Talking Truth, Music, Growth and Change with Big Sima
The man himself, Big Sima (Lucas Fahey)!
TRIGGER WARNING: While this interview is generally keeping it real, some topics may be hard to read for some. There is mention of addiction very briefly in this write-up. If this is something you are not ready to read, Iunderstand that your best idea would be to click out of this interview and come back for the next one.
During lockdown, I had the opportunity to have a Zoom chat with the absolute legend that is Big Sima (AKA Lucas Fahey) who has being quickly revolutionizing the New Zealand hip-hop/rap scene with his no bs songs and lessons that he continues to share with us all. Big Sima keeps it real and tells it how it is, constantly keeping his Instagram followers up-to-date with issues and also posts some sweet videos of his almost three year old daughter (who is super smart, might I add!) too.
We had a chat all things music and his friendship with long time close friend and mentor, Tiki Taane, the Go Live (Christchurch music festival recently held at the Town Hall) and then had a casual catch up from there. Don’t forget to check out Big Sima on Spotify and on Instagram, all links will be at the bottom of the interview.
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Big Sima: Here we are, meeting face-to-face on the internet!
I know, isn’t Zoom great?!
Big Sima: I saw you at Go Live! That was a good night eh, a wicked night.
Yeah! You smashed it! I didn’t see your full set, but I did see you with Dolph [Dolphin Friendly] and it was - oh my god - so good.
Big Sima: Yeah, the Dolph set was on, eh. I think anytime that you’ve got to play the first set of the night, and you know, your job is to basically fill the room if you can and at a festival like that, it’s quite an interesting dynamic because you actually are going up against 3 other artists in different areas of the same building, so it’s kind of like a sound-off, in a way. You know? Being a rapper, I don’t know, that’s why I came out with an acapella so that my voice would travel through the whole building. I thought I’d start with the acapella nice and strong and then at least maybe that will bring people in. I was pretty happy with it. It was cool.
Yeah, it was awesome and you did get a fair few people in there, eh!
Big Sima: Yeah, it was real weird, a song I’d released two years ago charted for two weeks on RDU [radio station] and like, I’d only just given them the those songs. Obviously people had gone on to their site and voted for it after seeing me at Go Live. It must have been that, that’s the only way I can really explain it. It must’ve had an impact on some people I suppose, so that’s good!
I think you do have an impact on a lot of people. It’s not just your music, but it’s the words that you put on Instagram, as well. Bloody inspiring, eh. Some of the stuff you say I’m like “wow, holy sh*t!” Pretty amazing.
Big Sima: Oh thanks! I guess it comes from a place of love and I think for me, I just nowadays, being a parent and that, I generally find a different way of looking at the world and you feel more passionate about things that you maybe didn’t feel passionate about maybe five or six years ago. I feel like with the way the world is turning that we need to be more aggressive with how we approach things and I also have a responsibility for the Polynesian and Maori community - if people are listening to me, that gives me a responsibility to make sure the sh*t that I’m saying is meaningful and that I can leave someone with something and they can take something away, then I’ve done my job really.
Honestly, inspiration all around!
The New Zealand music scene has so much to offer, so much more than it did when I was a teen.
Big Sima: Yeah, 100%. I couldn’t agree more. I was playing a gig the other week and I said “if you look at the line-up, we have so many diverse artists” and you know, that’s a tribute to where the music scene is at the moment. You can actually put an artist from every genre or like, six different genres on a line-up and people will still enjoy it because fans these days are more conscious and more switched on and they know what good music is. They are happy to go out and pay for gigs. The walls have been officially locked out between us [musicians] and the listeners now because of the digital platform. Spotify has broken down the access barrier. In the past, the access barrier was the financial one, that is in the middle, so people were buying CDs back in the day, that was parting with $32 for an album. $30! That’s two times a Spotify subscription a month! When it first came out, people were spoilt for choice. Now, it’s been normalised and people go after what they like. You can go on Spotify’s artist app, you can go into your account and you can see who exactly who has playlisted you. It’s breaking down those access barriers. Christchurch has gotten back on its feet as well. That gig at the Christchurch Town Hall was amazing, all those artists were amazing.
Big Sima: I could sit here and talk about all the things I love about Dolphin Friendly especially.
Ah, me too! I’ve seen them live 20 times now and that is since June last year.
Big Sima: Yeah, I love those boys eh. I met them at Wunderbar last year at The Hootz gig, pre-lockdown. We ended up getting on a bender and I met them properly and we just hit it off. That night, they played me Lifetime, a really rough mix of it. They were going to get Wax Mustang on the song and Wax is mean, but I was like “never mind Wax Mustang, send it to me!” we were all pretty drunk, so they sent it and I went to the studio with two verses but we ended up choosing one. We ended up recording a demo of it, it didn’t really work out well, but then we recorded it with Connor from Mako [Road] and then the rest is history. We then started doing them live, the first time was Lifetime [tour]. That’s how that song ended up!
