“I met another guy called Stuey Batten and his wife Karen and they lived in Hazy House Medicine Garden in North Lismore which had a granny flat out the back so I lived there and built a verandah with the wood from the saw mill nearby.
About 18 months later Emilia showed up and we went out and saw the last gig of The Units at the Italo Club and we stayed together that night, then she left again. A couple of months later she called to say she was pregnant. Eventually she lived with me and we went to Birth and Beyond and we had our son Patrick at home with a midwife Joy and we planted the placenta under a tree. We needed somewhere bigger so we moved a couple of times and eventually rented a nice place in High St.
Emilia lost her good friend in a car accident which really affected her and she wanted to go and study Buddhism. Patrick stayed with me. While I was in Lismore I enrolled in Uni to study Classical Guitar with John Fitzgerald and was then encouraged to do the degree. I was living in High St with Peter Jagel the drummer and I was playing piano for different groups. I ended up getting kicked out because I had originally rented with my wife who had since left and now there were others coming and going.
I then moved into 79 Bridge St in North Lismore and Patrick went to Vistara School and after that he went onto Richmond River High. He has 3 kids of his own now and lives in Canberra. It was here that I met Jill (who now runs Women up North) and we got married and that was real. She had her daughter Jasmine and I had Patrick.
We went through the 1989 flood where the water was lapping at the floor boards and we were way off the ground. I had my pianos in the front of Sound Solutions shop so I ended up losing 12 pianos. Jill had 22 acres out at Booerie Creek up high so we moved out there. By that stage I had started buying pianos again and doing them up for people.
In 1994 we bought our house here in Anstey St Lismore and we are still there. Thankfully we were safe from the last floods. I met some great people at the Uni and started getting into electronic composition and I was also teaching at Uni. I taught part time for 20 years. Some great bands came out of the uni and I’m so glad I was involved during that time. I did my Honours here which I did an album of different styles of House music, then the Beyond the Brain was happening and I became good friends with Paul and Cathy who put those on. Paul just finished his PhD in Adelaide DJ Culture. I eventually did my PhD in Creative Practises in Australian Techno or Electronica and the music I was making at the time was like Pseudo Psytrance I suppose. My music always changes too much to be real Trance for the devotees. We had lot’s of parties in the forest.
In the meantime the piano business was building and around that time Lyndon Terracini came to town. I’d taken over writing the music for a musical about the life of Peer Gynt. The backing track for that morphs into the music for The Cars that ate Paris. I did a rock score for that so Lyndon and I collaborated on a few projects.
In 1997 Jyllie Jackson started the Lantern Parade and the first parade I did some music and walked around the street in the parade playing it through a ghetto blaster. The next couple of years I did the music which was played through a system at the Rowing Club. In 2002 we did a big one down by the river on the other side of the bridge. After that it became huge, with over 25,000 people one year. I did all the music for the finales including the 20th anniversary on the footy oval. I really enjoyed it.
I’d become close friends with Michael Hannan who was a lecturer at the Uni. He and I formed a duo called Riff Madness and we asked local composers to write pieces for us. We took it on tour to Sydney and the Blue Mountains in the Bicentennial year. That was the first time I met David Helfgott because he was in the audience. In the 90’s we put on a lot of shows in Lismore. Last year I did the show with Sprung..I dreamt of things impossible. You get to learn a lot about this area and it’s musical history. Kylie and Danni Minogue were taught by Wendy Turner who used to live in East Lismore.”
I suggested to Christopher Dean who ran the Thursday Plantation Sculpture Show that I write a symphony for it. It was called Homecoming. I did it the following year again and we made a CD.
Harry Freeman has always been a big supporter of me. There used to be a Lismore Folk Festival that was held in the Rugby Grounds and Harry asked me to write a piece for the closing ceremony called the Bat Symphony. I recorded the Bats at the Racecourse. With the Homecoming I had gone down there at dawn and recorded the bird sound. We hid the speakers in the forest, it had been pouring with rain and when we started the piece the rain stopped and there was this amazing dry lightning. The Bats were flying past with the lightning in the background. Harry insists that from that night on the Bats changed their course, never to fly that path again (laughs).
In 2009 I joined an 18 piece big band run by Ken Stubbs. He was teaching at the Con and for a while we were playing at The piggery in Byron and a few other places. Eventually the rhythm section left and I joined them to make a trio with Hans Lovejoy on Double Bass and Ben Cox on Drums. The 3 of us did a lot of gigs.
Nowadays I still have the piano business, the kids have left, I play a lot of tennis so I have my tennis people, my music people and my piano people. Life is good.”
