My Ongoing Autobiography tracks my adventures in life together with a Spotify Top 500 list of songs that accompany my journey.
Turn up your volume and click on the link to hear the songs I am sharing!
I’ve always wanted to have a book where you could actually listen to relevant music at the same time as you read. That’s why I’m starting this blog series, where I’ll be sharing songs that have been and are part of the fabric of my life and the stories behind them.
Take “Norwegian Wood” by The Beatles. This song is a masterpiece from the album Rubber Soul, and it’s one that has had a profound impact on my life.
When I was a kid, I didn’t really understand the lyrics to “Norwegian Wood.” But as I got older, I started to appreciate the song’s complex emotions and its beautiful melody.
“Norwegian Wood” is a song about loss and longing. It’s about the pain of being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back. But it’s also a song about hope. It’s about the belief that even though love can hurt, it’s still worth it.
I hope you’ll listen to “Norwegian Wood” and share your own thoughts and memories in the comments below. And if you like this post, be sure to subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss any future installments!
According to an interview in 1980, Lennon described it as his “first real major piece of work”. He said that it came about when English journalist Kenneth Allsop commented that he should write songs about his childhood. How serendipitous it was that it was the song that came to mind in coming up with the first song on my list.
He rewrote the song into the one we know and love today because he felt the original lyrics, about the places he went past when he caught the bus into Liverpool, were ridiculous. He called it “the most boring sort of What I did on My Holidays’ Bus trip song”. Sage words of advice for me to ponder as I embark on this journey.
Mojo Magazine named this song as the best song of all time in the year 2000 and it has featured on many lists of top Beatles songs, and songs in general, including Rolling Stones 500 greatest songs of all time in 2004.
I’m sure you know the lyrics well yourself. We remember the places and people we have been to and known, but we can’t go back. Well we can, but they have changed, while the memories haven’t. Miranda Lambert captured this really well in another song on my list, The House That Built Me.
If music is the fabric of our lives, then the memories of what we were doing when we first heard them, map the timelines. Most of us can listen to a song that we love and evoke memories of what we were doing at the time, where we were living, and who the important people were in our lives; friends, lovers, and even people we didn’t like.
In My Life turned into a love song, as Lennon rewrote it to make it more commercial and less self-indulgent, as one of my lecturers at Berklee Music used to call the songwriters’ weakness.
So I think back to 1965. Our family at the time was composed of myself, my parents and my little brother, aged 2. We were living in our first home of many, in Titirangi, a village in the west of Auckland City.
It was a great house, edging onto the bush, neighbouring Titirangi Primary School, which was an awesome school, with strong links to the Ministry of Education. Titirangi School was involved in experimenting with many aspects of education, supported by an office at Lopdell House in the Titirangi township, which is now home to an art gallery, the Titirangi Theatre, a restaurant, and up to 11 small local businesses.
I often visited there when it was part of the Education Department, going up and down the lift to the third or fourth floor, as in some ways I was part of the experiment. I might come back to that later in this book.
Our house at 1A View Rd had a gravel driveway and a large section. It was surrounded by fruit trees. We had oranges, apples, lemons, grapefruit, mandarins, and even a large fig tree.
To the back and side of the house, we had beautiful native bush which was part of my playground. In summer I would have many adventures in the bush, and once I discovered a track that led me to the school playing field, I would take that route to school in summer. In winter the track became muddy, and I walked along the road. The Waitakere Ranges which Titirangi edges is part of a rain forest that provides drinking water for the west of Auckland.
On the radio, in 1965 a new talent emerged in New Zealand. Ray Columbus and the Invaders won the inaugural Loxene Golden Disk Award with the song ‘Til We Kissed. He would become a star, particularly due to his head-shaking dance to a subsequent hit, called She’s a Mod.
In my later years, I would often see and talk to the diminutive man with a big legacy and heart, when I had a stall at the Takapuna Sunday Markets. I would get up at 4 am and set up a stall selling holographic novelties. I would often sit there playing the guitar while waiting for my next prospect.
The Lawson Quins were born in 1965. They were New Zealand’s first quintuplets to be born and survive. Later as a young adult, I would live on the same road as them in Massey and would see them from time to time.
Kiri Te Kanawa also became a household name that year, winning the Mobil Song Contest.
Back to me. I was in Standard 2, and if memory serves me well, my teacher was Mrs Tuoro. As the only Maori teacher in the school, she taught us action songs, stick dances, and Haka, which we boys particularly enjoyed.
We had a school pool and I proudly arrived home with certificates for doing things like swimming the mammoth distance of 25 feet. I remember the smell of the chlorine that got mixed by pulling a bucket with ropes extending to each side of the pool. Those ropes would be dragged up and down the length of the pool until the supervising teacher felt the chemicals had been appropriately mixed.
I enjoyed swimming and other sports, although my coordination wasn’t great where a bat was involved or in athletics. I was pretty handy in squares and played on a school soccer team. Safety rules were a lot more relaxed then, and Mr McLaren a great teacher and coach was able to fit an entire team in the back of his Morris van for away games.
