The saga of the fallout stemming from 360’s controversial comments regarding the Australian flag and what he alleged is the prevalence of racism in Australia on a recent episode of Q&A just took a bizarre left turn.
On Monday, 360, real name Matt Colwell, appeared on Melbourne talkback radio station 3AW with Drive host Tom Elliott to discuss his outspoken comments. Elliott had previously been critical of Colwell’s stance, penning an op-ed in the Herald Sun.
Except, the man Elliott was talking to wasn’t Colwell, nor anyone affiliated with the rapper. In fact, as footage posted on his official Facebook page shows, Colwell was in bed listening to the interview that he was supposedly a part of.
“I just got a call saying tom Elliot from 3AW was about to interview me live about my comments on Q&A,” wrote Colwell. “This is the first I’d heard of it. So I recorded the interview and it is highly amusing.”
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“Tom Elliot, isn’t this the second interview you’ve interviewed someone posing to be someone else? Tom Elliot, do you even journalism?” Colwell referred to a previous incident, during which Elliott interviewed an alleged ISIS operative who turned out to be troll.
The fake 360 has since been revealed to be fellow Melbourne rapper and former journalism student BK Ultra, who recently appeared on Triple J to explain his actions, as well as how ridiculously easy it was to convince the station he was 360.
“Well, basically I heard that they had approached [360] last week to get on the program and then he wasn’t interested ’cause he thought he was going to get stitched up. So I thought it’d be a good opportunity to teach [Elliott] a bit of a lesson,” BK told The Doctor.
“Basically I just got someone to ring up the number and I said that they were 360’s manager and gave them my mobile number and that was it. They didn’t check anything,” he claimed.
“It seemed to work pretty well; I had a few rebuttals in there. I felt like I was actually beating him in an intellectual debate before I’d even started trolling him so that was a bit fun.”
Of course, the “intellectual debate” also included such gems as, “I’ve been inducted into the Illuminati. I’m an enlightened being. I’m a unicorn. Who are you to say I’m not a unicorn?” and “I am legally blind in my right eye and can see Australia is inherently racist.”
While Elliott alleged on Twitter that the station “shut the interview down immediately”, Triple J report that the interview was nixed only after BK began grilling the host about his journalistic credentials and asking whether he’d checked the identity of those he was purportedly interviewing.
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BK claims it was he who gave the real 360 a tip-off so that he could film himself listening to the interview. At the time of writing, the video has reached 483,443 views and is still climbing.
According to Triple J, Colwell’s management company, Crucial Music, said they had received “numerous requests” from 3AW for the rapper to appear on Elliott’s show.
“They even went as far to ask Matt via Twitter, after we denied them multiple times. Matt addressed Tom’s article via Facebook and said that would be the last he said anything of the matter,” they said.
“As I explained to [them], our contact details are on 360’s Facebook and website so it’s very easy to contact us, just as they did post-interview, so why they didn’t take this verification measure before the interview is ludicrous. I actually laughed and said how funny it was that they will just put anyone on air that says they are that person.”
The Crucial rep also insisted that Colwell had nothing to do with orchestrating the hoax, saying, “I have no knowledge of Matt engineering the interview… even if he did (which is doubtful as he is sick of this topic being regurgitated and taken out of context), it seems completely deserving and highlighted a huge issue with the way 3AW fact and identity checks its interviewees and information. It casts aspersions on anything that Tom Elliott says and who he speaks to.”
