Getting serious about Turning Heads- UPDATED x 1

Given the absurdity of my previous posts, it could seem somewhat odd that I am going to take a serious moment but the subject of my post deserves to be void of hyperbole and invention because it is just so darn brilliant.

So, the story goes like this. I randomly clicked a Facebook ad- which I normally never do- for a young photographer based in the inner-west, because it looked interesting and I wanted to find someone who had a good instinct for shots so we could do album artwork that didn’t involve trawling Google Images and then spending subsequent weeks trying to find the owners of the images to use permission. That photographer was Lina Hayes, a 21-year-old legend with an eye for landscapes, sunsets, and silhouettes.

So we emailed back and forth a bit, regarding projects and availability and other such things related to band and album photography. Since we weren’t even going to start recording until after Pat finishes getting his house built- which, at the current rate, will be September 2017- I figured it was more about identifying a talent and coming back to the whole situation in a few months’ (or years, depending on builders) time.

Periodically, I’d come back and look at the latest pictures. Pop a comment up, click away, maybe come back a couple of days later.

It was one of those days later when I saw this photo:

Amazing or what? Lina and Helen for the win! Photo (c) Lina Hayes Photography

That photo was the first in a series that were done for a project with Helen Beasley from Rainbow Face Painting and Body Art. The project was called Turning Heads.

Now, I wasn’t sure what this was for at first. Was it part of some monastic tradition? But then I found out that no, it wasn’t. The baldness of the women in question was not a choice, but a condition known as Alopecia Totalis, and the project was aimed at creating something innately beautiful to help these women feel special, unique, and amazing, turning their heads into an amazing canvas and creating art that reflected them personally.
Alopecia Totalis is contrasted to Androgenic Alopecia, or pattern baldness, or as I refer to it, “having kids”. Tristan is always keen to point out my lack of hair compared to his strong, thick and flowing locks, but given my work with teenagers over the years, I assured him I had already had it pointed out plenty of times.

Alopecia Totalis, however, was the complete loss of all the hair from the head (well, not the eyebrows), and could effect any age.

Next came this article in the Hornsby Advocate and as I read about Stephanie, who was diagnosed in year 5 and was now in year 8, I was struck by the images themselves. So great a blow to the confidence of the subjects had been dealt by the condition that many avoided going out because, well, it caused stares, but the amazing canvas that it enabled them to be, and the joy that was captured in the photos as for a moment their heads were in fact the perfect subject for the art, was in that moment a glimpse of another kind of value.

Finally, Lina put up some shots of a 2-year old girl. Little Jono turned 2 in March and this little girl had a similar vibrancy and joy as he has; she took the condition in her stride, unaware of any difference. The photos really captured the fierce joy, although this one is my personal favourite:

Best. Photo. EVER. (c) Lina Hayes Photography

The shots moved me in unexpected ways as according to my wife, I don’t have things known as “feelings”, whatever those are. Something about the project really created an amazing connection, and as I read the girls’ stories, I gave pause to reflect on how we automatically attribute our definitions of beauty to the exterior, how flawed our assessments of other humans can be.

For those who don’t know, I have three kids, Ben (9), Tamara (7), and Jono (2). As I looked at these girls, and read their tales, I felt enormous sadness for the circumstances we find ourselves in in our human condition, and I wondered what I could say that would make a difference. So I sat down and started writing a song, and then dragged Tristan over to help me push through writer’s block. In 40 minutes, the song was done, and entitled All Of The Strands.

We’re doing some work on it and will be aiming to record it in July, to pass on something encouraging to these women. But as a sneak peak,  thought I’d include the bridge lines below:

Are you simply a picture, with warmth and a smile,
The depth and the beauty of somebody’s child?
You knew they were looking, but did they see more
Than all of the strands as they fell to the floor?

But in the meantime, please can I encourage you to go along to Lina and Helen’s Facebook pages, find out about the project, and make sure you share it with your friends. There’s something uniquely beautiful about it, I suppose because it creates beauty out of an ugly situation, and creates joy in the midst of sadness or resignation. There may not be a specific cure for it at this point in time, but perhaps the opportunity to celebrate a different kind of beauty is cure enough; perhaps it is we who need curing.

UPDATE: Tristan and I are going to record a demo of it this weekend which I'll try to get up on our site as soon as I have a moment. Stay tuned! Then we'll record the proper version with the rest of the band when Pat is back from Korea and the next gig is out of the way.

