Sydney hip hop artist, actor and ocean lover Maddi St Bedlam is creating waves in the scene with her unmistakable steeze. Leaving her creative directions to flow with the tide of her experience, the name St Bedlam nods to the duality of creation. Up in the clouds one minute and in the gritty gutters of an asylum the next, this contrasting title leaves space for Maddi to explore all sides of herself in music. Since releasing her debut single MASQUERADE (production by Caine Pyrex) in early 2019, St Bedlam has crafted herself as a budding favourite of the community. Spending the next year and a half dropping track after track, St Bedlam did not come to play. 

2021 has already been a huge year for Maddi, donning the blue white and red jersey of Glenview Collective, the crew unleashed at Nymphae Takeover 1 in March. GVC are set to show up again in Sydney at a mystery warehouse show on May 8 dubbed The Cook Up, see: Nymphae x Hypnotics for more on that. St Bedlam’s latest single WAZOWSKI (production by HappyCamper) was served to the world 72 hours after Hypnotics sat for chats with Maddi which made for celebration. The song is an anthem to self identifying freaks and folks who do not fit the bill. 

Providing a breath of fresh air from the standard mould, a queer female perspective infiltrating a space so often uh… not? is a brilliant sight to see. While not burdening herself with the pressures of much, Maddi’s existence in this space as a queer, female daughter of immigrants means her art is a protest in itself. Hypnotics dives more into that in these chats with Maddi, also touching on family, mental health advocacy, the Australian hip hop scene and so much more. There is also an extended version of these chats with St Bedlam available via our Hypnotics Family patreon which may or may not include some more laughs, rants and an impromptu home bootleg version of NPR tiny desk, WAZOWSKI edition. Huge love to Maddi for welcoming us into her home and sharing beers and wisdom with us!

Hi!

hey

I’m curious about the whole drama and commercials and acting and everything. Where did you start? Did you do drama at school?

I did and I think that’s where it started for me, like my primary school did pretty cool musicals and I dunno I was just always just a bit of a show off. Like I was always the weird kid at school that got bullied and then like, I’d get on stage and it wasn’t just drama too, it was like public speaking and stuff. I’d get on stage and be like “I don’t give a fuck what anything of you think.” It was so freeing for me. So I was really good at drama and I actually went to uni straight after high school and was doing a degree in theatre but life too a bit of a turn there so no more uni… but did keep the drama aspect of my life. I will never stop being a performer and now the road has taken me into hip hop. That’s where I’m getting it out yeah.

Do you feel like the skills that you learned from your time at uni and your time at school doing drama enhances your performance?

I don’t think there’s anything in life that wouldn’t enhance your performance. If you’re a tapped in enough person then you can realise everything is interconnected but definitely performing arts is all interconnected. Like sometimes I'll be up on stage and I’ll be losing my breath during a song and I’m like you need to ground yourself, like remember what - Shout out Silsey - Ms Sils said, like feel the energy from your feet and then all of a sudden your breathing comes into alignment and like stuff like that. There was another thing, like I was talking to one of my young homies today, Haunted, who I have a collab with and he was like ‘I’m practising for the gig tomorrow in the mirror,’ and I was like ‘don’t practise in the mirror bro, that’s like the key way to put yourself in your head.’ You want to be out of your head when you’re performing. You don’t want to be looking at yourself in the eyes going ‘oh this is what I look like when I say that line’. Like no no no, and that’s an acting thing I learnt. Never rehearse in the mirror.  Don’t fucking do that.

Yeah well I guess your eyes you're using to look out at everything you’re not using them to look back in at yourself. There’s reason you can’t see your own face.

Exactly. And mostly rappers are so insecure and introspective and already wondering what the fuck they look like. Get out of that. Get out of it homie.

Do you consider yourself a writer? Do you write a lot? Or does it just come out in a performance? Do you feel like you resonate with a particular part of rapping?

