Larry Van Kriedt Interview

by Jeremy Platt

J. Let’s start with a question about your musical upbringing. What was it like having Dave Van Kriedt as a dad?

L. From the womb I was always surrounded by his kind of music - West Coast jazz of the 1950s. He would be writing and arranging things on the piano. I’d be hearing the architecture of the chords…. And also he’d be playing sax. There were lots of rehearsals and jam sessions at the house.

J. This was in San Francisco?

L. Yes. Every couple of years we seemed to move house, but it was all in or around San Francisco… in Northern California. 

J. Did that include “Jones Street”, which is the title of one of your songs?

L. Yes. We moved to Jones Street, in the North Beach neighborhood of S.F.,  around 1963. I was 9 years old …. I would come home from school sometimes and there’d be a jazz band in the living room, rehearsing for a gig. 

At the same time there was the 1960s counterculture all around ... the roots of the hippie movement. There was an influx of young bohemian people, and across the street from our house there was an arts school, there was always going on there. It seemed like overnight psychedelic painted cars were driving around. Something changed, you know. My father moved away from that. There were five kids in my family - two older sisters, and a younger sister and brother, with me in the middle. My father started getting very protective of my older sisters. They/we listened to the Beatles, Bob Dylan. My father wasn’t keen on that because it was the cultural revolution and he came from an era of Big Bands, quintets, quartets or whatever. When he saw a band with guitars twanging away and teenage girls screaming, it was a bit of a shock for him. He probably saw that the music he’d trained for was disappearing.

J. Was he trying to steer you away from that, musically?

L.   In his own way… but he knew that it would be like trying to stop the tide coming in.

J. I’m interested in your musical relationship with him. Did he teach you or did you just absorb things?

L. I absorbed a lot. A piano player called Si Perkoff came round. He was a jazz musician and gave us some lessons. I didn’t persevere a lot with the piano and was somehow pushed and guided towards the double bass. My dad inherited one from a jazz club and he organised lessons from a classical player around the corner. I played a bit at school. I always found it a difficult instrument because it’s physically demanding, especially for a kid. Blisters on the fingers and so on. I’d play at family parties at the house, jam sessions.  It would get pretty loose. Someone would say “Come on Larry, you get on the bass”. I just learned how to fake it, and they were always very encouraging and told me I was a natural musician. But of course, I saw the Beatles coming... and Bob Dylan. It was a different generation.

J. Did that make you want to play guitar?

L. Well you saw the Beatles and they were pretty good, and girls were chasing them, you know, A Hard Day’s Night. So I just thought - that’s what I wanna do! Ha! I wanna be in a band. My sister had a nylon string guitar that I found really difficult to play. There was a book… here’s a C chord, here’s a G chord. Even after playing the double bass it seemed like hard work. 

But then a year or two later I remember hearing on the radio - Yardbirds - I think it’s called M A N (I’m a Man) - (sings riff) I worked it out on the guitar and started building on the blues scale from there and then the other kids  at school would go “Wow, you can play the guitar!”, you know, and there were a lot of Indian modes that were popular at the time , George Harrison songs on Revolver and Sargent Pepper, and I could sort of drone on one string and play a mode on another and that was pretty impressive to the other kids. 

And then when I first heard Hendrix - that was a life changing moment. You could hear what a guitar could do. At that time there’d  never been any sounds like that.

J. Were you still playing double bass?

L. I was still playing double bass at school and sometimes my dad would drive me along to a jam session with his mates. 

J. It all seems to be kind of self taught experimentation - nothing formal?

L. That’s right. One day I asked my father - I played that Dominant 7th Sharp 9 chord which Jimi Hendrix used a lot - and I said to him, “what is this chord” and he said it’s an E7 sharp nine, or augmented 9 and I said “ well what is a 9? “ and we went to the piano and he showed me about intervals. “Here’s the root” and he’d count up 123456789 - 9... and that hit something in me. We used to drill each other. Play a root note, and do a blind test - what’s this other note? I was quite good at it - semitone above the 4 - sharp 4. 

Years later I did study some harmony with him, working with Bach Chorales. 

J.One of the things that strikes me about some of your songs is that the harmony is pretty sophisticated - there’s like a jazz vocabulary. Where did that come from?

L. Well I think I’ve always been attracted to pretty sounds.

J. But again that was achieved by experimentation rather than formal training.

L.  That’s right. It was just an attraction to those sounds. There has been a lot of trial and error in my education. I think that the environment I grew up in, in San Francisco, had a leaning toward jazz, blues. There was an openness towards different chords and experimentation as well. With the whole psychedelic thing - it was almost like “Anything goes”. 

