You survived a bomb blast about 100 metres away from you.
Yeah.
What is that like?
Uh...
At that moment you just freeze.
You just can't move.
You see things unfold in front of you, in slow-mo almost.
That stayed with me for a very long time.
Tell me what Iraq felt like in your early years?
Because you lived through the Gulf War -
All the Gulf Wars!
All the Gulf Wars.
I'm sure there's like a crusade
or something that you missed way back then.
So, what are your earliest memories of Iraq?
My earliest memory of the place was that it was
a warm place, family-orientated
sort of country, that's relatively volatile.
And I've always known it as being a volatile place.
What does that do to a kid?
To live in a place
that you understand to be volatile?
I noticed the kind of stark difference moving to Australia
because things like
very mundane things, like having a diary
was a very weird concept.
Because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
Right.
You don't know whether there's a bomb around the corner
or there's like an air raid.
So the idea of not knowing what's going to happen next week
was really weird.
It was a police state.
You couldn't say much. You couldn't criticise anyone or anything.
And from an economic perspective as well.
My dad is a microbiologist.
He's got a PhD in microbiology
and his wage was like, I can't even remember.
It was the equivalent to $3 a month.
Jesus.
It was horrible.
We had food stamps, and everyone was included
and you could see Saddam building palaces, all the time.
You're a guy, right now, that plays huge parties.
And your job is to give people fun.
Yep.
I was curious about, how do people have fun
how does fun, and music, and culture
manifest in an environment where
life is sort of on an edge, a little bit.
I think people tend to head into the fun way to try and forget
about all the troubles happening.
And I still remember, when the invasion happened
the Coalition invasion happening in 2003.
The first chance people got to leave their homes
and actually open shops and stuff everybody was out.
Because they wanted to just forget about it, and have fun.
And try and live life relatively normally.
We kind of decided that, we had to do something about it.
Things are not getting good
they're not getting better.
They're getting probably worse.
Again, the volatility is a lot more tangible.
And my dad thought, we just need to do something.
So he just decided to pack his bags.
We were in Jordan, in Amman Jordan
which is the only sort of, exit point for Iraqis back then.
And you have to travel by land, it takes like
10 hours, 12 hours to travel
through the desert.
He thought, yeah I gotta do this. I need to do something about it.
So my mum and my sister kind of
and I, thought - we'll go back home, we'll brave it.
But little did we know that Saddam
the whole regime, would end up being gone.
And the invasion happened as well, in 2003.
And my dad
packed his bags, and pretty much
travelled to Australia on a boat.
And got locked up in Woomera for a year.
Your dad has left
and he has, I assume, very limited capacity
to communicate with you guys.
Whether he's alive
whether he's well.
What were you getting back?
Letters.
Letters?
Yeah.
Do you remember what the letters had in them?
I do remember him telling us
he was outside in the courtyard
and there's all like fences around the place.
Everyone was locked in, and they're all looking at the
you know, the desert.
They could see countless kangaroos running around
freer than them, you know?
So how did you guys end up coming out to Australia?
Well, he finally got his permanent residency.
How long did that take?
Six years.
About six years.
Did you see him in those intervening years?
Nup.
What did you actually know of Australia, when you came out?
Not much.
I knew of Savage Garden.
When you came to Australia, you -
at some point you got a job at a music store.
Yes.
Right away, pretty much within two or three months.
And what sort of impact did that have on you?
It's amazing.
And those, I mean working at the music store at that time
was crucial
to me understanding the culture in Australia.
Oh yeah. What did you learn about the culture in a music store?
Not taking things too seriously.
Without that, I wouldn't be making music for a living.
I studied, I went to Adelaide Uni.
What was interesting though
your mum said you should do music.
Yeah.
Yeah, my mum said I should get a serious job like a teacher.
Or doctor.
Yeah, I know.
You lucked out on the immigrant mum stakes.
Exactly, yeah.
My extended family are all like doctors, engineers
so it's part of that.
And also, as an immigrant you come here
and you're like, you need to work extra hard
because you need to rebuild your life
because you left everything behind.
So it's natural for them to be realistic, what are you going to do?
As a musician in a country full of amazing musicians
and you're an immigrant.
My mum thought, Tez, "You're doing really well."
and for my mum to say that
that was a big turning point for me.
Have you ever been back to Iraq?
No, absolutely. I can't really.
Why not?
It's not only dangerous, but I know
probably it's not going to be easy coming back to Australia
without getting a lot of questions asked.
Do you ever wish you could?
If all that didn't exist, do you ever wish you could go back
and see places you hung out as a kid.
Yeah, I would love to.
But I think
I have
I'm a lot more myself here, than I have been there.
And you have
control over your destiny in many ways
and have a diary and know what you're going to eat next week.
When you're up there on the stage
and you see the army of people in front of you
are you surprised
at how your career has gone, and how your life has gone?
I played a festival in Las Vegas
called EDC, Electric Daisy Carnival
It's one of the biggest festivals in the world.
It's huge.
Yeah.
And there was about 30,000 people in front of me.
That was probably one of the points in my life
where I kind of stopped
and really
took in what was going on around me.
And I thought -
I made this track in my bedroom.
Like, I made this track in my bedroom, on my laptop
by myself, in my tiny house I used to live in, in Adelaide
I remembered how much I was enjoying myself doing that
and it was right there in front of me.
Music is like a manifestation of you
in like a form of a song composition or a tune.
It's like a piece of you everywhere, you know?
So I'm very thankful when I get up there
I think, within myself, I think that.
Motez.
Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you so much, thanks for having me.