Things You Never Knew About... Tristan "Ted" Edwards and Me

All good things come to an end. This series has increased our blog popularity by like 5,000 percent, because we went from having 1 person reading to having 200 views and if we’d gone from 1 to 2, that’s a 100% increase. My mathematical calculations for the adequate number of zeroes might be slightly out. Shocking, I know.

Anyhow, to complete our band profiles, our front man is exposed and his true history is finally on the record. Straight from Roswell, New Mexico, prepare for:

Things You Never Knew About... Tristan “Ted” Edwards and Me.

Here’s the thing people don’t realise about Tristan. He and I are actually identical twins. I was eight and a half months premature and he was twelve months overdue, because he was growing hair and I evidently didn’t have to. Strangely, we were both born at a normal gestational weight, which our parents put down to hormone-fed chicken.

Back then, our parents were living in a potato sack which they rented with seven other families and money was tight. I was sold to a travelling gypsy troupe when Tristan was finally forcibly removed from the womb with an eviction notice and removal of his cable TV subscription.

Whilst I travelled with the gypsy caravan troupe, things were tough at home. A ninth family had put in an application to move into the potato sack, and Mr. Edwards (I mean, ‘Dad’), finally fed up with the lack of career progression options at his job training tapeworms to rollerblade, took a job which was remarkably similar, but paid better, which was teaching in the NSW public school system.

The sudden influx of money confused Tristan. Up until that point, the potato sack tenants had had to share one piece of toilet paper across all the families per day. Now, he could use three, four, even five sheets at a flush. Giddy with power, he convinced our parents that he should have singing lessons.

Mother had read somewhere that long-lost-twins who played music somehow found each other, like in that animated movie An American Tail where Feival brings the Black Plague to America, and so she enrolled him immediately and hoped that as he sung mournfully under the moon one night, somewhere I too would be singing in harmony. But she was wrong, because I can’t sing in any key.

Back with the gypsy troupe, life was good. I had a daily ration of peanuts and hay, and was taught all the educational tools I would need to grow up and make my adoptive parents proud: pick-pocketing, avoiding baths, scabbing cash, and sleeping til noon. Playing an instrument somewhere usually allowed crowds to gather so that members of the troupe could more effectively steal their wallets and phones (referred to by marketers as “Cost/Benefit ratio increase), but after the troupe’s main guitarist had his fingers broken in an unfortunate incident involving heavy losses on squirrel ballet and a bookie named Big Bubba, I was the only one left and the only instrument that spoke to me was piano. Loving parents that they were, they promptly stole a baby grand piano from a rehearsal room in the Opera House, a fact that wasn’t even discovered until 2009, because they also left a note saying “taking piano for a walk, back in 10 (years)”.

My twin was meanwhile living the good life, but couldn’t help feeling that there was a conjoined part of his soul somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight. The call of performing running strong in his veins, he began doing clowning for children’t birthday parties, becoming the first party clown to make an exact replica of the Mona Lisa out of balloons, including the half-smile and the eyes that followed you around the room. In order to supplement his act, he learnt guitar, so as to teach the children educational songs like the compound materials for making C4. However, listening to music to hone his skills would also develop his first substance dependency, that substance being CDs. He would go into record stores and casually order fifteen, sixteen boxes of the latest singles and either leave a pile of cash on the counter or run like a hungry cheetah was chasing him.

And in fact, this is how we met. As he fled the mall security guards, fifteen boxes of CDs in his arms, singing “You Can’t Catch Me, I’m the Gingerbread Man” with a beautiful vibrato, I was chasing my piano downhill as I’d forgotten to put the wheel locks on. I had managed to get onto the keys and was trying to slow it with me feet, but drawn by the beauty of his Gingerbread Man song, I began spontaneous accompaniment, and the guards were caught in the music and began spontaneously dancing, which is a difficult feat if you are running downhill at great speed. Our getaway was a fait accompli.

Catching our breaths and dividing the CD spoils (I referred him a support group, but got the name wrong and he attended “Seedy Addicts” instead,  which was full of guys wearing nothing but trenchcoats, but that’s a story for another time), I noticed a birthmark on his right ear that looked enormously similar to one on my left foot. As I looked at my new friend, I realised I was virtually looking into a mirror, and he realised it at the same time. Twins! How could it possibly be anything else?

The resemblance is uncanny, no?

It so happened that I had ‘borrowed’ a bible from an elderly priest earlier that day and hidden it in the piano in case he ever came around, and as we pored over the texts and felt a calling to write songs about the duality of human nature, the mysteries of the universe, and cowboys who find out that they’ve actually been dead the entire song with a twist ending. Feeling guilty, we returned the stolen piano to the Opera House in 2012, instead stealing a smaller, more portable one for street performing. We left a copy of our CD in payment.