There were some jazzy rock bands around. This band called the Sons of Champlin were a really big influence on me with their first album, ‘Loosen Up Naturally’. And they had a great guitarist in the band, Terry Haggerty, and a really good singer (Bill Champlin). They had good chords and scales, but at the same time it was really psychedelic, but R and B with saxophones and Hammond organ. And the guitar playing - still to this day, I think there’s some really great guitar playing going on there.... adventurous and wild, but sophisticated.

I played double bass in the school orchestra. I went to Sir Francis Drake High School for a year, there was a full orchestra with all the percussion instruments, flutes, trumpets, everything. And after class, one of the trombone players, who played some blues piano at home,  said “come to my place and we’ll have a jam after school”. 

Somebody had a bass guitar there and because I played Double bass and 6 string guitar, it was an easy fit. And then I started playing guitar with these guys because I had a guitar and then I got quite a nice guitar, a Gibson ES175, that I’d saved up for. And then I was on fire. But, destiny had it that we were gonna move to Australia at that point. 

J. Before we get to that can I ask you - at this point , absorbing all this stuff, are you already thinking that music is your life?

L. Pretty much. I mean I was told otherwise. I can clearly remember my father saying, on several occasions, “ if you want to make money, have a house, have a normal life ...don't be a musician ….. especially don’t be a jazz musician!” 

J. So was money tight at home for that reason?

L. Well, he was teaching, He did casual gigs but he was teaching school. He had a family to support.

J. Even when he was playing with Dave Brubeck and so on?

L. Well, that was in the fifties and he was younger, and a student. He and Brubeck and a few of the other ones studied with Darius Milhaud, the French composer. They all went to Paris to study with him after World War 2, and then Milhaud moved to San Francisco and they continued to study with him. I looked at my birth certificate recently and my father’s occupation is listed as ‘student’. He was twenty nine years old then.

Sydney, Australia

J. Let’s talk about the move to Australia. Was that discussed at family level or did that just come out of the blue? 

L.  My parents had, for a few years, talked about moving to Alaska or Australia, and we thought that’s never gonna happen, but then in 1969 it suddenly became serious. I didn’t really have any say in it.

J. What were the reasons for the move?

L. I think he just felt that the trajectory of his life was not gonna go anywhere, and he had to change things. But I don’t know. There could be many things behind it.

J. How old were you at the time of the move?

L. I had just turned 15 when we moved.

J. And did you not want to move?

L. Not really, no.

J. Am I right in thinking that your sisters didn’t go?

L. My two older sisters did not go and they were teenagers at the time. They stayed in San Francisco. Me, and a younger sister and brother moved to Australia with my mother and father.

J. Did your older sisters stay in touch?

L. Oh yes. They just didn’t want to go to Australia and to this day they live in California and I go visit them when I can.

J. Did your parents have jobs lined up in Australia?

L. No, nothing was guaranteed. They had a scheme where the Australian government assisted you by paying for some of your passage - many Brits did it, not so many Americans like us. We went there on the Oriana. We took that double bass - it slept in one of the berths. And when we arrived in Sydney we went straight to a migrant hostel in Burwood. We stayed there until we could get a house and then it was just a matter of applying for jobs and getting us children into school.

J. What did your Dad end up doing?

L. He got a job teaching school again, didn’t like it. And then he got some gigs playing. A steady gig he got, was playing in the band for the stage musical, “Hair”. And then he got a contract to play in a Football Leagues club in Newcastle, which is about a hundred miles north of Sydney. 

At this time I had left school because I so didn’t fit into the school system. I quit at fifteen and started to look for a job. I got a job as a trainee musical instrument repairer in a music shop. And after that my dad got this contract in Newcastle, so they moved north and I stayed in Sydney. So at fifteen I was living on my own in Sydney. At the time I thought “this is great”. I moved into a house with some other guys. We had a little band.

J. Was Australia a massive culture shock?

L. Yes. Absolutely. San Francisco had been at the centre of this cultural revolution. The Summer of Love was really a marketing event that was organised by the music industry to sell records, but the scene had been going on for a number of years before then, eventually swallowing up the Beatles generation.  And there was a lot of drugs- pot smoking, LSD was the big drug of the day (in San Francisco). 

So when I hit Australia everything seemed to be grey, old fashioned. They didn't wear school uniforms in California - we wore jeans to school. In Australia you had to wear the grey uniform and the tie. Students were disciplined with the cane.

It was an all boys school and it was a bunch of prefab buildings. The music class in Sydney consisted of a bunch of boys sitting in a room blowing on  recorders. And I remember the teacher was talking about music, and I was new in the class and he asked “What did you learn?” and I said “Intervals” and he tested me and said “What’s this?” And I said “major third” and he said ok and played a flat 5 and I said “flat 5” and he couldn’t believe it. I had an ear. 

Some of the teachers were bullying me actually, for being American. Some of them apparently didn’t like Americans. I was the brunt of a lot of jokes. I didn’t like it, and I quit school. I might have stayed if there had been some friendlier teachers.

