The Loop

Tom Hardy's 1999 mixtape has been unearthed...and it's actually not terrible

January 18, 2018
Premiere Of FX's "Taboo" - Arrivals

Jason LaVeris

Tom Hardy is a man of few words. Grumbling and mumbling through starring turns in Dunkirk, Lawless, and Mad Max: Fury Road, Hardy has become Hollywood's arty tough guy—a stoic ass-kicker who doesn't need one-liners to land his punches. As Reddit discovered this week, however, the London native wasn't always so reserved, rattling off relentless verbal machine-gun fire on his long-lost mixtape, Falling on Your Arse in 1999, which—after 19 years in the wind—not-so-quietly popped up on bandcamp earlier this month.

So how do Hardy's bars hold up to those found on 2001, Things Fall Apart, Black on Both Sides, Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter, and the fistful of other legendary releases from a watershed year in rap? Unsurprisingly, they don't. Surprisingly, they're not that far behind either. Dealing in the blokey, ropey style that dominated Y2UK hip hop scene, Falling on Your Arse in 1999—produced in collaboration with DJ Eddie Too Tall—wouldn't sound out of place on the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels soundtrack, with Hardy spitting all over everything from the Godfather theme to Too Tall's original beats like the cocky, cockney kid he probably was at the time.

In the end, it's more of a curiosity than classic, but hey, at least he's not getting destroyed by Alvin Kamara on Twitter.