I think I’m a writer but I’m also a musician and I think that that is a line that most people don’t want to cross. Like being a rapper, or being a musician. A lot of rappers, especially in Australian hip hop with this attitude like, ‘I don’t do music, I do Grime, I do Drill,’ it’s about an attitude or it's about a facade for them but like your music could take it so much further. Me saying that, with not a lot of followers, like I have a vision that the music aspect can be integrated with the writing aspect. Does that make sense?

It makes me think of just what you represent in the Australian hip hop scene and you’ve got a really interested Australian cadence and you represent the female rappers in this really Australian way. I don’t know if that’s even appropriate to say, ‘you represent that’.

Yeah totally. Thank you. Well I think one thing is and like, because I’ve been in church choirs and stuff, like one think is is that I’ve always, and like, obviously this comes later with like the whole being gay part of it, but even as a kid I always had a deeper voice than other girls that were around me and it’d be like, if there are 16 kids in the choir, all the girls would be in the soprano section and then I’d be singing the boys part. Which I was super insecure about but I also get complements that my voice sits in a very nice spot being like deep and rich like that so, and don’t get me wrong, after high school, the pack a day ciggie habit definitely didn’t help that.

Classic. Enhance the grime of the voice. The roughness. 

The grime, the whatever you call it. Yeah I sit pretty low but yeah I guess as for representing… what was the question?

The original question was to do with what you represent. Basically I was thinking about other young Australian female rappers, particularly gay rappers and what they’re looking at you and what they’re seeing and you represent a very small, essentially a minority. Not to say that there’s no female gay rappers out there, there absolutely is, but there’s not many.

It’s a minority in the scheme of it. Yeah, I’ve kind of not tried to put that weight on my shoulders. I just do what I do and if people fuck with it they fuck with it and if people want to give me attitude for it they can give me attitude for it but it’s like nothing I haven’t heard on a train at like 10 o’clock at night. Call me a dyke. Call me this and that. Like come up with something original. That’s what I am waiting for, something exciting, but also… I was actually thinking, like having a little rumination about this today, about what message I’m sending and I feel like quite often my rhymes and stuff can be quite abstract or I find myself saying that same kind of shit that a lot of guys would say in their raps and I’m like, this is not me trying to be a bloke or trying to prove myself as a guy in this scene. I’m saying it to piss off a lot of people. I say all these things about girls not to piss off girls, like you know ‘I fucked her blah blah whatever’, I don’t say it to piss off girls, I say it to piss off guys who don’t want to hear the little dyke like me is getting that. You know what I mean?

Yes, I like that. Very empowered.

Exactly so I feel like, and this is what I want my audience to understand is that, its not that im not writing deep songs, It’s that the shit that I’ve been writing in and of itself is a fucking protest. The shit I’ve been writing is so riddled in… there might be a line I write and then I’ll question it and I’ll go, ‘is that PC? like honestly is that PC?’. But I’ll feel ok with pushing some boundaries because it’s got a whole different layer to it with me being a female lesbian. Like you know? Because it’s like, this might not even directly be my attitude but it’s me saying something that’s going to piss off the world and I fucking hope you know that we’re here to say it. I am writing a song at the moment that is about female empowerment, like that is the topic of the song, but I want everyone to understand in the fucking layers of all my abstract cryptic words, it’s like im sticking it to the man. Alright. There’s meaning.

It’s like a reclamation.

100%. Yes, exactly and that’s like, a lot of people will say the work ‘dyke’ in songs who are men.

Do you think they mean it as an insult when they say it?

No, and thats the thing I have to navigate as a rapper as well, it’s like rap is an art form that works with rhymes and structures and you can fit this scaffold together, this puzzle together, so there are often times where I’m like ‘I need to brush that off and not get offended’. As we discussed off camera, I’m a cancer and I get very emotional about some things. But also then there’s words that I will say where I’m like ‘mmmm, maybe that would hurt some people's feelings, oh well’.

