On Waking Up The sun snakes its way through the zipper of the tent. I lie on a camping bed, some sort of daft hammock-type situation. Arms tucked down my sides, wedged to my sweating torso by the heft of my own body weight. Tendrils of dust float through the sunlight, buoyed back and forth by the slight breeze that flaps the tent walls. Its seven am, and already Illawarra Folk Festival is in full swing. It starts with the cry of crows, back and forth they scream across the camp-site, short guttural screams, three or four little punches and then one long cry that starts high and descends in pitch. The menacing cries feel like they come from within my tent itself, so close these crows come, but everyone in the festival swears the crows were situated directly above their tent, so its either a single solitary crow cry carrying in the morning air or a murder of crows infesting the entire festival psyche. With the crows comes an influx of visitors. The food trucks roar to life, cars rumble into the single round-about that marks the entrance of this thousand person festival. A man yells instructions to the best of his ability but a line of cars waits to enter the roundabout and someone up the back beeps impatiently while the cars in front pause in the middle of the roundabout itself, unsure of where to go. I hear car doors slam. I hear tent zippers, sliding up and down in this identical tent city that houses the festival’s artists. I hear a violin spring to life, and somewhere else I hear someone else cursing them out. It is still seven am after all. … I’ve spent years of my life sleeping in close proximity to other people. At a young age it was with my brother, dual beds in numerous countries until my parents succumbed to renting houses with a room for each of us. Through high school I bunked up with three, then two, then one of my best friends. Memories flood back, waking to find gangly blonde Joe leant over my bunk. My Swedish Year 12 roommate brushed his teeth every morning to Coldplay. He swore his dentist told him the song ‘Fix You’ was the perfect length of time to maintain adequate dental hygiene. Waking another night to find Joe sawing a hole through the window’s security bars with a hacksaw blade he ‘borrowed’ from the school workshop (the reasons behind his sawing: we had a nine pm curfew at boarding school and it was of utmost importance that some twenty-three boys leave the dorm that night to pull pranks on another dorm). Waking to early morning yells and thumps down the hallway, the dorm set up with an odd hot water system that preferenced the upper floor to the lower floors. Anyone showering in the lowest shower would risk uncontrollable water stoppages. The water wouldn’t slow to a trickle, it would physically stop flowing at all. The boys on the lowest floor developed a ‘rain-dance’ to let the upper floors know their plight, stomping and stamping and yelling and tapping the roof with a couple of well-placed broom handles. Invariably the upper floor boys didn’t care so there were constant trails of suds and water leading down the fifty-metre hallway, up thirty stairs and into the next shower room. Another odd facet of dorm room showers was the lack of privacy. I spent four years showering in a large room with three shower-heads jutting from the wall. A metre separated them, nothing else. No shower curtain, no walls, just boys trying to maintain their pubescent modesty. We eventually gave up our modesty and found a park bench from one of the school grounds and snuck it into the shower under cover of darkness. Just long enough to fit three seated boys under three shower heads, you’d wander into the shower in the morning to find half the dorm waiting for a spot while the earliest risers carried on casual conversation under the steam. … Waking on tour to find a well-drunken band member tumbling through the door in an attempt to locate their bed. Not realising it was the wrong room they cosied up on the floor and I, in a rare fit of empathy, threw them a pillow and a towel to use as a blanket and sizzled back to sleep. Waking at nine am to missed phone calls. We’d left the gig straight after playing the night before but one member had kicked on with the intent to arrive home later that night. Six am rolls around and they arrive but can’t find the key we’d left out for them. Door knocks and phone calls to no avail, the band slumbers on. We wander out to find him happily snoozing against a pile of dirt in the backyard, head propped on a sack of gravel he procured from the garden shed. Not sleeping on one particular tour as a six-piece band lay in a row on a friends floor. Six yoga mats, five complaining backs, one sleep-apnea affected member keeping the rest tossing and turning to loud snorts. … We’ve slept a lot this tour. Not in the conventional sense. No solid eight hours a night. No bedtime curfew and early morning rise for work. No routine at all, so the sleep invades all other areas of band life. Some members sleep in the car on the long drives down the East Coast. Some members sleep in the green room, stealing a sneaky fifteen minutes between sound-check and dinner. Some members disappear post-gig to nab the best section of floor. Some days the entire band falls asleep in the park, worn out from a day of beach and beers. One un-named member even manages to fall asleep at a gig, propped up in the back row, feet on the floor and facing the stage, soaking in Balkan strains as a raucous lullaby. … Back here I find myself. Waking to the sounds of the festival. No room for sleep in a packed day of seeing great live music, diving into vegan curry, running to the beach for some bonding band exercise, attempting band admin with a laptop in a tent and a shaky mobile hotspot, and of course playing, the main reason I wake at all. Time to get this day started. … Ps. One thing that has helped me sleep for many years in many countries over most of my life is Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. PPS. I’ve started a mailing list. If you want to get very occasional updates (mainly writings such as this, new music, show dates etc), please click here to sign up.
