Nic: What was your parent’s taste in music like? Did they play records?

Neil: My parents liked the pop music of the forties and fifties, particularly The Weavers. In the years before television the entire family would spend every Sunday afternoon listening to the Top 40 on Melbourne radio and a couple of different top 10s in the early evening. Unlike most of Tasmania, Smithton was close enough to the mainland to pick up Melbourne radio.

Nic: In the United States, a lot of budding musicians had their ‘wake up moment’ when the Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. What was yours?

Neil: I remember one Sunday afternoon in 1963, before Beatlemania happened in Australia, a DJ in Melbourne, without any fanfare, played a new single by a band from England called the Beatles. It was their third single ‘From Me To You’. That was the first time I ever heard them. What immediately struck me about them was how happy and excited they sounded.

Nic: I read you were inspired by the folk and protest songs of the Sixties. Did this translate into any actual protesting where you lived?

Neil: There wasn’t a lot in the way of organized demonstrations up on the coast. Some of us sang anti-war stuff, but mostly let the songs do the talking. There would have been more organized demonstrations in Hobart. But that was before I moved south.

Nic: Tell me a little about the Brumida/North West Coast scene you were part of?

Neil: In my final term at school in 1967, I met two new students  David Paulin from Ulverstone and Mike Raine from Penguin. Along with a third associate called Bruce, whom I never met, they had formed Brumida; a collective of likeminded young people with a mission to write create and entertain.  It involved writing and staging plays, writing and printing magazines of poetry and eventually staging folk concerts.  North-West Tasmania was very provincial and we had to make our own entertainment.  Culturally we were quite successful but none of us made a fortune.  In 1968 David began working in Television in Launceston, Mike and others went to Uni in Hobart. Brumida people became very active and influential in the Uni folk and blues music scene in Hobart.  I went apple-picking in the Huon Valley and dreamt of making a record.