Soundtrack to a Life

The first music I ever truly heard wasn’t in a record shop or on a bedroom stereo. It came through the walls of a warship.

I was small enough that I had to be lifted up the gangway, my father’s hand steadying me at each steel rung. The HMNZS Southland smelled of diesel and salt and something metallic I couldn’t name, and my father — Captain Peck to the crew, just Dad to me — led me through narrow corridors to his quarters as though showing me a world I might one day understand. Someone had set up a ghetto blaster on a shelf bolted to the wall. I remember the sound before I remember anything else about that room: something patient and layered, keyboards climbing over each other, a voice that seemed to know something sad and accept it anyway. Genesis. Phil Collins. The songs had no titles for me then, only textures — the particular grey of that afternoon light through a porthole, the slight sway underfoot, my father humming along without noticing he was doing it.

Later came the Holden Commodore, road trips across Australia with the family packed in and the Hutt Valley receding further into memory with each kilometre. Dad played Dire Straits from cassettes kept in a soft case above the sun visor, Knopfler’s guitar unspooling across the flat brown distances of Canberra’s surrounds, and those songs threaded themselves so completely into the sensation of moving through open country that even now I cannot hear Sultans of Swing without feeling simultaneously eight years old and nowhere in particular. I didn’t choose that music. It chose me, by proximity, by repetition, by the unconscious authority fathers have over the emotional education of their children.

Then came the moment I reached for something of my own.

It was at Nick’s house — my best friend at primary school, the boy I’d bonded with over King’s Quest and sleepovers and the particular intensity of childhood friendships that feel like they will last forever. His father had a stereo that seemed engineered for a different league of listening: large, dark, a row of silver dials that suggested serious intentions. Bon Jovi’s New Jersey was on, and when the volume went up it changed the air pressure in the room. I was nine, and something clicked into place. This wasn’t background. This was mine.

I saved my pocket money with a discipline I have never since matched and worked my way back through the catalogue on cassette — Slippery When Wet, 7800 Fahrenheit, the self-titled debut, each one played until the tape hissed. On my bedroom wall, Jon Bon Jovi looked out at me with the particular confidence of someone who had never doubted himself for a moment. I found that aspirational. I reflect on it now with enormous amusement.

But Bon Jovi, for all his hair, could only carry me so far.

By 1992 something was shifting. I’d come across a tape of Rattle and Hum — borrowed from Dad, who was not a fan — and found something in U2 that I couldn’t articulate at nine but felt viscerally at twelve: the sense that music could be about something. Not heartbreak as a concept, but heartbreak with a specific geography, a politics, a weight. I collected their tapes methodically — Achtung Baby, The Joshua Tree — and played them on a Walkman whose headphones left red marks on my ears.

Then in 1994 the family moved to London, my father attending defence college, and I started at a new international school feeling profoundly out of place in the way only a fourteen-year-old in a foreign city can. My daily commute became a ritual: Walkman on, the world outside muffled to a manageable distance. Zooropa had just been released, and that album — strange, ambient, unresolved, the sound of a band refusing to repeat itself — became the sonic wallpaper of London streets I was still learning to read. U2 by then were doing something that felt genuinely dangerous, genuinely political, and to a boy who had moved schools so many times that he had almost stopped trying to belong, that sense of emotional and moral seriousness in music felt like proof that art could hold you together when geography could not.

But it was my brother James who detonated the next charge.

He was seventeen then and I was fourteen, and the gap that had always existed between us — the torment-and-protection dynamic of brothers — was compressing into something more like mutual territory. James had an ever-expanding CD collection and an ear trained by instincts I couldn’t yet name. In London, his world was drum and bass: pirate radio stations that bled in and out between stations, and music that seemed to exist outside any category I’d been given. He played me Leftfield’s Leftism, and the bass frequencies of it moved through the floor. He put on Portishead’s Dummy and I sat very still for the entirety of it, not entirely sure what had happened. He walked me through Massive Attack’s back catalogue like a guide leading someone through a gallery, letting the work speak.

I listened through a setup of my own making: a Discman patched into a pair of large wooden floor-standing speakers that Dad had handed down, and which stood in my room like mismatched elders. The sound that came out was imperfect and full-bodied and absolutely overwhelming at volume. Dummy at midnight through those speakers felt like being submerged. James went on to DJ at electronic clubs in Wellington, to build a life around that music, and I followed him into those rooms in the late nineties — Sub 9 for drum and bass, Tattoo for techno, one-off raves in venues that no longer exist. I never collected records the way he did. But I carry the debt.

Then, in 1996, everything reorganised itself.

We were in Kelson by then — Lower Hutt, the family finally settled, me in 6th form at Hutt Valley High School. My musical diet had widened into alternative and grunge: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, the Smashing Pumpkins. All of it good. None of it prepared me for what Nige played me.

Nige had become my closest friend in the way that only a shared cigarette at the back gates of a school can produce — a bond cemented in the specific code of two people who immediately recognise each other’s frequency. He handed me Aenima, and I remember thinking the opening was wrong, that the stereo was broken, that something had gone badly sideways. Then the bass came in and the guitars found each other and Maynard James Keenan opened his mouth and the world I’d understood music to occupy simply ended, and a larger one began.