Meeting Angus Young

J. Let’s jump to your meeting AC/DC. Everything I’ve heard of your music and having played your music, playing in AC/DC isn’t something I would have expected you to have done.

L. That was when we were living in the migrant hostel in Burwood. It was a place that attracted young people to hang because there were families there, and children of different ages that were living on the hostel, mostly British migrants. 

So some of the locals kids in the area would hang there after school. I noticed a couple of kids in the far corner of the park in the hostel and one kid had a guitar. He was a little kid. It was Angus. He had his school uniform on because he must have come straight from school. He had his friends and a couple of local girls hanging around. He was showing off a bit.

 I didn’t think much of it and a couple of days later there was a group of boys there and he was there and he was talking about guitars. I was a shy kid and I didn’t really say too much. He was talking about guitars and he said he wanted to get a Gibson. He had this old Hoffner that he inherited from an older brother. Another kid, who had a room near mine in the hostel, named Robert Proudfoot - he pointed to me and said, “He’s got a Gibson.” And Angus looked me up and down, looked right in my eyes and said... “Bullshit”... Then he looked away and said, in a friendlier tone, “do you really have a Gibson?” I said “yes...” and he said “...Can I see it?” And I said “yes but on the condition that there’s only you that comes into my room. I don’t want all these other kids coming in”.

So he came to my room and all the other kids are out in the corridor trying to peer in. I pulled my guitar case out from under my bed, got my guitar out, and, he couldn’t believe it. Then I played some blues licks, and he went “Woah - you can play”. He says “What are you doing tomorrow? After school you’ve gotta come to my house and meet my brother! ... and bring your guitar. I’ll come and get you so be ready!”.

 I wasn’t  going to school at that point because we’d only arrived the week before. So, the next day I went to his home with him, a few blocks away. We went in, and he was very friendly now. I was like his pet find, kind of thing. So he took me home and he introduced me to his mother, and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying because it was a very thick Glaswegian accent. He had to translate everything. As soon as he went into the house he was speaking with the same accent. So he’d speak with the Aussie accent to me and the Scottish accent to his mum. His mother was very nice, very sweet and she seemed to like me, Angus said “she likes American boys”.

 We went into the bedroom that he shared with his brother, Malcolm, who was sitting on the edge of his bed with a guitar already playing away. Angus says to him, “This is the kid I was telling you about”, and Malcolm looks at me distrustingly. He was practising away and he had a record player there. He’d put something on. He had a Led Zeppelin record, or something, and he was working out the riffs. And I can remember one of the songs he played (sings riff “and my legs are thin”..)

J. “Oh well” - Fleetwood Mac

L. That’s it. And he was playing it over and over. He said “Get your guitar out” and he seemed to soften up. Anyway, that’s how I met them. I was invited over every weekend after I’d finished working, to come over and stay at their house. I’d come over on Friday night and I’d go home on Sunday evening, every weekend.

J. But you played bass with them didn't you?

L. Well they didn’t have AC/DC yet, that came a few years later. They were still going to school. It was just sitting on beds and playing guitars. You know - “what’s that, and, how did you do that?”

Formation Of AC/DC

J. So when did it turn into AC/DC?

L. A few years later. Things had happened... things had moved on. A couple of years later I had a son. I was eighteen, nineteen, and I had a family. I was trying to make ends meet. I was doing a few gigs on the bass. I’d gotten a bass guitar as a ploy to get some work. There was an agency and I used to get the odd fill in gig at a club or somewhere, backing acts, doing Tom Jones songs or Engelbert Humperdink, or whatever. They’d have charts. I probably wasn’t very good, but it was a good experience for me. 

One day there was a knock on the door, it was a guy who I recognised as Robbie Lord, a friend of Malcolm Young’s. He wasn’t a musician himself, but he was a loyal friend of Malcolm’s. 

He said “Have you got a bass?” and I said yeah, and he said ”Malcolm’s putting a band together and he needs a bass player, he wants you to come and have a jam”. I said “What, now”? And he said “yeah”, so I went to the rehearsal place with Robbie. Malcolm at this stage had a Marshall stack. He’s discovered the sound of the Marshall. Full rig setup. There was a drummer, there was no singer yet. It was very loud.

J. And was Angus playing in that band?

L. He wasn’t in yet. We just got together and played 2 or 3 times a week. Then one day a couple of weeks later, Angus came in and he just seemed to fit right in with Mailcolm’s songs and stuff. We tried some singers out, and drummers, before Malcolm settled on Dave Evans and Colin Burgess.  Malcom and Angus’s older brother, George Young, had been in the Easybeats. Him and Harry Vanda were moving back to Sydney from London.  