I didn’t know that’s how you guys met, that’s so awesome!
Big Sima: Yeah, looking forward to playing more shows with them. I’m playing a headline show on the 6th November at Hide, so Mander from Dolph is going to come out and do a rap gig with me.
Big Sima performing with Dolphin Friendly at the Go Live Festival in the Christchurch Town Hall, July 2021.
You wrote Neverland with Summer Thieves, correct?
Big Sima: Yeah, I’ve known the Thieves boys for about 7 years now, so I met the first when I was living in Dunedin and funny story: I used to work at Lone Star down there. I used to live up this real steep street down there called York Street. I used to live right at the top of that and somedays, on Sunday, when I was hungover from the night before, I couldn’t be f*cked walking all the way up the top of York Street. So, one time I got a taxi and this taxi turns up and there’s this shaggy haired guy that is in the front seat and he is like “where are you going to bro?” “York Street” “You don’t rap do you?” “Yeah. How do you know that?” “You’re Big Sima!” “Yeah, how do you know that?” and he goes “I’m Jakey bro, from Summer Thieves!” Jakey’s old man used to drive taxis and every now and then, Jakey would do a shift just to make some money! That’s how we first met. Those boys are like my family. We are on the same level, same vibe, same planet. The vibe of Dolph and the vibe of Summer Thieves are two totally different energies that’s why I appreciate it so much. They’re nothing like each other. We do equally as good work with each other. They are equally as good as each other, even though they’re different.
I think it’s cool you can know people on different wave lengths and they can still be so good. Yeah.
Big Sima: My whole thing is that - I’ve watched the rap scene quite a bit, but I never wanted to follow the same recipe as everyone else. Everyone is sort of copying with each other. I want to do something different. Collaborating with Summer Thieves and Dolph, you know. The first single from my new album has Tiki [Taane] on it, so just things like that. That’s me stepping outside of the norm. It’s not me conforming to the way we are supposed to do it.
It’s good to branch out of your comfort zone, as a musician you do sometimes get caught up on what you’re meant to do, so good on you, that’s awesome.
Big Sima: New Zealand hip-hop is kind of like crabs in a bucket. There’s lots of crabs in a bucket and one tries to get out and all the crabs try to drag the crab back down. That’s what it can be like sometimes. That’s the whole New Zealand culture - it’s built on the whole tall poppy thing. It’s sh*t. I think we’re starting to get better now though. I think the young millennials are going to be better and a lot more conscious, I think they deserve more credit than people give them, especially with their social awareness.
I agree. I think it’s going to get even better.
Big Sima: As a whole, our industry is pretty important. We have things like MusicHelps, stuff like that. Everything is like an email away, you just need to know who to ask. I do see a lot of young artists who are coming through at the moment who are complaining like “how come we aren’t getting this or that?” and I totally know what it’s like to have that sort of small bit of entitlement, if you will. Your hard work can go unnoticed for ten years, you know. That’s what it was like for me. I didn’t get any rewards for my work for ten years and then I gave up for three and came back and then started working with Tiki, then shed myself of all the expectations and started doing it for the love, you know? Slowly, but surely, things start happening! That’s just a testament to the way the universe works sometimes. You have to go through it and go through it forever until it feels like you’ve got nothing left and then boom, it just starts happening.
Big Sima is back on the music scene and is playing his one and only headline gig for the year at Hide Club in Christchurch on the 6th November! Check out the details here.
I was going to ask you about your hiatus from music!
Big Sima: I did some little sh*t while I took that time off but nothing like releasing anything or doing any shows. I was going through a stage of trying to get clean and I was on a voyage of self discovery - not so much trying to discover who I was, but who I wasn’t. You know? I think those two things are just as important as each other. I think sometimes people show the areas around who they are, not who they aren’t. They just focus on who they are and then they end up not being true to themselves. I had to figure that out for myself, being a recovering addict, as well is a big thing for me. I see a lot of artists out there who struggle with that at the moment and I always say “when I was your age bro, I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, you know?" I wish I could say I did. I know that I became a father late in life in order to teach me something I needed to know at that point in time so I could have this massive growth. It wasn’t like a light bulb switching on in my head, it was more like a steady, slow discovery and then it was when I read this article about ego death and I was like “f*ck! Ego death” that’s what it is, eh. That’s what you have to do. If you really want to enjoy what you do and do what you love and pursue your passion in life, you have to kill your ego and bury your pride and then just realise that nobody’s bigger than they are. No one is bigger than their music. The industry is interesting because it’s the business side of it, but the art is ultimately what it all comes down to. Too many people do it for the business side of it. You don’t want to get to 50 years old and say that you could have said something real that was in your heart.
Big Sima: This new album that we’re just wrapping up, a lot of the themes are political, based around addiction, childhood trauma, it’s not an exciting, vibrant album… I wanted to talk about all this sh*t, but with cool production and good quality beats and that, make everything to listen to at the same time, with some real sh*t underneath it. Your music is how you live forever. I just want my daughter to get to her 20s and look back and be proud of the sh*t I’ve done. That’s the only expectation that I have. That’s an obsession with the process.
