound $ystem was receiving airplay on Triple J, with the single, "Qwest" reaching #2 on the Net 50.Unsound $ystem features a number of guests artists such as The Herd's Ozi Batla and TZU's Seed MC, but the most confronting cameos are from MCG and SMS: two Afghan refugees who had escaped from Woomera detention centre.
...
Wikipedia