Some people “find” their career.
Cute.
Mine came through speakers, scratched CDs, sweaty band rooms, dodgy merch tables, late nights, loud guitars, and the sort of obsession that doesn’t ask for permission. It just moves in, takes over the lounge room, and starts rearranging the furniture.
Music was never a hobby for me.
It was the operating system.
I was born and raised in Melbourne, the son of parents who immigrated from Mauritius. So culture was already in the house before I even knew what culture was. Food, family, stories, accents, rhythm. All of it. But music was the thing that cut through everything.
And that started with my dad.
He was a proper music tragic. Not the “I like a bit of everything” type, which usually means someone owns three Coldplay albums and calls it range. I mean genuinely eclectic. Bob Marley. Stevie Wonder. Steve Winwood. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Led Zeppelin. AC/DC. INXS.
The good stuff.
As a kid, I’d sit there while he played records and songs that were clearly bigger than just background noise. I didn’t understand the history. I didn’t understand the craft. I definitely didn’t understand why some songs made adults go quiet.
But I felt it.
That’s how music gets you early. It doesn’t explain itself. It just lands.
The CD Wall Wasn’t a Collection. It Was a Personality Disorder.
By the time I hit my teens, music had moved from something I absorbed to something I chased.
My brother and I became obsessed with CDs. Properly obsessed. We were deep into 90s R&B and hip hop, and we built the sort of collection that made no financial sense whatsoever. Every spare dollar went into music.
And yes, this was before everything lived on a phone.
You had to work for it. You had to go to the shop. You had to browse. You had to take risks. You had to buy an album because you liked one song and then pray the rest of it wasn’t rubbish.
Sometimes it was.
That was the tax.
When my brother and I moved out together and bought a house in our early 20s, the CD collection became part shrine, part museum, part warning sign. The walls were stacked with albums. Soundtracks to different versions of ourselves. R&B. Hip hop. Rock. Classics. Metal. The whole messy map.
That’s the thing about music. It doesn’t just remind you of a time.
It stores who you were when you heard it.
Then I Found Heavy Music and Things Got Loud
As I got older, I started circling back to the music my dad had introduced me to. Hendrix. Zeppelin. The heavier stuff hiding inside the classics.
That eventually led me into metal.
Not casually either. I didn’t just dip a toe in. I dove headfirst into the deep end with boots on.
There was something in heavy music that made sense to me. The force of it. The emotion. The release. The fact that it could be aggressive and honest at the same time. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t trying to behave. It had teeth.
And somewhere in all that noise, I realised I didn’t just want to listen anymore.
I wanted to perform.
Small issue: I had no confidence.
Tiny inconvenience.
So I did what any rational young bloke would do. I taught myself how to scream like a metal vocalist.
Not sing. Scream.
A beautiful life choice for everyone living nearby, I’m sure.
I practised until I could do it properly. Then an opportunity came up through my sister’s best friend’s boyfriend, who was starting a band. I put my hand up.
That band became BRONSON.
And suddenly the thing I had loved from the outside was something I was inside of.
BRONSON Taught Me Marketing Before I Knew It Was Marketing
Being in a band teaches you quickly that talent is only part of the game.
Annoying, but true.
You can write good songs. You can rehearse. You can play your guts out. But if no one knows you exist, congratulations, you’ve built a very loud secret.
BRONSON started gaining momentum in the Melbourne live music scene, and one of the biggest moments for us was launching our debut EP at the Espy Gershwin Room.
We sold it out.
For a local metal band, that mattered. It wasn’t just a gig. It was proof.
The room had energy. The crowd was alive. The band was locked in. For one night, everything we had been pushing towards became real.
And looking back, that’s where the marketing brain really started switching on.
I loved the performance, but I also loved the build-up. The posters. The messaging. The scene. The way you could create momentum before anyone stepped on stage. The way a show became more than a date on a calendar if you knew how to make people care.
At the time, I probably wouldn’t have called that marketing.
I would’ve called it getting people to the gig.
Same beast. Less LinkedIn nonsense.
The Band Faded. The Obsession Didn’t.
For years, we toured, released music, played shows, and collected the kind of memories that become better with age and worse with accurate detail.
But life does what life does.
Careers got serious. Families came along. Priorities shifted. We didn’t have some dramatic band breakup where someone threw a cymbal and stormed out.
It just faded.
Which is often how real things end. Not with a bang. Not with a press release. Just less rehearsal. Fewer shows. More life.
But the love for music didn’t go anywhere.
It just changed shape.
HEAVY Was the Next Chapter
As performing became less central, I found myself more drawn to the industry side of music.
That led to HEAVY.
I helped launch HEAVY as a media brand for rock and metal, working alongside the founder to build something that gave the scene a stronger voice. That period taught me a lot. Not in theory. In the trenches.
Media. Marketing. Content. Events. Audience building. Artist promotion. Brand partnerships. Scene politics. All the glamorous stuff nobody sees when they look at a poster and think, “Cool.”
It was a chance to take everything I loved about music and apply it in a different way.
Not on stage.
Behind the machine.
And honestly, I loved that too.
Because entertainment marketing isn’t really about selling tickets or pushing posts or writing clever captions.
It’s about understanding why people care.
Why they leave the house.
Why they drag their mates along.
Why they buy the shirt.
Why they stand in a room full of strangers and feel like they belong.
That’s the part that hooked me.
Music Also Gave Me a Life
The funny thing is, music didn’t just shape my career.
It shaped my actual life.
It introduced me to my wife. Before kids, so much of our world revolved around gigs, festivals, friends, and live music. That was the rhythm of our life.
Then we had kids, and as every parent knows, your social calendar gets taken out the back and quietly put down.
But music stayed.
It had to.
Now we share songs with our kids. We play them the music that shaped us. We take them to shows when we can. We let them build their own taste, even when their taste occasionally tests the limits of human endurance.
That’s the handover.
My dad passed music to me. I’m passing it to them.
Not as a lesson.
As a gift.
From Fan to Performer to Marketer
When I look back, the path makes sense.
At the time, it didn’t.
It was just one obsession turning into another. Listening became collecting. Collecting became performing. Performing became promoting. Promoting became marketing. Marketing became a career.
That’s usually how these things work.
You don’t always choose the thing that defines you. Sometimes it chooses you early, follows you around, and waits for you to catch up.
Music did that for me.
It gave me confidence when I didn’t have much. It gave me identity when I was trying to work out who I was. It gave me a stage, a scene, a career, a family connection, and a way to understand people.
Because music is never just sound.
It’s memory.
It’s belonging.
It’s rebellion.
It’s grief.
It’s joy.
It’s the thing playing in the background when life decides to become important.
And for me, it became work.
Lucky bastard, really.
Not because it was easy. It wasn’t. The entertainment industry is chaos wearing sunglasses. But because I got to build a career around something I actually cared about.
That’s rare.
And worth protecting.
Music didn’t inspire my career.
It dragged me into it by the collar.
And honestly, I’m glad it did.
Fast forward to today, and my life revolves around running Australia’s premier music festival, Bluesfest, along with our touring company, Bluesfest Tours, and our venue, The Green Room. Heading up the marketing team has been both challenging and rewarding, but it’s an incredible privilege to work in an industry I love. Music isn’t just my career—it’s my life, my passion, and my connection to the people and experiences that matter most.
As the great Bob Marley once said, “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” That sentiment has carried me through every chapter of my life, and I’m endlessly grateful for the journey music has taken me on.
