So my original plan was to write one of these each week, but I've never been very good a things like "patience" and "pragmatism" and "not having ADHD" so without further ado, let me reveal to you...
Pat "Mixmaster" Beckett
Pat was conceived in Sarajevo during the Bosnia/Sarajevo conflict to a tank driver and her haberdasher husband. From conception and throughout his gestation, a regular pattern of falling bombs created a lifelong affinity for heavy, thumping bass and explains why he can only hear you if you talk to him using a megaphone.
During the testing of newly-acquired amphibious vehicles, his mother took an incorrect turn as she was too self-conscious to admit that she needed to rotate the map to read it properly, and wound up two months later landing in Bondi in the summer of 1987, breaking out of the water in a torrent of frightening power, which is coincidentally what Pat did not twenty minutes later. The amphibious tank drove to Royal Prince Alfred where they were not asked to pay the $5 parking fee, for some reason, and Pat was born.
An unusually advanced child, before Pat could walk, he had already begun mixing. First, it was whites with colours (laundry, that is- Australia in the 1980's didn't have segregation, you had to go all the way to South Africa to see that). Next it was soft drinks with juices.
In 1992, at a mere 5 years of age, Pat discovered Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. This was the catalyst for a lifelong love affair with loops, rhythm, and using words like "legit" as punctuation. By year 3, he had already mixed tracks such as Go Ninja Go Ninja Go by Vanilla Ice, and by year 7 he was consulting to Eminem, who is quoted as saying "if it hadn't been for Pat Beckett, I would have followed my original dream of becoming an opera singer with a mild meth habit."
In year 8, at the tender age of 14, Pat was on his way to a Home Economics class (which, coincidentally, is where he got the nickname "mixmaster"- nobody could make smooth cake batter like Pat, and he always maintained a silken texture in your cakes was like oxygen- simply a requisite for life), when he tripped on a step and dropped a dozen pots he was carrying. It was then that he suddenly discovered that drums weren't things you programmed into chart-topping songs, as he had been doing for so many years by that point, but an instrument that could be played loud. Really loud.
Eminem was said to have personally begged him not to give up his studio career (and explains why he hasn't had a good song since Lose Yourself), but Pat was hooked. He enrolled in drum lessons and a week later completed his 12th grade drum exams, at one point also setting the world record for longest drumming session (36 continuous hours without dropping out of time).
Occasionally, in between drumming and finishing his high school, he would hack NORAD. But that's a story for another time.
We met Pat at a Western Sydney beat-boxing competition, where Pat was experimenting with ventriloquism beatboxing. Some performers managed dubstep, most just managed the beats themselves, but Pat completed a full rendition of Lose Yourself with all instruments and the chorus vocal lines without even moving his lips. Obviously, he won the competition.
We had to have him in the band. But given his previous grammy victories (which he had attached to gold chains around his neck), how could we justify joining a small, part-time Western Sydney band?
I told him I was an orphan whose parents had passed away in an unfortunate juicing accident (Worst. Smoothee. Ever.) and that it had been a lifelong dream to start a small, part-time Western Sydney band who would never get to play the Ellen show.
How could he refuse?
Pat enjoys drums, bass, drum n' bass, building things for bass to play through, recording bass, and having more TV's than people in his house (he is planning for his eventual kids, although I pointed out that he will need at least 6 kids to bring the ratio to 1:1).
Pat, we love you, and are ever so glad for the 6-inch armour plating that kept you safe in Sarajevo all those years ago. You're...the... bomb!
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