I didn’t understand much about the music industry then, but they were very close with Albert Music, which the Easybeats had been signed with. Alberts were an Australian publishing family who had backed the Easybeats years earlier. Now, George and Harry were going to be the A & R for the record label. But I didn’t understand all that stuff. Goerge was coaching Malcolm from afar to get a rock and roll band together.  I think George was saying “Just play Rock and Roll, forget the other stuff” So Malcolm said “That’s where we’re going - we’re gonna do stripped down rock and roll”.

 So we rehearsed and got the odd gig. Because of the older brother’s connection with the Easybeats, there were plenty of people willing to help the band out. We got some gigs and then we went into the studio with George and Harry and we recorded some stuff. And on the second day, I think they thought there was something wrong with my bass part and they wanted me to do it again. And I think I just thought “I wanna play what I wanna play” Anyway, I didn’t get along with George and Harry and I really wasn’t going to fit into AC/DC. As you probably realise, I wanted to play different kinds of chords, different kinds of modes. They were right for them, but I was right for me. Anyway that was it. I wasn’t gonna fit , they realised that, so I was out. 

They weren’t successful for a while but eventually I began to hear things about them. A song would come on the radio and they just kept going up, up, and up for years. And people would say “you missed out on that one” and I’d say “ I dunno.”

J. So you don’t regret it at all?

L. I don’t, because I can’t really see myself doing that, and they never changed that thing, and why should you change, but it just wouldn’t be me.

J. Was Bon in the band when you were in?

L. No. He came after. I think they really took off when Bon Scott joined. In Australia, we could all see what was going on, and Bon Scott brought it to life. He was the perfect face, voice and lyricist for AC/DC.

J. So you didn’t think that was a particularly big event at the time?

L. Well I did. It was clear that the band would be successful one day, I liked being in it and doing the whole recording thing - going into a big studio to do that - I was like “wow”. I did learn a lot from the whole thing, for example, Malcolm once said to me “The people in the music business who make the money are the people who write the songs”. And it struck a note with me, ‘cause my father was a writer, and I thought, well I can write. So I started writing songs.

J. So you’d never tried to write anything in America...or?

L. Not really no. I started singing in Australia, and that’s something my father did encourage because he wasn’t a singer but, although he said “don’t be a musician and don’t be a jazz musician”, he did say “if you can sing and accompany yourself, you’ll always get a job”. That was a bit of encouragement. And people that I admired could play well, sing and write songs.     

J. So were you writing songs for yourself to perform or was your idea to write songs for other people?

L. I was just writing songs that I would sing, and then be in a band and people would say “we should do something with this”.  So we’d make a demo, and all that stuff. 

And so, after AC/DC, I hit a low point. All the friends that I’d had, had gotten married or moved on, and nobody seemed to be around. It was a bit lonely, and my relationship with my son’s mother fell apart. 

Then I was all on my own in Sydney with no band, no family or friends around - I got a bit depressed actually. And my father came down to see me, and he basically said “Why don’t you come up to Newcastle? Live in the house with us. There’s a lot of bands there, a lot of gigs, live music. You’ll fit in somewhere.” 

Newcastle, Australia

So, I went up on my holiday time and ended up staying in Newcastle. I started playing in different bands and stuff, I’d write songs and nobody around there seemed to be doing that. There was a lot of live music around… lots of local musicians. We played a bunch of covers. 

We worked in a place called Zorba’s Tavern, which was open until about three every night and whatever ship was in the harbour would be the clientele of the place that night. It was a very colourful place, and we’d play there six times a week, sometimes five nights a week, whatever. 

It’s a really good way to learn how to perform with an audience. 

And then we started to put in a few originals. At some point, I was singing more and more and I wanted to reshuffle the band and get jazzier, more r&b and funkier musicians. Because a lot of musicians in Australia were coming from, I think a country kind of route. Cause we’re talking seventies now. There was disco, funk pre punk, there was a lot of  funky, jazzy popular  music around, some of it not great but there was some good music too. And I liked that funkier sound, that jazzier sound. It was still kind of rock or pop. It could be popular, it could be on the radio. But then of course, the punk thing came along eventually, and that was all - forget about jazzier sounds. 

J. So the punk thing hit Australia in the same way as Europe?

L. Oh yeah. And then soon after it was the post punk thing like the Police and Joe Jackson, the Cars...

I started writing a lot more songs in this New Wave vein and eventually we formed “The Eighty Eights”. We started getting interest from Sydney. 

Back To Sydney

J, So you were in your early twenties at this point?

L. Yeah, and the guy who managed INXS, Chris Murphy, basically took us to Sydney and said “I’ll give you work” and we said we’d need to make X amount of money to live there, and he said he could do that. So we went to Sydney and released an album. One of the songs was on the charts in Sydney and we started touring around the country... Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide.

J. What kind of music would you describe it as?

L. They called it Powerpop, they were pop songs with a lot of high energy in them. Tempos were fast, and they were kind of in that New Wave sound……..it was during that time… the late seventies.