Is the ‘oh well’ because the benefit is greater from saying that than the hurt it might cause?

Yes. Like I would never ever say the N word or any racist things, for me that’s out of the picture and hopefully one day hip hop gets to a level where words like  f* and dyke will get eliminated, and that’s even a thing, like I’m so part of the queer community in Sydney, but I would never put f* in a song and I say it as like a homie to my friends who will also call me a dyke in response, you know. But the only way I’d put it in a song is if the voice was saying to straight people ‘don’t say that word’, you know what I mean? I’d never use it as an insult in a song. So, I feel like the world’s kind of at a place where racial slurs are becoming totally unacceptable which is amazing. It’s time to cut out homophobic slurs as well. Because no matter how much people want to deny it gay people have fucking suffered.

Absolutely! Not to discount racism at all -

Or any other discrimination. Ableism as well, there have been songs released in the past few years that the R word has been used by Australian rappers and I feel like America is a bit more ‘woke’ to that, I hate the word woke though, fucking…

I get why you hate it but I also think it’s incredibly descriptive and communicates so much, particularly to this generation.

Yeah, I just prefer enlightened, I feel woke carries this social media weight to it.

I noticed whilst I was researching you, that you expressed that you want the freedom to explore both light and dark stuff. Can you tell us about how that links in with St Bedlam? Can you give us a little description?

Okay, so if anyone knows of Bedlam, the asylum that used to run in London back in olden times where mental health patients were… there are so many layers to my name. So like, mental health patients weren’t treated fucking awesomely at all back in the 19th century, it’s really bad. And the ‘Saint,’ I grew up really catholic, so catholic, like church every Sunday, church choir, alter serving at St Mary’s cathedral, Rosary before bed. I grew up in Sydney. St Scholastica’s College. I’m a Scol’s Mole. Represent. Point being, I grew up super Catholic. So yeah, that’s that good good part in me that everyone has and then there’s that dark part of me which I think everyone has as well and it’s just about navigating that. Then if you go into like modern day spirituality, not modern day spirituality, I guess more like occult stuff, working with your shadow self, how if you don’t work through your shadow that you can’t really reach the light and stuff like that. I guess that’s the thing, growing up so catholic, I was so fucking well behaved, I’d never put a toe out of line. And then you leave school and then all of a sudden you can go to clubs and you can make out with people and then drugs were starting to appear and then you’re under the influence and you do some stupid shit and its like well fuck I just spent 18 years of my life thinking that I would never do these things, judging people who would do these things and now here I am in that same position so I guess the dark was always in me I just never had the opportunity to explore it. Then you go so far into the darkness that you’re like ‘well I don’t actually like this, how do I come back?’ You know its like that classic thing of the angel and devil on your shoulder, how do I work this out, how do I find a balance? Because as well the stuff I was taught that was darkness was just like sex. Was just like dropping an F bomb in a song or in a conversation, that shit was condemnable. How do I find that middle ground? So, what’s in a name?

What’s in a name? A lot apparently. I guess it’s like a pendulum swing. You go from this extreme on this end and then the pendulum swings all the way to the other end, shorter each time till it meets the middle.

That’s like my whole life. I’m so black and white in that sense. Like I’m either all in or all out. This or that and that comes with having borderline personality disorder. I’ll speak openly about my mental illness. It’s one of the, I guess it’s kind of in the requirement, that’s not the word I’m looking for. It’s like the, what is the word for, it’s like a check list and if you have black and white or ideologies in life, it’s one of the things they’ll tick off for like having borderline. So, you know living at extremes. You’re either extremely happy or extremely sad or you’re extremely social or completely delved into hermitude. Borderline kind of gets confused with bipolar. I’m not a doctor. My understanding is that Bipolar will have the chemicals that either switch on or switch off and like put you into either that state or that state whereas borderline is not so much chemical more behavioural. So, it’s more learnt things from having a complex trauma in your life. That’s why often people get misdiagnosed with bipolar especially early in age and start putting them on, you know, the lithium tablets and stuff when really they don’t need it they need DBT therapy. If you think you have Borderline go to DBT therapy, seriously.