In order to formalise our performing, we took the name “Redwoods”, a portmanteau of “Rose” and “Edwards” by Autocorrect. And it was the beginning of something beautiful.

Ted, I am glad our various nefarious activities allow us to finally meet in that constabulary-avoiding collision. I’m not sure if you’re a friend closer than a brother, or a brother closer than a friend, but either way you’re a legend and I’m ever so glad you found the GPS tracking device in the piano or otherwise we’d be in a heap of trouble right now.

Things You Never Knew About... Marty

It’s Friday before a long weekend, and that means it’s time for you to get to know the latest band member and his incredible true story.

Look up the word “incredible” in the dictionary some time. Or even the word “credible”. You’ll see what I mean.

Things you never knew about... Marty

Those who have met Marty could be forgiven for thinking he was American. The truth of the matter is that Marty was born 150m below the earth’s surface in a West Australian opal mine to a nigerian mother and her Cherokee Indian husband. Raised in the same mine with his only source of contact with the world above the surface being American TV programming, it accounts for his pale skin and mysterious accent.
It was kind of like the movie Blood Diamond, but, like, with a happy ending and not-one’s arms being deliberately chopped off. Because accidents still happen in mines. 

It was in this mine that Marty first discovered (at the tender age of 3) some of life’s great engineering principles, such as leverage (by jamming crowbars into rock), transmission of energy over distance (getting TV underground), and drinking (by drinking). By the age of 5, he had re-designed the entire mine to increase operational efficiency by 75%, and drunk his first keg. Nobody told him that the contents were actually sparkling apple juice, because nobody keeps alcohol in a mine, but as part of an engineering fraternity, he needed to feel as if he was drinking lots. Even now, give Marty enough Appletiser and he’ll start acting drunk. Deadset. Some kind of psychological thing evidently. 

After submitting some improvised designs for the internet to the Edison foundation via the internet, which he had built a test version of using parts from old TVs, a kilometer of copper cabling which coincided with the same amount mysteriously vanishing from the mine, seven hamsters, one large cat and a lot of chewing gum, he was unearthed (so to speak) and sent to further his education, like Dougie Howser MD. By the way, did you know that Twitter got the idea from Dougie Howser’s updates at the end of each episode? Yeah? Did you know that it was Marty who gave them that idea? No? There you go. Marty called them up after watching an episode and said “we need to put, in 140 characters, stuff nobody really cares about. I saw it on TV and people were tuning in.”

Who says TV is a waste.

Marty was flown to the United States and given an education centering on engineering. He was loosed in a forest with an axe, a generator, a few magnets, some assorted tools and some wire, and came back with an electric guitar. He found out later that it had already been invented some years before, but that didn’t stop him.

A new world had opened to Marty. As an engineer, he could only meet women who were in the middle of doing a keg stand. As a musician, he could totally meet women well before they’d found where the kegs were kept.

Marty travelled to Australia to pursue his dream of engineering a relationship out of music, and one holiday ended up way out west near Penrith at a small church with a good-looking single Italian lady. He struck up a conversation, a little something like this:
“Hey, I play guitar.”
“Hey, I’m Italian.”

“You wanna get married in like 5 years?”

“Sounds great!”

We first met Marty as we were walking down the street pushing a grand piano and a guitar together, it being the day when we were taking busking seriously. Marty, in full tuxedo, ran up to us and asked us if we could play at his wedding. Which was in fifteen minutes’ time. That was twice the rehearsal time we needed, so we bought chips and milkshakes and then headed up. Amazed at his organizational skills and ability to wield a compelling argument with such dexterity, we asked him to join us during the wedding practice on guitar. He quickly improvised one out of a pew and the remnants of a broken heater, and we knew we were onto a winner. 

So I told him that unless he joined in the band, I would tell his wife-to-be that he secretly hated pasta and the entire family’s mafia connections would come for him. I didn’t know if they even had mafia connections, but I heard the word “Italian” and just went for it. It seems to have worked.

Marty, we love you and your unerring instinct for beauty. Thank you for sharing your African/Cherokee heritage with us, as we are far more culturally aware now than we ever were before!

Things You Never Knew About... Pat

38 views! That is something truly special for me, since the previously highest-rating post was my very brief rant about how I wanted to suggest a special segment to Ellen to have on her show just so that we could play it. And the amazingly shocking thing is that I never heard back from her! I know, who suspected?

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!