J. And were you the main songwriter in the band?

L. No. That was the thing ... everybody started writing. We had a manager and everybody started lobbying him to get their songs out in front. I started to feel that I was wasting my time with it, and once we finished pushing the first album and it was time to do a second album, I knew I needed a change. 

Non Stop Dancers

So, after a short break, I formed a new band with my brother on drums, and my girlfriend on bass, and some other friends, and we all wrote a bunch of songs... It was now the early eighties, there was still a punk awareness though people were trying to do things differently. It was adventurous, a little bit arty I suppose. 

Musically there was a bit of experimentation but it was a real mixed bag of all sorts of styles. And we had a hit single with my song, Shake This City.

Production

We did some recording with some producers...  Mark Moffatt and Ricky Fataar. I became friends with them, especially with Ricky. I’d go round to his house. I wanted to learn about production. He got me involved in some projects he was working on. 

And Ricky, he’s a great musician, he’s well known for his drumming as well as his record production, and for playing ‘Stig O’Hara’ in the Rutles movie! He came from South Africa, but was quite international - London, Los Angeles, Amsterdam. He was in the Beach Boys at one point, when Brian Wilson left... Now he plays for Bonnie Raitt, he’s been her drummer for many, many years. I was kind of in awe of his studio vibe. He was so relaxed. 

I did quite a few projects with him - an LP for Tony Llewellyn, a movie soundtrack with Tim Finn for Barry Humphries. So I kind of got myself into a studio thing, which I wanted to do - be part of the studio family of the Australian scene. 

I’ll just say that while we were working on the soundtrack of Barry Humphries’ movie - “Les Patterson Saves The World” I started working with samplers and sequencers, timecode and computers… how they worked and how they locked everything together.... In today’s equipment, it’s all built in, but in those days, you had to make everything talk to each other. 

I started playing around with a sampler during the movie. I got an Atari computer and an Akai S950 sampler, and started playing around with, among other things, looping bits and pieces. Even if you had a ride cymbal, you could loop it so it would be a continuous and seamless groove. 

Def FX

I guess a few people knew that I was doing sampling, in a musical way. So one day I got a call from a uni student named Sean Lowry, who was doing an art degree at Sydney Uni. He was forming a band and he wanted to bring some records round and have me sample them. 

So we sampled some very popular records and put them together. I tuned them up so that the various keys and rhythms were locking together and in tune. It was quite an exhilarating sound and we started writing a song over that. The postmodern formula worked with pop songs. The band was called Def FX. The first song we put together, on day one, was called Surfers Of The Mind. The words and music were all finished on that first afternoon. It became an underground single. The energy of the band was like grunge but it had dance techno underneath it.

J. Were you in the band?

L. Yes. At first, I was an invisible member, I was very much a part of the sound … but they were all like twentyish and I was like, forty… bit of an age gap...I was always there, working in the studio. We did several albums. 

One day the bass player came down with some illness and he had to pull out. He was in agony. They were just about to go on a big tour around the country, and I knew all the songs because I’d helped to put them together. I just picked up the bass and segued straight into it. I went on the tour with them and became part of the live lineup. 

J. Were you using samples live on stage?

L. Well basically, the band was playing along to my backing tracks which were sample heavy, there was no drummer. The backing tracks were made of various drum and music loops with some sound fx thrown in. Everyone played their individual parts over the backing tracks, and very energetically I might say. 

Afram

So I toured around with Def FX while developing some other projects at the same time. I met this Moroccan fellow named Abdellatif Chikhaoui. He became a friend of mine. One day, backstage at a gig, a friend told me “This guy wants to meet you.” 

So, I went out, and here is this very charismatic guy with dreadlocks sitting on the floor with a beautiful woman. He says “Hi man, I’d like you to make me a star.” That was the first sentence he said to me (I’m still trying to do that). 

Then he said “I’ve got this gig up at Avalon Beach in a cafe every sunday. There’s jamming. Why don’t you come up? 

So I went to the cafe and there was all this chaos going on... I loved it! There were some good players here. I recognised a few of them, Arnie Hanna, who played with Jackie Orszaczky and Max Q. Arnie was an excellent guitarist, very funky. 

There were a few other people, and , of course, Abdul, the Morrocan Mick Jagger, hopping around the cafe - flipping out.

 So I got my sax out and jammed, nice energy, very open. Afterwards, I went back to Abdul’s place and we wrote a song. And every time we got together we’d write another song. And I thought, “this is pretty good”. He’d sing and he could play a bit of guitar. He would interpret things and we would take it somewhere really unexpected. So we wrote a lot of stuff and I thought... ‘why don’t we form a band?’. 

So we started playing around Sydney, trying to approach it seriously. We got some gigs and the band became a focus. We called it Afram, which meant African/American. 