What’s DBT?

It’s Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. So Dialectical, there is it, it works with the highs and lows the extremes and I was very grateful I had the opportunity to do that and the thing is it doesn’t take away borderline but it helps you regulate it. And the woman who helped devise the theory, the psychologist who devised it, she actually has it herself. So if you do go and do it, you know that you are in the right hands because it has actually been made by someone who actually understands it. I like to liken it for people so that people can understand better is whenever I’m discussing mental health stuff, I often take it into a physical thing. So like, if you had a problem with your knee, like a mild problem with your knee, you’re not instantly going to jump to a knee replacement. You’re going to find the right strapping for it and you’re going to do the right exercises for it and your knee will probably be a little bit sore for the rest of your life but have you learnt to deal with it? Have you done the correct strengthening exercises? Yes, you have. Have you given it the right support it needs? Yes, you have. So it seems to click for people when you put it into a physical ailment because that’s been so much more accepted.

So you work at a sex shop?

I do… yeah we were somewhere but then I had to go to the toilet and the camera almost blew up… I work in a sex shop, yeah shit. Now I’ve lost all my inspo for that topic.

I’m very curious, when I was looking at your spotify, you have 2 songs that are named after ocean creatures. Is that a coincidence or is that an ocean creature habit thing or is it something different all together

So what, Squid Ink and Oyster. For starters anyone that knows me knows that I am obsessed with seafood. It’s just always on my mind. Like I’m just always, total wog mentality, I’m always thinking about food but the specific food I’m thinking about is from the ocean.

What’s your favourite ocean food?

Tht’s hard I debate with myself all the time. About what my favourite ocean food is.

‘Today it’s prawns… Today it’s oysters.’ Today what is it?

Probably crabs. Just like fucking… there’s something primitive about eating it too. Like when you sit there, you get the hammer out because you bought a 2kg mud crab and you gotta fucking crack that thing open. You know like, yeah, it is a thing. But yeah also, the ocean is a big thing about my family and my life so… So there’s the seafood element, the edible element, but there’s also the connection to water and… Oh fuck, the water is my happy place, hey.

Are you a beach fan?

Yeah. I love snorkeling. 

Do you have a favourite snorkeling place in Sydney?

We did a couple of spots this summer. Clovelly was awesome! The last time I went snorkeling was in Malta, because Covid happened and shit. So the last time I went was in Malta, it was actually off the island of Gozo. That was awesome snorkeling there, and then I hadn’t been, and yeah jumped in the water at Clovelly this summer and I was probably under the water for like five minutes and a grouper! A fucking blue grouper about this big swam into view. They’re just the most beautiful friendly fish, if you snorkel in the same spot for a while they’ll make friends with you. And they’ll come say hi to you and stuff. They’re so fucking cute. I was just so fucking excited. I’d look at it, and then I’d come out of the water and be like “it’s a fucking grouper, back down!”. It was so fucking wild. To have your head under water for all of five minutes and for that to happen, like people wait for that moment their whole life. 

You really are a water baby. Well you are, you’re a Cancer.

Yeah, I am! I’m a Cancer. My parents were born in Malta which is such a tiny island, I think to go from the west coast to the east coast is a forty-five minute drive. Tiny island. The best way to explain it is that you can fit sixty-two Maltas into Tasmania. Tiny island. My parents got here in the fifties. 

How old were they in the fifties?

When Dad got here he was 14 and when Mum got here she was 12. So they got ships and at the time there was a war in the Suez Canals, so on the east coast of Africa - no go zone. So they had to go around the west side of Africa to get to Australia. I think it was like three months or something. 

What a long trip! Was that your parents?