The only negative, and maybe one of the reasons I used the bush track, was because there was a kid a few houses towards the school who was older and bigger than me, who bullied me from time to time.
For example, I took the initiative with all our lemon trees to make lemonade. I had a jug, cups, and ice and sold the refreshing drink to kind people walking along the road. I don’t recall how much for, probably a halfpenny. Yes, this was before the days of decimal currency. That makes me feel really old!
Anyway, I remember one day, this bully came along, slapped me around, and threw everything off my table at the top of my drive, smashing my glass jug full of refreshing juice. Such is youth. This person would later apologise, on orders of his parents, but took advantage of opportunities to let me know that he didn’t like me.
He was a rarity, though. I had plenty of friends and attending a school reunion decades later, caught up with people whose children were then going to the same school. Even though we were just little kids at the time, we remembered our friendships and the years seemed to melt away.
Life was simple then. Later in life, I was to hit some stormy weather, as I wrote in my song Life Is Simple When You’re Five.
Did this resonate with you? Please leave a comment and tell someone about this blog if you think it will be of interest to them.
I believe it will lift a lot of spirits and bring HOPE to people who have cancer or who have friends and family going through such a journey.
I didn’t want to have Mental Health Week pass without posting something and this is going to become a short series on the benefits of floating in a sensory deprivation tank and my experiences with it. So ignore the next few blogs if you don’t have aches and pains or don’t suffer from stress.
Yesterday we flew to Wellington and drove over the windy Rimutakas for a funeral of a friend and family member who died of cancer on Monday. It all started with a lump in her breast, it ended with tumors in her spine and brain. A prognosis of months became days.
This view on the flight home (no filters used) last night was a fitting tribute to our friend Shelley who didn’t make it. It reminded me of the late Stevie Ray Vaughan singing The Sky is Crying.
Can you spare $5 in support or in memory of a friend or family member with cancer. 
Some of those side effects included painful urination, short term or permanent erectile dysfunction, never producing seminal fluid again, the length of your penis being reduced, damage to other organs, chronic fatigue, loss of libido and depression. Some of these are experienced by most prostate patients and some depend on the choice of treatment, which of course depending on the seriousness of the condition may not be optional if you want to live. It’s also important to recognise that everyone responds differently to different treatment.
Basically you are emitting radiation, which while not powerful, could have unintended side effects for others. The percentage likelihood, very slim, but percentages weren’t working well for me at this time and I wasn’t going to have on my conscience that I could be sitting next to a random stranger, potentially damaging a foetus she didn’t even know existed. Obviously some people do that. You can’t exactly hop on a flight and ask not to be seated next to a young girl going through puberty or a woman of an age that she could be pregnant and perhaps not know it.
The next option was 8 weeks of almost daily radiation on this beast, which includes a CT scanner which would first make sure that every morning, after drinking enough water to fill my bladder and push my organs out of reach of the radiation (where possible), that I was lying in an identical position.
So the visit was short and sweet, my PSA levels have gone down a little, without the help of any more drugs and after prodding my stomach (not quite sure why and I didn’t ask) I don’t have to go back for another 3 months.
If you can’t join us, it would be great if you could leave a little donation. Even $5 is tax deductible and it is an awesome cause. With one in three Kiwis getting cancer, anything we can do to aid research and the awesome work of the Auckland Cancer Society who have been a huge help to me, is welcome. Last year I raised $1,500. So far this year I haven’t got to $50. So either way, can you lend a hand?
As you may recall, dear reader, I am working on a HAG project which is huge, creating an EP and video series for people with cancer and those who are supporting friends and family with cancer in some way to help them on their journey. If you missed that story, 
So for the foreseeable future I will be stressed out on the last week of each 3 month period and hopefully like yesterday, will be told the good news that I continue to be doing fine. Benji thought I was looking very well and looking back at photos of my pasty pale face of a couple of years ago when I was undergoing radiation treatment and dealing with chronic fatigue, I look great!
So there you have it. I’m currently working on the demo for my second song called Who Stole My Words, which is about an incident where the chronic fatigue brain fog meant I couldn’t come up with simple words like current and channel to explain how I found myself upside down in an ocean kayak, without any fight or flight instinct because I wasn’t producing cortisol or adrenaline. I was upside down, underwater harnessed in thinking ‘this is interesting’. Anyway, I’m having a bit of a struggle going from fingerpicking to strumming and staying in perfect time with the clicktrack so I can add a walking bassline. But that’s another story.
Want more info on my cancer journey? 
Have you heard of Meresha yet? Let me introduce you. It seems like many years since I first heard 
I knew instantly, seeing her perform (online) that she was going to be a superstar. She has a voice to die for, passion and personality that you can’t help but get swept up in, energy to burn that seems endless, a vision for what she wants and humility that keeps her grounded despite amazing successes on Billboard, MTV and many other platforms.
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