From time to time a conversation would come up...He’d say “Why don’t we go to Bali?...Paris, New York, London - what are we doing here? - there’s nothing going on”.

 But everybody would have their own lives and we’d think “That’s nice but how do we do that?” 

What Are We Doing Here

So anyway, we made this CD/album of our original tunes, we called it What Are We Doing Here. I produced it and we got it finished and sent it away to get pressed. 

On the Afram album cover, we had a little thank you list, and he started naming people I didn’t even know, like someone named Zakaria, and I was like “Why are we thanking him?” and he said “because we’re going to stay at his place.” We were thanking them in advance, for something he would do in the future! Which is brilliant, when you think about it. 

J. What was his prior relationship with Abdul?

L. Zakaria and Abdul were friends from teenage years in Morocco. They came from the same neighbourhood of Casablanca, from the old medina. 

Let’s Go!

There was a point where nobody in the band was in a relationship and didn’t owe any money to anybody. So, when the old conversation came up again…”Why don’t we just get out of here?”, suddenly it was, “Yeah, why not?”. So we bought some tickets to Germany, to Munich. 

Morocco was always calling…  It was always in the background calling to us, “Morocco, Morocco...” but it was on the other side of the world, faraway from Sydney... a long way away, and we didn’t really have much money. Maybe we were just dreaming. We didn’t know if we’d ever make it that far...

When we got the tickets, Abdul, who was savvy at travelling, said “ Get the ticket to Munich via Bangkok and make sure you have a stopover in Bangkok”. So I bought a ticket, a return ticket, open for one year. 

Thailand

When the CDs arrived I stuffed as many as I could into my suitcase, grabbed my guitar, and flew to Bangkok. 

I got into a cab and reached for my seatbelt ... there wasn’t one... and I thought... “Oh... third world country”, it was my first time. We started driving into Bangkok and the energy of the city - it was late at night, it was jumping all over the place, there was traffic everywhere, cooking smells. You could see people preparing food in the back of a van, while they were driving along in heavy traffic. They were chopping things up - somebody was working in the back to go and feed some people in some night time market some place.

I got to my hotel and it was all pretty wild, I was mesmerised. And the next morning.....I rang Abdul and he was on an island called Koh Samui and he said “Just fly down, get a ticket today!”

 Every hotel lobby’s got a little travel agent, so I got a ticket right away. A cab took me back to the airport. I got on a plane, propeller, we took off and landed an hour later on Koh Samui, in the middle of a jungle. I got my bags, everybody left and I was the last one in the airport. The place was deserted. 

And I rang Abdu, “I’m here!” and he said “Great! We’ll come and get you. Just wait”. So I sat down under a coconut tree while music, muzak, was piped out of the foliage. I sat there in wonder. 

We spent three months on the beach, as part of our business plan. We had a suitcase full of our CDs, and Abdul, this was his plan the whole time, he says, “first thing, we get a suntan on the beach.” And we hired these little motor scooters, Hondas or Suzukis, just like a pushbike but with a lawn mower engine on it. For me, it was total freedom, (sings “Born to be Wild”) with the wind in my hair, doing 10 mph on my Suzuki.

We’d go to a bar, with no walls, it was just open, on the beach. There’d be music playing and we’d say to the guy “Excuse me, can you put our CD on please” and he put it on, and there’s our CD playing. People are dancing and some are saying “It’s these guys - it’s their CD!” ,

“Is this yours?” “Yeah”, “Oh, can I buy one?” We sold a whole bunch of them. This was all part of Abdul’s business plan. He’d travelled a lot and he knew how it worked. 

After three months it was time to move on, and we continued our journey to Munich.

Munich

Munich was so quiet compared to Thailand. There was no one haggling in the street. Everybody was very polite. It was almost sterile in comparison. It was clean. It was nice. Zacharia was there, the guy we thanked on the CD. 

We got his car going, a 70s vintage Cadillac Eldorado with tinted windows. You could imagine Jimmy Carter sitting in the back. Eventually, we had to make a decision, “Are we gonna go to Morocco?” The money that was supplying this whole thing was running out. And the question was - do we go back (to Australia) or do we make that leap of faith to go from Munich all the way to Morocco on the road? Because if we do, we’ll run out of money and we’ll be in Morocco with no way home, back to Australia.

Morocco

Big decision, we thought about it and eventually, we said “Let’s go, let’s go to Morocco”. So we did. Abdul went ahead on a bus and Zakaria and I drove a week later in a car, in the Cadillac, a petrol guzzling thing, crazy business plan - we were filling the gas tank up all the time. It took us about three days to get down there, driving. 

For me it was exciting, it was an adventure. I felt I was doing something that had never been done before . I’m sure it had been …..we got to Morocco. 