Yeah. We said this off camera, but my Dad’s baptism got interrupted by a fucking air raid. The Germans were bombing Malta at the time and my Nanna had to carry my Dad into a fucking bomb shelter mid baptism. So that’s pretty cool. 

That’s a direct blood relative, I mean your parents!

Super direct, my actual parentals, yeah. It’s a bit of a trip out. I feel like when everyone hears about World War 2 stuff is like ‘oh that’s so long ago’. You know, like people still feel it, it’s the Holocaust, of course people still feel it. I feel like generations even from us will still be feeling it. But that wasn’t my grandparents, that was my Mum and Dad. 

Do you ask them about their direct experience ever, is that something you guys talk about?

Well Dad passed four years ago, but he spoke a bit about it. Mum, for example she was one of twenty-two kids. Yeah I was waiting for that silent shock from both of you. Mum was the youngest of twenty-two, I think in that there was two sets of twins. And, to be fair, Mum being the youngest Mum was born in forty-forty, so most of them were born through the twenties and the thirties. So I think.. She delivered every baby alive but a lot of them did die because of gastro and stuff. Different time, and Malta as well. So yeah, Mum was the youngest of twenty-two and Dad was the youngest of nine, or eleven. I get those two numbers confused for some reason. 

Well, they’re both next to ten.

Yeah, exactly! You’re not wrong (laughs). I know Mum for example, all of the parents and the siblings all lived in the same bedroom. They came to Australia for a better life. And this is something I want to clear up, I don’t claim to be a houso, I don’t claim to have grown up in full on struggle. I know there are definitely people who have had it worse off than be, but my parents came here at twelve and fourteen, went straight into work, bought in Balmain in the sixties which at the time was super blue collar. A lot of people here not understanding that my parents bought in that age, a lot of people hear that I grew up around Balmain and be like ‘oh, so you’re rich’. I’m like ‘no, I wasn’t rich’. I actually grew up in the nineties from parents who bought in the sixties when housing was cheap in that area and I watched the suburb gentrify around me. I watched, all of a sudden, other working class families move out and richer families move in and felt extremely out of place. The stage in my parents life in which I was born has kind of put me in this grey area. Like, I don’t understand myself and I don’t know how to convey in my music either. There are times where I want to go deeper in my music but I’m also like ‘I don’t want to claim I came from the struggle because I grew up near Balmain’. But then also I need to get into this because yous need to understand the perspective of what it’s like to grow up in a family hearing your Dad say ‘I can’t afford your schooling anymore, I can’t afford this and that’ and like watching everyone be more effluent around you. You know what I mean? It’s a really different perspective, like it’s so unique, and that’s probably where I feel pressure to when I do put it in music I do it right. I’m so grateful for everything my Mum did. She saved money so much and made sure I got to go to a good school and what not. I had opportunities that other kids wouldn’t have like going to therapy and piano lessons and stuff like that. But then there’s also a lot of stuff I missed out on, like if you put a Playstation controller in my hand I don’t know how to use it because I never had those optional extras. I’ve had this argument, like well yes in some ways I’m privileged, compared to a lot of people I was privileged, but also compared to a lot of people I was not. It’s a funny thing to navigate. I don’t think I’d give a fuck about thinking about it and defining it that much if I wasn’t in hip hop. I feel like it’s a debate in hip hop. 

Is there anything that you could potentially tell the younger version of yourself that you think would aid in your hip hop journey? Or anything that you would want to express to younger, potentially gay, female rappers, or people wanting to get into the scene? Anything that if you had known maybe would have made your experience a little bit easier. 

