17 years. Roughly the amount of time it took me to end up at WAAPA.
After leaving high school in the small country town of Takaka, NZ at a pretty young age, I had to get a job. Jobs can be quite scarce in this small but remarkably beautiful town. So, like most good young boys with no direction do, I got a job in the trades.
It was 2005 and the local milk factory had burned down, and I landed a role as a stainless steel engineers' laborer. Needless to say I had to grow up pretty quickly and adapt to this new way of life - working 12 hour days, answering to people I didn't want to answer to, and having to get out of bed at some ungodly hour of the morning.
I've always had music in my life. I was lucky enough for my Dad to introduce me to a great man/musician called Harry Harrison who gave me my first guitar lessons around age 7 in the city of Christchurch and more specifically, the suburb of South Brighton.
Kevin Stone was also a family friend, and a bloody good musician; I have such young memories of his beautiful music room with everything set up: drums, amps, guitars, mics and percussion. He has a son Reuben, around the same age as me and with the addition of my brother, 3 young kids had the best few years playing away on those instruments and forming a beautiful relationship with each other and with music. I took up the bass, my brother Adam was on drums and Reuben played the guitar. A bond was formed and that was that. We were rocking.
I lasted probably 4 months at the milk factory. I was dealing with my parents separating, bad decisions and raging hormones. I needed a change so I moved to Christchurch. I got a job in an aluminium window factory for the next 18 months, met some great people, earned some money and probably made some more bad decisions. I was bored.
Reuben was going to a music school called Vision College. I wanted in, and sure enough I'd convinced my Mum that it was a good idea and she went guarantor on a student loan. It was an awesome time. I had my bass, a great band that was getting gigs, was learning about music and getting better at it.
Still though, I was young. I thought I had to carry my role of class clown over from high school and could have taken it a lot more seriously. Also when you're that age, you're automatically a rock star if you're going to music school right? After successfully completing a year at Vision College I picked up some work back at the window factory for the holidays. Unfortunately I crushed one of my fingers in a hydraulic punch at this place and it really did a number on me. I couldn't play the bass and I couldn't go to school, my world got shook. If only the safety guard was installed on this machine, but for some reason on that day, it wasn't... well when I got back from the doctors, it was.
The tip of my ring finger bone on my left hand from the top knuckle upwards was crushed in to a hundred sand like pieces and it was going to take a long time to heal.
Luckily my Dad had ended up in Perth a year or so before that, so I gave him a call asking if he could "shout me a plane ticket" there. I needed a change of scenery. I don't think I ever paid him back for that...
I was 19 and a bunch of friends from Takaka were already living in Perth. It wasn't long before I moved in with a house full of them down near Freo, and before I knew it a few years had flown by! My good friend Carl Bowden had a copy of Logic Pro 7 on his computer and he was teaching me how to use that. We would spend hours upon hours trying to create/recreate the sounds of our teenage years and our home town: Drum and Bass!
- To be continued...
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