was the class I looked forward to the most. In music I really felt myself. I always found time to play terribly on different instruments.
As a pupil, I think I was quite well behaved – but that changed a bit when I moved up into high school at Norwest and every single teacher’s comment on every report card read: ‘Calum has potential, but he gets distracted too easily.’ That was my life summed up in a sentence. As I grew older my grades got worse and worse. No matter how hard I studied I just didn’t excel. Later, there was a certain point when the band started where my grades went down the drain and my parents weren’t happy at all. It’s not cool to suck at school, but by then I didn’t really care about anything other than the band.
Hanging with the Band
I first met Michael when I was in Year 3 at Norwest Primary. He had the best fringe I’d ever seen. But the one thing I remember about him as we got older was that he was really tall. He must have gone through puberty when he was 12. The beard kinda gave it away.
We really became friends a bit later, when we started at Norwest Christian College. We did music classes together and started playing guitar. I always used to love watching him play. He was so talented for his age.
When I was about 15 I saw a classical guitar lying around in my house. I had no idea whose it was but I picked it up. Although I really struggled at first, it didn’t feel like a task to learn to play it. For months on end I’d come home from school and look up videos on YouTube on how to play; I used to always play in front of my parents and they used to love it – they kind of had to, they were my parents. When I was 16 they bought me my first steel string for my birthday and I used to take it to school all the time, but back then I never would’ve thought I’d pick up the bass.
I was 13 when I first met Luke. He joined our school in Year 7 and because he had an older brother, he’d made some older friends. I always wished I had that. I can still see him now, wearing a green jumper with one of those snapback hats with a peak at the front. I didn’t look so great either. I wore really short shorts and my legs were so skinny. My head was shaved, too. I was in a bad place.
Because of my sister, I really liked R&B acts like Chris Brown, but I soon fell in love with the American pop–punk and punk–rock bands like Green Day, Blink-182 and The All-American Rejects. I instantly fell in love with the sound.
I remember the day when music took over my life; I was on the bus on the way to school and my sister’s friend’s brother handed me a burnt CD with ‘Green Day – American Idiot’ written on it in permanent marker. I put it in my CD player and literally could not stop listening to it. I loved everything about it: the angst, the rawness, the distorted guitars; it almost took me out of reality. I loved the energy and the emotion in all the parts; there was power in the songs. Every time I heard the opening chords of the album American Idiot, it always made me wonder how they wrote the album. I learned how to play their song ‘Good Riddance’ and when I strummed it to some cousins on my new guitar they said, ‘Hey, you should play more often ...’
Michael and I always liked the same kind of music – bands like Blink-182, All Time Low and Green Day are the reason why we each picked up an instrument. That was unusual in our school because there weren’t a lot of kids like us around. If you were really into music like we were it was thought of as being a bit weird, and a lot of the other students looked at us like we were outsiders.
Then Michael and I started sitting together in music classes and playing songs. There was an event every year called Live At Norwest where all the kids that could perform something would get up and play in front of the whole school. Because we got on and liked the same bands, the pair of us decided we would play ‘Beauty in the Breakdown’ by a band called The Scene Aesthetic. I would love to say that it sounded good, but it didn’t. Luke played that night as well – he played Jason Mraz. He also had a broken wrist! He was crazy at guitar. I knew how much he practised. He used to put up covers on YouTube. I thought he was amazing.
At first I thought Luke didn’t hang out with me because he hung around with an older crowd, but I went up to him and said how much I loved his stuff on YouTube. We became friends after that and the next time Live At Norwest came around, me and Luke did a song together. At first Michael, Luke and I never played together – it was always Luke and me, or Michael and me – but once Michael asked Luke to play I also wedged my way in.
Luke, Michael and I then started to hang around in the music room, jamming and playing riffs. We were there for as long as we were allowed, which was good for me because by the time I’d got to being 14 or 15, I’d found that school was tough. I’d got into Norwest on a sports scholarship, which meant I had to play sports all the time. At first I loved it, but once I discovered music, I realised that’s all I wanted to do. Football fell away – I wanted to spend all my time playing with the guys.
Then, one afternoon in December 2011, Michael said those words: ‘Wanna start a band?’
Luke
In My Own Little World
It’s funny, I can’t remember what I did yesterday most of the time, so I struggle to remember my childhood, but my mum always tells a story from when I was really little. Apparently, she came into the kitchen and caught me with my hand in a tub of margarine. I was eating the stuff off my fingers, which must have tasted awful, not that I seemed to care at the time.
I was a happy kid. We lived in a small town called The Hawkesbury and I came from a small family – just me, Mum, Dad and my two older brothers, Ben and Jack. Mum was an accountant, then she became a maths teacher. In fact, she taught Ashton for a year or two. She always said he wasn’t the best student, but that he was a really nice person.
Although we weren’t a massively musical family, my dad liked all the older Australian bands like INXS and AC/DC, so there was always music being played when I was little. Mum had played the piano, though there was never one around the house, but it was Ben and Jack who started me on playing the guitar. Ben had tried to learn when he was younger, and there was an electric lying about which I would pick up and play. Jack had a drum kit in his room, so sometimes we would make a noise together.
The first song Ben taught me was Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’, when I was 10, and I would play it on the top string with one finger. I did it so much that there was a massive crease in the skin and I think I must have driven everyone crazy, playing that same song all the time. Later, I learned the lyrics to Green Day’s ‘Holiday’, and for some reason, I would sit in my room singing it over and over until my dad would