So we spent a couple of days in Casablanca and then we went to Essaouira. Basically, we just started playing around the town. We used the CD like a business card and people would get into it say “Wow this is really cool” and we’d just go and play in restaurants with no electricity. We didn’t have any amps, so we just learned to play with an acoustic guitar, a hand drum from off the wall that was there for decoration. Somehow we just managed to entertain people who were kind of starved for entertainment. The rest of the guys in the band flew over. Cause it was just two of us and another Moroccan guy was in the band. So the rest of them came and they brought my saxophone and a few things, not much. It was cabin baggage. We still didn’t have any amps. But I played the sax which was like “ Wow, a saxophone in this place” at that time.

J. Can we just stop briefly there, because you did briefly mention the saxophone before and the fact that you started playing much later than your other instruments - you haven't really said anything about how playing the saxophone came about.

L. Way back in Sydney, I left school and I got a job repairing musical instruments and it was mainly saxophones that we were doing. And I just started noodling around with them in the shop. I bought an old used sax and took it home. And the band that I was playing in - we were just young guys living in the same house. I don’t think we did any gigs. We were just writing songs and I just blew the sax, worked things out by ear. So I started like that. In the earlier bands, I didn’t play much sax. Then when Non Stop Dancers started, I made a decision to use a lot more sax and I went from alto to tenor. I got a nice Selmer tenor. So from Non Stop Dancers on I was playing a lot more sax.

J. You found your own way with it?

L. It was just self taught. I didn’t read or anything like that. It was just all by ear. Of course, my dad was a sax player and I had an ear for it.

J. Ok. Do you want to jump back  to Morocco?

L. Ok, so we’re in Morocco and everybody’s vibing on our CD. We crossed Moroccan and western music, fusing it together, even though when we made the CD in Sydney, I didn’t know much about Moroccan music, other than being around Abdul and other Moroccans. I would sample them playing drums and I would pick up a rhythm that they liked to play on, and I would loop that and we would write songs and make it fit to our material. That kind of thing made it Moroccan sounding. And we put jams together in the way that people would put a twelve inch single together - snippets of a jam, tidying it up and putting it into a song form. 

The Moroccans really liked our CD and were excited by it. We started in Essaouira, just messing about, and then we went to Casablanca where we met some people who got us some bigger shows, tapping into a Lycee (a secondary school), lots of young people started coming to our concerts. We got into radio stations and were partying with the DJs live on air. 

We were regulars on Nadia Larguet’s TV show, Entr’act. Nadia loved the band and still is a big supporter. It was fun. Everybody was having a good time. Everybody wanted to know us. 

But after a year of living in Casablanca… there were decisions to be made. The big one was about the plane tickets back to Australia. They would expire at the end of a 12 month period, so, the question is: do you go home, or do you let the ticket burn? We also decided it was time to leave Morocco and try our luck in Europe. A couple of the guys went home. That meant we were a smaller, tighter unit now. 

Andalucia

A friend of the band gave us a car. We thought we were going to go to Paris, but the car overheated in Andalusia. When we got to southern Spain, big mountains, very hot in August - it just heated up and blew a pipe. It did the head gasket in. Steam hissing out, we limped into the nearest town, which was Granada. We didn’t know anything about Granada, and no one in Afram spoke Spanish. 

It was a Peugeot 504 or 405 or something and there was a Peugeot sign on a garage and it was open, amazingly enough, because it was a national holiday. So we just went down the ramp and coasted in with steam coming out and this Spanish mechanic is looking in amazement thinking “Where did you guys come from?” He opened up the hood of the car and looked at it. He revved the engine up from the carburetor. He pulled the accelerator lever and water shot up like a geyser. He shouted “Malo, Malo”.  We gathered that it wasn’t good. So we left the car with them and we got a cab into the center of Granada. 

We really didn’t have much money left. Hardly any actually, enough for a couple of nights there, so we stayed in this hotel. We were all sick from eating the food on a new continent. We were all lying in bed feeling miserable and moaning. And then Abdul said “Come on, we’ve got to go into town. We’ve got to make some friends, we’ve got to hustle.” So we all went into town.

  Plaza Nueva. There were things going on, bars, young people everywhere. There were a couple of German girls and somehow we started talking to them. They were with this local guy named Jose, they were staying at his place. Jose was this really sweet Spanish guy. He came with us to act as our translator. We went to all the bars and said “Do you wanna hire a band?” No one did, not on this night. 

At the end of the night we sat there with Jose, thinking “What are we gonna do?” And Jose just says, at the very end of the night “ I...have...a...bar” (laughs) “What? You have a bar? Can we play there?” “Yes, why not?” So the next day he picked us up and he took us to his apartment and we all moved into this one bedroom apartment - the four in the band, the two German girls who were already living there, and Jose. 

We began rehearsing with a local drummer and soon started doing gigs around Granada with Jose helping us. We got some big crowds and we got some money together to fix the car and then we thought “Let’s take the car back to Morocco - get it back to its owner.”