Things You Never Knew About... Micky

So, I have decided to begin penning a series on each of the band members' mini biographies, except myself, because you can't write your own review, so to speak.

Micky D
Micky was born in Romania to a sausage manufacturer and his pedicurist wife in 1989. As a young boy, he won a number of Romanian power-lifting competitions and eventually won entry and citizenship into Australia after lifting a Holden ute above his head.

Once in Australia's shores, the young Mr. D set about racking up an impressive number of awards. In 1997, he successfully built a particle accelerator using four coke cans, a television remote control and eight kilograms of Wonka's Nerds. The call of music was too strong, however, and so despite the heads of numerous universities begging for his attendance (and the ripe age of 8) to their various faculties of advanced physics, Micky elected to remain in school and begin playing guitar.

Micky graduated high school with a fierce sense of protective civil duty. Unfortunately the local police force were not accepting applications and so Micky found a cave and became Batman. After 10 years in the security industry (based on total hours worked measured against a standard 40 hour work week), Micky realised that his desire to protect humanity came not from being Batman, but a shared parentage with Superman and therefore he had to fly.

He left the security industry and began his pilot training, which he continues to this day. Like, four days into it.

We first met Micky when he was tearing the door off a wrecked car and saving the occupants along the Western Distributor on our way back from a gig. We asked him in passing if he played any instruments.
"I play every instrument," he replied humbly. "All of them. At once, sometimes."

We watched him perform Beethoven's 5th Symphony in its entirety and were sold. There was only one thing for it: how did we convince him to join a small, fledgling, Western Sydney project.

So I told him I had cancer and he couldn't say no.

By his own admission, Micky considered himself (up until recently) a guitarist who also plays bass. This changed a few months ago to being a bassist who also plays guitar (extremely well). It's possible outlaying a few thousand dollars for a sexy Fender bass had something to do with this change in status.

Micky, we love you and are glad you play in our band. Stay away from kryptonite before gigs!

'Abandon'ing the last tuesday

This past Tuesday we played a short but amazing gig at Glenmore Park for an event called "Abandon". There were two other awesome bands, White with One and Whitefield (formerly The Cameo), which I think both impressed and inspired us with their talent and energy - check them out when you have a moment!

        

The near-term sees us taking a quick break for 2 weeks then back to heavy practice mode (yes, 1 times a week) in prep for the Western Sydney Showdown where we will be sharing the stage with the dudes from Chasing Light.

Thanks again to all who encourage, support, and tolerate our musical endeavors (and putting up with listening to rough recordings at every chance)!!!

Only the greatest idea EVER

I've always wanted to play something big. Like a stadium or something. Or any crowd in excess of 500. The flat bed of a big truck turned into a mobile stage.
The Ellen show.

Ellen is about the only daytime TV show that's on my lunch break that isn't entirely depressing, boring, or a very bad straight-to-TV movie about a shark that swims up from the salt water area to the fresh water area and then eats 1960's kids or something (I wasn't paying huge attention to that one).

Ellen's show is always coming up with new segments, so I thought of a mad name for a segment that would totally get her attention. Time Travelling Obscure Australian Band Friday!

See, 'cos of the time zone difference, travelling from Point A to Point U (Australia to USA) would mean that if we left at the right time, we could play yesterday in the States. In the imaginary situation (much like 'what-I'd-do-if-I'd-won-the-$70m-Oz-Lotto-on-Tuesday, which, it turns out, is buy all the wrong things and have a fight with my best friend because I'd got him the wrong house, car, and Angelina-Jolie type adoption because there's apparently a difference between adoption and human trafficking, and the answer isn't "peak hour"), we'd totally pay for our own air fares and Ellen would supply instruments because they're too big to put on a plane. Then we'd play either Hoping For Jupiter since it ties in with our album release, or Monsters In Mirrors because it'd show we're mega versatile and ahead of the musical curve using loops, real drums, and multi-instrumentalism.
Except if I stuffed the solo. That would be embarrassing.
Then Ellen would interview us and we'd be all "we've got a web page and a blog and you can buy a song for $1!" and then we'd get a hundred downloads and it would offset the cost of the flights by $100. Leaving us... ummmmmm... about $6000 down overall. Not too bad, really.

So now, all I need to do is either start stalking Ellen on Twitter or send her an email because she's totally sympathetic to Australia after Finding Nemo even though she didn't actually come here and instead recorded in a sound studio in LA. Because her character spent time in the mouth of a pelican flying around Sydney Harbour being chased by seagulls.

This plan can't fail!
Unless, by some miracle, she ignores a small obscure Australian time-travelling band. But what are the odds of that?