On Where I Began My parents have always been the biggest supporters of my music career. When I was ten, they bought a 2nd hand drum kit in Melbourne and had it shipped 12,000 kilometers to Yemen. A ‘Boston’ branded drum kit with ‘Dolfin’ cymbals was, in hindsight, a pretty laughable start but enough to kick me off on a life-time of weird experiences (ps. that’s me in the center of the photo up above). … I have this theory with the young students that I teach, that a love of instrument or even a love of music isn’t important. It’s incredibly helpful, but by no means the defining factor on whether they will improve their skills and/or turn it into something more than a passing phase. The kids who don’t love it, but have parents who push them to practice are the ones who improve. It’s a simple formula. Five minutes a day is genuinely enough to make a lasting difference for a kids’ musical ability. Kids’ love is fleeting (hence we see them drift through the passing phases of Fidget Spinners and Fortnight, Pokemon and Pogs), but the stuff that sticks with them is the stuff that educators keep forcing them to learn, whether they like it or not. We don’t allow kids to give up on maths or reading, but we expect that a musical instrument will be something that they love enough to dedicate hours of their young lives to. Little consideration is given to the mental ability and focus to stick with something to the point where it starts sounding and feeling good. Thankfully drums can sound ok from the get-go, we are just hitting things after all. In one school band program I was involved with, several year 7 boys attempted to play the flute week after week for five weeks. They literally never learnt to make a sound (and I never learnt to help them), but the percussion section up the back was a joyful cacophony. Imagine a group of boys half-heartedly spluttering into flutes up the front while the stereotypically ADD boys up the back hit everything in sight with gusto. This is most band programs. … My mum was a defining character in my young musical career. She tuned the guitar in my first rock band (‘can you get your mum to tune my guitar again? It always sounds better when she does it’). She made me practice fifteen minutes a day (usually just enough to get through two Green Day songs and something by Sum 41). She kept me in lessons. I learnt to play drums through tuition with an enthusiastic Iraqi violinist, probably not the most auspicious start, but you get what you get. Many years later I had my first lesson with an actual drum teacher in Melbourne and he examined my technique with some alarm… ‘have you had lessons before? There are some interesting wrist movements going on’. Well yes, I’m applying the finest Iraqi violin bowing techniques to the drum sticks, what else do you expect? One particular exercise consisted of taking a pair of drum sticks and, starting on the tiled floor, tapping my way around the terracotta walls of my room. We never addressed the reasoning behind this activity, but I’m sure I could find a way to address rebound and mechanics in it now. If I had the years back, I’d explain to my young self the focus is on ‘getting out of the way of the stick’ (thank you Dave Elitch) but again, you get what you get. … You read musician’s biographies and they wax lyrical about how their dad’s vinyl collection was the defining moment of their preformant life. ‘I grew up with the sounds of the 60s, Van Morrison gave a soundtrack to my childhood, ra ra ra’. My start was lacklustre in comparison. From memory, we had one comedy tape of Ray Stevens (listening back to it, this was the racist sounds of the 1960s), and a series of Christian gospel songs. (Dad may not have given me music, but he gave me an entrepreneurial spirit, something to address in a future post) My brother introduced me to a set of slightly rockier religious songs, in the form of DC Talk, and a primary school friend gave me a burnt copy of Blink 182 and my teens were spent in pop-punk bliss. The local Yemeni population were into the vocal stylings of Diana Haddad and the best of Egyptian soap operas. My drumming thundered through the neighbourhood, further ‘othering’ myself as a young white male in an overwhelmingly Arab neighbourhood within an overwhelmingly Arab city on the bottom of the Middle East. As a side-note, there exists a wonderfully vibrant pirated cassette tape market in Yemen. Local street vendors would display the pride of their collections: badly photocopied covers of all the latest 90s boy bands (for the mid-2000s, anything from the last 20 years was quite current) clustered around badly dubbed cassettes (often starting midway through a song, and ending midway through another with vast periods of silence in between). It brings me some sense of comfort that at a time when most of the world was embracing CDs I was still fast-forwarding tapes and attempting to make my own mix-tapes via an aux cord from my computer’s headphone jack to the input on a Sanyo tape deck. The local ‘dabbab’ drivers (mini-buses, the main form of public transport throughout most of the third world) would trade dubbed tapes with a sense of pride little seen in any other aspect of their work. Tyres screaming as they slam to a halt in the middle of an intersection, arms waving tapes out the window at the hawker on the side of the road. I’ve seen street kids running along side a dabbab with a handful of tapes and a kebab, attempting to garner a pocketful of change from the mildly focused driver. I also saw one driver disgustedly fling the wrong tape into a passing vehicle, then realising his mistake, pull a swift U-turn and drive his passengers two kilometres in the wrong direction in an attempt to get it back. … I moved to boarding school in Kenya at the age of 14, and high-school brought new friends and new music and a high-school band program. Still no real drum teacher as such, but an introduction to the world of performing, playing ‘big-band-jazz’ (ah that bastion of the ill-understood kids of high school). We performed such hits as the Pirates of the Carribean theme song and Bilbo’s Song from the LOTR soundtrack. I took my first drum solo (16 bars over ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing’), and if memory serves me correctly, flubbed it totally. Soloing still isn’t where I find my joy as a drummer. … One final thought. Yemen has been in a state of chaos for the last 10 years. Decimated by civil war (spurred on by a much deeper disagreement between various other states and ongoing arms sales from countries such as the US and Australia). Millions of people are displaced. Millions more are starving. Schools, hospitals and essential infrastructure across the country have been closed (and often bombed). There have been some small steps in the last couple of days, but this is a country and a generation that may never fully recover. One of my friends (who lived in Yemen at the same time as me) has started a funding campaign for one of the groups doing essential work with children in Yemen. If you felt like passing some Christmas money on to someone less fortunate, it would be greatly appreciated. Read about it here Non-Facebook link