Playing at Mono Nights, a University of Canterbury event. So much fun.
You’ve started For the Culture recently, was it recent?
Big Sima: Nah, actually For the Culture has been around for a long time, it hasn’t been active. We used it to promote sort of like, the promotion side of my shows. The last two headline shows that I’ve done, at the top, says “For the Culture presents…” It’s been really exciting, this endeavor that I’ve been brainstorming and sort of putting together for the last couple of years that I’ve had a few others’ input on it with what it is going to look like and what shape it needs to take. Now that we’ve got the framework for it, yeah it’s all go. 2022 - For the Culture is going to be responsible for bringing back freestyle rap battles, breakdancing battles, DJ battles in the ITF format and also we are going to be doing two mini festivals - South Island and North Island For the Culture fest. It’s going to be two hip-hop festivals with local artists. One in Auckland, the other in Christchurch. Six or seven hours long. The reason why we’re doing all of this, there’s a gap. This is what used to happen when I was in my 20s. It just gave the scene so much life.
What have you been doing in lockdown - what’s your favourite thing to do in lockdown?
Big Sima: I’ve been reading about my Whakapapa (ancestry), we’ve just sort of been introduced to that this year, where we come from in the North Island - up in Russell. We have this big document that was sent to us by a relative who works at AUT. He compiled all of our families history. I’ve been going through that whole document and reading diary entries from my earliest ancestors. We’ve been walking to dog… I’ve watched a few civil rights movement documentaries, watched a few New Zealand produced documentaries like children in the revolution and stuff. During this time, I just like to become a sponge. You know? I just like to soak up all the information. That and been experimenting with reels on Instagram. I’m quite an analytic person - not in the way that I’m obsessed with numbers, but how the analytics side of social media works. It fascinates me. Wrote a couple of features for a couple of people that I need to go record. Tiki has sent through a couple of mixes from when we did a show with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, so we have live mixes from that, I’ve been listening to those.
Tiki is quite an inspirational person, what’s the most important lesson that he has taught you?
Big Sima: Should I get the journal out?! That guy is like, where do I start?! His partner, Rachel, is my best friend. His fiancée, I should say, so that’s how Tiki and I met each other. He came to Dunedin to produce Summer Thieves’ first album and so, at Albany Street Studios in Dunedin is where I met him and shook his hand for the first time. That night, we hung out, got drunk and from then, we’ve just been so close. Since then, those two have been like my family. We’ve been friends since they’ve been together (since about 2013). I’d say the three years that I took off, Tiki and I became real close, like best mates and I wasn’t even making music and it wasn’t until my birthday in 2018, he’d just built a studio in his house in Papamoa and he came to my birthday in Christchurch and was like “hey bro, I didn’t get you anything for your birthday, but if you ever feel like making music again, come up to Pap and I’ll produce your music for free” I was like “oh f*ck” I hadn’t written anything for three years, you know? I was like, well, this was literally the opportunity I’d been waiting for my whole life, you know? So, I went to my little sleepout and built a little studio and started to write the Underground King EP and I went up there twice and we did two recording sessions and he produced the whole EP. He has produced all my sh*t and he’s produced his whole new album as well. I’ve tried to work with other producers, but you don’t know how good he is until you get to create with him. I reckon he’s the best producer in the whole country. He’s got platinum records in his garage from songs that you’re just like “what did you do for that?!” and he’s had so much input in so many different areas with so many different artists. It’s amazing. To answer your question, you asked me what I learnt from him… I learnt how to be a calm parent from him. I learnt how to approach situations where you would generally get p*ssed off and fly off the handle and to be calm instead. That’s one thing I learnt from him, 100%. I also learnt how to look at things differently, especially conflictual stuff. I’ve had a couple of instances where I’ve been outraged and he’s been like “hey bro” he’s always been a voice of reason for me. He is the kindest, most empathetic person that you could ever meet and he is amazing. Out of the many things I’ve learnt from him, and there are many, the one thing I’ve learnt from him is how to take it easy with your parenting style and you don’t have to have a loud voice to get your point across. He also taught me how to lead with love as well, that was a big change in my personality - I stopped competing and started collaborating. I’m super lucky to have him as a producer and he already knows that.
That’s so cool, thank you for sharing your story!
Big Sima: I love to spin a good yarn. Thank you for taking the time out to have a chat with me.
No, thank you! I appreciate it so much!
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*ALL photos provided by Big Sima.
A HUGE thank you for taking the time out to have some great yarns with me and telling some home truths. I think we can all agree that being able to chat about anything to a creative person is one of the greatest things and what I find about Big Sima is that he is inspiring and is not afraid to speak up for what is right.
You can follow Big Sima at all the good links below -
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I have limited slots available for New Zealand musician interviews over the next couple of weeks, please DM me on Instagram here or send me an email here if you are interested.