I went back for Undertow, then Opiate. The architecture of what Tool were doing — the time signatures that shouldn’t work and did, the lyrics that rewarded obsessive close reading, the way a song could hold menace and grief simultaneously — was unlike anything I had encountered. When Lateralus arrived it cemented something that had already been building: a devotion that wasn’t casual listening but something closer to a life position.

And Pushit. There is a piece of music that has moved me more than anything else I have ever heard, and it is that song. I cannot fully explain why. I suspect the attempt to explain it would only diminish it. It lives in the body before it reaches the brain.

Nige understood all of this without being told. That is a rare thing.

I was working at a web and design agency on Tennyson Street when the next door opened, and it opened through a car radio.

Radio Hauraki, around 2000. A guitar figure that seemed to spiral inward. I turned the volume up and didn’t recognise it and that feeling of not recognising something good is one of the best sensations music offers. It was Pink Floyd. I went back and consumed the catalogue the way I had consumed Tool’s five years earlier, but with a different quality of wonder — the wonder of someone who has found the lineage, the ancestors, the reason a thing exists.

Wish You Were Here destroyed me quietly. Dogs destroyed me loudly. The Pulse concert recording became the document I returned to repeatedly, that combination of technical command and emotional exposure that only a great live recording captures. I came to think of Pink Floyd and Tool as occupying the same vast territory approached from different decades — one arriving from progressive rock’s labyrinthine corridors, one from the harder and more fractured edge of the nineties, but both doing the same essential thing: building worlds inside the listener.

I introduced Pink Floyd to Dad eventually. It seemed only right — he had given me Genesis and Dire Straits in that navy captain’s quarters all those years ago, and here I was returning the favour across the decades. He found his way to Comfortably Numb and stayed there. He has since made clear he wants it played at his funeral. I find that both perfectly appropriate and faintly devastating — the idea that a song I found through my father’s musical inheritance will also be the last piece of music played in his honour.

But it is Tool who have been the pilgrimages.

Nige and I attended our first concert in Wellington in 1997, 7th form, the particular charged stupidity of two teenage boys at the best gig of their lives so far. I remember coming out into the Wellington night afterwards and feeling that my ears were ringing and my chest had been rearranged.

In 2001 we drove to Auckland in my 1L Daihatsu Charade — a car that had no business covering that distance and knew it — and stood in another dark room while Tool dismantled us again. On the return drive, at Hunterville, the Charade made a noise that meant it was finished. We boarded a bus to Wellington with a dozen beers and the particular warmth of people who have just survived something minor together. A night in Wellington, then we flew to Christchurch for a second show on that same tour — two men in their early twenties who would have considered all of this completely normal.

The 2002 tour brought three shows: Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington. We attended all three, flying between them, rearranging the calendar around the dates with the efficiency of people who understood what these concerts meant.

Then 2013. By then both of us had one-year-old babies at home, our lives reorganised entirely around small humans who needed constant attention and offered very little in return for it beyond the astonishing fact of their existence. We flew to Auckland for a single night — a night of freedom is exactly what it felt like, the particular wild relief of two fathers temporarily off duty. The concert was, as it had always been, extraordinary. We flew home the next morning restored.

February 2020: Fear Inoculum had arrived the previous year, and Tool were touring on it, and Nige and I flew to Sydney and saw them twice over two consecutive nights. Two nights of the same band and I didn’t want more sleep and I didn’t want to go home and I’m not sure the second night was any less electric than the first. We got home just before Covid-19 closed everything. The timing of that feels, in retrospect, almost cinematic — two Tool concerts and then the world sealed shut.

November 2025: a road trip to Auckland, proper accommodation this time, no cars expiring on state highways. No new album to tour behind, but the band walked onstage and within a minute none of that mattered. There is something they do in a room that recordings approximate but never capture — the way the volume becomes a physical presence, the way Maynard stands to the side and barely moves and somehow fills every square metre of the space. We drove back to Wellington and I kept replaying it in my head and I am already waiting for the next one. I will always be waiting for the next one.

I think about the boy in the captain’s quarters, standing on a gently moving ship, hearing Genesis through a ghetto blaster while his father hummed without noticing.

He didn’t know yet what music would do to him. He didn’t know that it would track through every chapter — the childhood road trips and the London commute and the Kelson bedroom and the work desk where a radio station played something that would send him back through decades of someone else’s catalogue. He didn’t know that a friendship forged at school gates over a shared cigarette would become inseparable from the music itself, that some albums would be impossible to hear without also hearing a particular person’s voice saying listen to this part, wait for it, there. He didn’t know that the songs his father played would one day come back around, that he would hand something back across the years and watch it land.

What I have is not a record collection. It is an autobiography in sound — every era marked by what was playing, every important person associated with something specific on a stereo or a Walkman or a Discman wired into too-large speakers in a London bedroom. The music did not soundtrack the life. The music was the life, running beneath it like a current, and I have simply been listening.