(Background Music)
Other than playing in bands?
A lot of recording, recording for some Australian bands
a lot of advertising jingles with people like Mike Brady
who wrote 'Up There Cazaly'
He is a hell of a songwriter and his last album was in Nashville,
he and I have been friends from working together for years.
My favourite? I probably shouldn't say, but we were finishing a tour
of Thailand with Kylie (Minogue)
Traditionally at the end of every tour, I would play jokes like
get the drummers sticks and tape them all together with one sticking out so that
when he broke or dropped a stick he would pull up about 20,
but of course I'm working for Kylie so I had to run it by her first
and say "we're playing tricks" - just messing around and so on.
She said "I'll get you" so I said "Yeah, okay. Good good luck with that" because I
had everybody set-up. We had a rotating stage for the dancers
and then they are rotating around and then when she (Kylie) gets to me she
surprised me - by flashing
so she definitely got me, I'm not sure what I played but it wasn't the right part.
We toured America with LRB (Little River Band) which I really loved
It was good for me because I started out with Air Supply
which was all hands-on, no sequencing at all
and then over the years I drifted into synthesisers and sequencing
There was a lot of sequencing with Kylie because you couldn't
reproduce that dance music without some sequencing happening
and then to go back to playing just hands on again with Little River Band
was just insane. Plus the American audiences are unbelievable.
We were playing to 50,000 people every second night
and then 5,000 the next. A lot of
county fairs, so you'd get 50,000 people out in the paddock somehow
and their incredible. You really know when they enjoy it.
A dear friend of mine I lived with, Charlie
was working in Jesus Christ Superstar,
in the mid-seventies. He rang me and said there are two other guys in the show
that are starting a band - so they came down and showed me that
the first acetate of their single and so my
drummer friend and I came up here (Sydney) and we started Air Supply
with those three guys and Mark McEntee from the Divinyls
I had to find a house in Sydney so I lived here in Queenscliff
which was right around the corner from where the Roland office was, and also
there was a shop in Brookvale
called Farrell's music and Tony was the
Keyboard Manager there, and he got me into demonstrating - I mean I was still touring,
but when I was in town, he would say 'Come in and show a couple of the guys what
you've been doing on keyboards'. So I was demonstrating ARP,
Oberheim, Moog and early Roland, like the SH-2
I think it was back then. (because) Roland was around the corner, they would come and watch
my demos and then eventually
John Egan who was the boss then, said come and do seem demos for us.
In 1981 Roland released the
Jupiter 8 and he rang up and said 'We are doing a national tour, can you
demonstrate the Jupiter 8' At that tour I met
Mr Kakehashi from Roland and he invited me to Japan
and I've been a consultant since then.
(laughs) I was wondering that. Again I went back to that
bastion of integrity - Wiki - and then I had a look at the
list of products in my categories, I have worked
on well over half. I didn't realise, I had lost track of them.
It's interesting, and in fact I'd love to go back one day and
find them all and just the re-record the demos, or get a copy of some of the demos that
I've done. I've done some ludicrous
demos. One product, it might have been one of the Sound Canvas's, I was
was working all day on a demo song in Japan and they said 'OK come on, its lunch time'
In Japan, 12 o'clock is lunch time, you go. So we went off to lunch
to eat in the local eel restaurant, which is just down the road from the factory
in Hamamatsu and they had background music play which was the
'koto' and 'shakuhachi' and noises from the
ah, whats the name of that theatre - kabuki theatre,
so you got all that 'yawool' and all that wonderful sound and I thought
most of those sounds I can get on the Sound Canvas, so I went back and wrote this tune
called, um, I think I called it Bento
...and then there is another, I just thought of another demo I did
for the W-30 which was an early sampler
we had, that had a sequence a built-in so we could
included a demo in that. I sat down with my acoustic guitar and
I recorded all the strings, then I recorded all the strings again with me hammering,
rather than picking and then I recorded some string slides
and then I recorded all releases of each note
I was going to play and then I had to program it so that every time a note
finished this release would play and if I wanted to do hammer ons, then I had to
put that on another channel
I created this thing that started to sound like an acoustic guitar - and I thought that's great,
but it needs a melody, so I rang up
my friend Penny, down here in Melbourne - Penny Dyer
and said come and sing on this for me - but you can't sing much,
sing the last line and for the rest of it just go 'doo doo doo'
and I sampled all the 'doos' and this last line, so it sounded like I have a
complete song where she is going 'doo doo doo doo foo' and
and this one line at the end. I paid her for the demo
but didn't realize that Roland Japan liked the sound
of the 'doos' so much, they pout it in every Sound Canvas ever made.
So I'm always apologising to Penny because she only got paid for the first session