“I was born in Darwin. My parents met in Sydney. They were old school punks. Dad was a musician through the 70’s, early 80’s and Mum was probably a punk hunter. They moved to Darwin when Mum was pregnant with me and Dad worked in remote Aboriginal communities fixing windmills. At about one we moved to Muswellbrook where my sister Grace was born. Dad worked as a Machinist in the Hunter region.
We came to the Northern Rivers around 1993, first to Keerrong. Ironically two of my best mates live in that same house now. We came to Lismore when I was little and I’m still in that house. We are on 80 acres in South Lismore.
I was talking to Mum yesterday. She has this great photo of my sister and I and we’re black from head to toe. Dad being an Engineer and just a wizard at everything was collecting the old oil from car oil changes and had it in a 44 gallon drum. My sister and I tipped it over and rolled naked it in all day. My Mum said she had to wash us in petrol to get it off. She was calling Dad seeing if she should take us to hospital. I think the oil seeped into my blood because I’ve been a crazy rev head my whole life. I have this deep seated passion for motor sports. I know through my fathers side he had brothers who raced speedway. I’ve always loved it. My first dream when I was little was to be a race driver.
When we moved to this house Dad started a band called Gravel Rash. They later became The Passengers. Growing up I spent those formative years surrounded by music, listening to Dad’s band play. All the kids of the band members were about the same age so we had heaps of fun. Kim Maclean out of Black Train was one of the band members. We’d bash around on the instruments when they had a break. I don’t remember learning how to play drums which is the instrument I play. I remember the kit was always there from a very young age and I played all the time. They played old punk covers of Steve Lucas and X…old Australian punk. That definitely gave me my love for music. I would always have his songs stuck in my head. I went to Wyrallah Rd Public School and I remember daydreaming all day about playing music or being a race driver. Dad was either playing music or working around cars and I think that definitely influenced my passion for both too.
Every year we built Billy-karts for the Bangalow Billy-kart Derby. We won quite a few times. I wanted to race Go Karts but it was too expensive a hobby. When I was about 10 my parents bought me my first motor bike, a Kawasaki 80. I made a track around the paddock and would time myself. I would just be racing myself but it was heaps of fun. From about seven to seventeen years of age I broke a bone a year. I was so accident prone growing up. We spent a lot of time in hospitals. One of Dad’s good friends is a Nurse so Dad would always take me there first to see if it was broken. He’d say.… No, it’s not broken but it always was broken (laughs). I’ve broken about 15 bones now.
My friends and I had a crash on our billy karts in Caniaba when we were in Year 6. I broke my right arm and it was right in the time when you do exams to get seeded in high school. I couldn’t write so they gave me a Writer who happened to be my girlfriend at the time. She was super smart. She just did everything for me. When I went to high school they put me in all the top classes and I wasn’t quite up to that standard. I was unsettled through high school, became pretty rebellious and just wanted to play music. My two passions in high school were history and music, I went down a rabbit hole in history with modern history, revolutions and Che Guevara, etc. It was hard to come back from that. We would have the CAPPA creative performance nights at school which were great fun. You’d play to huge audiences. I loved the adrenalin. I hated being nervous but it was also such a good feeling.
I went to Uni to do History but didn’t last long. I wasn’t settled. I worked for my Dad Neville who had an engineering business, learnt heaps of skills and then I went to the Conservatorium of Music. I played drums for hours a day. I’d formed my first band SubStation which was the best time. We were so young and everything was exciting. Every gig was big. We entered the Lismore Young Songwriting Comp and came second. We won tickets to Mazstock. We’d all just turned 18 and never heard of Mazstock. We went and had this sense of belonging. We hadn’t seen much live music. It was an older crowd and we thought it was so cool. The year after that Sideshow who promoted it asked us to play Mazstock which was an honour as well.
We used to have the whole band set up in the kitchen for rehearsal. Dad got a bit sick of it because you had to walk through the whole band to get to the sink and it was set up for nearly a year. My parents split up when I was 10. Mum moved out but they are still great friends. I sort of took over the house from about seventeen. It was cool having this old farm house to myself. We slowly built a studio on the property mainly for a jam space at first. Through Substation we needed T-shirts. Jesse from House of M printed the first lot designed by Matt our Guitarist. I didn’t realise my Dad had screen printed their own shirts and made their own paper for posters. I have the press here now. Dad showed us how to make the screens and do the whole process. We started printing for other bands. It started as a side hobby then progressed.
I started the studio and the screen printing as a full time business and now it’s all I do. I’m so happy and I realise how lucky I am to be able to do that. At one point I was drumming for 6 bands at once and spent a year solid touring every weekend. I did a national tour with Steve Lucas from X. I auditioned and knew all the songs from memory. We played Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. My band Masochist played at the last Falls Festival.
About 3 years ago I had a really bad accident on a motorcycle. I was lucky to survive.”