Paris

Soon after returning to Casablanca, we caught a bus to Paris. Money was tight but we found a cheap hotel called Formula One. It cost twenty eight euros a night and it would sleep all four of us in one room. It was  a kind of space age, modular hotel. 

We had a friend who had a studio apartment in the 17th arrondissement, and she let us stay there. We made lots of friends in Paris, and tried out some ideas, but after three months, in Europe, you have to move if you’re not from an EU country, and we weren’t. But, the UK had passport control and we could cross the border and stay in the UK for 6 months. 

So Abdul said “I’ve got this friend - he lives in Sheffield”. He’d been to Australia years ago and he’d travelled - Bali, around Australia. He knew what Abdul was like, and he just lit up - “Whoa - this is great, Abdul’s in town with the band. Come to my house! Come and stay with me in Sheffield”. He came and picked us up in his car on a day pass on the ferry. 

Yorkshire

So there we were in Sheffield, in the UK - we got a few gigs here and there. We did some shows in London. We had a flat in London for a while, but it wasn’t easy, there was a lot of pressure. The band kinda fell out a little bit, to be honest. After all that time on the road, we were feeling the strain - it was three years now since we left Sydney. I got married in Sheffield. 

We still had the flat in London and I would go down there. I made good money busking in the London Underground. When the lease on the flat ran out, I went back to Sheffield. Then, I got citizenship, dual citizenship - American and British. 

J. What did you have to do to qualify for British citizenship?

L. Just jumped through all the hoops, did all the paperwork. I was married to a UK citizen, naturally that was a big help. I got the papers. 

So, I settled down in Sheffield, started a business, and started doing gigs around town… building up momentum.

Cancer 

2002, about the time that I got married, I had a swelling on my temple. We got an x-ray and there was some kind of tumour in my face. So I ended up with this special Maxi-facial surgeon, because it had to come out. I wondered “How are they gonna do that?” They took it out. It was a big one. It was benign but there was a tiny bit left in. It was incomplete and it would show up on MRI scans. 

They went in again and they couldn’t find it but it was still there on the MRI scans. They said “we can leave it”, probably because I played the saxophone, I think. “We can just watch it. It probably won’t do anything - but if it does do something, we have to move fast because it could be nasty. So after five years - nothing, fine. I was still playing the sax. 

Then in 2008 I went to Spain to visit my son. I looked in the mirror. It was a different house, a different mirror, the light was different, and I noticed my temple was swollen again. I knew right away that I had to let my doctor know. So as soon as I got back from Spain I rang them up and said “There’s a swelling on my temple” They said “Come in.”. X-rays, biopsy.

They said it’s most likely something nasty. They didn’t know what ...they were analysing, and analysing. Eventually they came up with a name for it. I can’t remember what it was called now but it was a nasty one. So the plan was - take it out. And of course it was a very life threatening thing because as the doctor said, “If it was in your arm, we could cut your arm off but it’s in your head. We can’t cut your head off”. I don’t think that would work too well. I said “Do you think you can get it out?” He said “We’re treating it as curable”. 

“Oh, Good.Ok”

So it was a big thing. There was a team of doctors and they would cross reference with each other. Anyway, I went in and they did it - took it out. It was life changing surgery this time. The first one was pretty invasive but this one was more because they took out part of my jawbone and they had to go through the roof of my mouth, so they had to take teeth out - not all of them. There was a hole they had to get through to get access to this awkward part. 

So I recovered from that but I had a hole in my mouth and I have to wear a plate. My jaw is locked now (trismus), so I can’t open my mouth very wide. I play the sax any more because of the hole through my mouth and my embouchure is completely different. Saxophone -  finished. 

It stopped my musical career except for my online business, Jazzbacks (I produced backing tracks in my studio). Gigs just had to stop, so any momentum that was there was stopped. My partner lived in Huddersfield. She could have backed off when I had this illness but she didn’t. She stepped up and we got even closer than we were, so, I moved to Huddersfield. 

For years following the treatment, I didn’t know how to approach life. Everytime you move from one town to another you start all over again. I started working my way back into it, gradually. I really had to learn to sing again because of my mouth locking up. Not playing sax anymore was weird. But luckily, I had my guitar playing. 

I went to the Huddersfield Jazz Guitar Society once a month to play. There were some very good jazz guitar players there. It’s been really good for me. 

I settled down and started learning more guitar, and when you don’t have the other instrument… there’s no saxophone to practise... so just practise the guitar. 

Through the Huddersfield Jazz Guitar Society, I met other players who became part of my band. We’ve got Ben Crosland on the bass and this guy named Jeremy Platt.

J. I’ve heard of him.

L. And Caroline Boaden playing drums. We did a couple of rehearsals and just started recording. We’ve done some shows and it’s been great. It feels great!

Finally

We’ve recorded an album of my original songs. It’s called “Finally”.