Matt Annett

Music Scribe

A man with a burning ambition to one day be paid for a piece of writing (anything will do: money, beer, spinach and feta gozlemes from ALDI).

My favourite music moment

Beyond The Valley, 2019 – a raucous New Years festival that takes place a few minutes from my home. I’d forgone it for a few years already, trying to avoid the ticket cost and amount of effort it’d take to get a group of 18-20 year olds together with all the camping gear and alcohol-stashing techniques that the festival called for, but this one was different. Tyler, The Creator was here.

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I had a chance to see the man who opened the gates to my love affair with rap music when I was about 13. My friends and I would sit around on those weird sleepovers you have when you’re that age where you’re too young to drink, but old enough to want to stay up all night – we’d fill this time by sitting around and learning all the words to Yonkers.

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So here we are, that same group (many years later), on the night of Tyler’s performance, and we gain entry to the festival through a convenient hole in the fence like the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing-ninjas that we were. We get to the main stage, Tyler’s there (!!!) and he starts his set. We’re loving it, of course, but he’s in Igor-mode, and so the chances of him playing our jam, Yonkers (an 8-year-old song, at this point) seemed thin.

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Despite this, of course, we had to politely request our song, and so we did, much to the humor of our surrounding crowd-mates. And then, when that rattling beat actually started, I think I blacked out. I still get chills thinking about it.

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I saw Tyler perform Yonkers. Right there in front of me.

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COOL.

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