Yeah just don’t let the voices in your head get you down. I feel like if I didn’t I would have released stuff a lot sooner. Don’t fucking worry about what other people think. The only reason I’m releasing music now is because four years ago I entered a hip hop competition and I won it and it lit a fire up under my ass. But the thing is I needed that validation to see that I could win, to see that I was good enough to be able to go okay now I can take the steps to release my own music. If I could go back in time I’d be like do it anyway, get it out anyway, release that fucking song and forget about what anyone thinks. At the end of the day you’re doing music for you, what you put down on that page and those like… at midnight when you’ve got nothing else to do and you’re listening to that song and those words are flowing through you just let it happen. All the technical stuff, all the perfecting comes later. You’ve just got to get yourself out there basically. Especially the young gay women or young gay fellas in hip hop, don’t worry about the hate, don’t worry about the homophobia. We get it anyway when we’re walking down the street and any person of colour, any migrant, any person with disability will tell you the same thing. You’re going to get the hate anywhere in life so you may as well do what you fucking want to do. Just do it, just do it, just do it! Like who cares? I’ll also say to people who are not gay or who are just struggling - cut out the hate. Unless you’re in a fucking gang and you’ve got legitimate beef with a rival gang, don’t start beef because you’re jealous of someone. Work on your shit. Even if you’re really good at your shit and you’re still getting pissed off because of someone else’s progress, just cut it. Because you never know, that person you’re dissing on or that you’re commenting on on Facebook or whatever could be the person that has… Well first of all could be one of your best homies if you approached it with love rather than hate, and second of all could have the connections that you might need to get somewhere. If that person has got the connections and you’ve spilled hate on them then all of a sudden all those connections are going to know about it. So just approach shit with love. 

Wazowski! Can we talk about your newest song? This is very exciting, very fresh, I can taste it. 

Literally though, less than seventy-two hours she drops!

By the time this video comes out your newest track Wazowski will already have been released. How do you feel about us listening to it right now? 

Super fucking keen. I love watching people’s reactions.

**Head over to the Patreon and sign up to the Hypnotics Fam tier to watch this special private performance of St Bedlam’s ‘Wazowski’.**

I had the idea for the song, but then I wrote the violins completely randomly. I was just playing around, having a fiddle around, and I was like ‘oh this is something’. Sent it to Happy Camper, I was like ‘I think we need to use this for Wazowski’. Then he built the beat around it because he’s amazing with his finger drumming and stuff. Then I wrote the verses. So it’s about having that idea of not just rapping to a beat, which is really exciting for me because up until now I’ve kind of just got beats from people that were already made and then I had to work within the scaffold of that beat. But now I’m there for the beat writing part of it and I can put my musical knowledge into it and be like oh shit, like we’re writing a song. I’m rapping on the song but it’s a song, you know what I mean? Not just rapping over the beat. So that’s really fucking cool. I’m really excited. I’m really excited for this year. 

I really want to know if there’s any fun, funny things you can tell us about the Wazowski video behind the scenes. It just looks like it was so fun.

I’m an idiot because I booked the shoot day without realising the day after Mardi Gras. 

Oh my god, were you fucked? Had you slept?

Yeah, me and most people were fucked. Everyone was cooked. You know when you go to work the day after you’ve had a night out and you just like gotta find the spoons within you to make it work? It was like that. I just put everything into that video. Everyone was fucked and - 

Like everyone was fucked?

Most people (laughs). Most of my crew. 

Was it all your mates that were involved?

Mostly yeah. Most of my friends are actors anyway, actors or rappers, so I don’t really have to source extras from elsewhere. Unless I was doing a bigger clip which I probably will soon, but you know, I’ve definitely got enough for what I needed for Wazowski. There’s a bit of bondage in it, there’s a bit of fake money in it. There’s a bit of gender bending, I’ll tell you that much for nothing. I put on a dress.

Any parting words?

Shout out to my producer Happy Camper, give him a follow. Shout out to my beautiful girlfriend Capitarnocase, give her a follow. Shout out to GVC, give them a follow. Shout out Illeqwip but you’re probably already following them. Stay up to date with my music because I’m going to be pumping out singles all year baby! 

Hectic! Is that it, are we done?

I think so. That’ll do.