Michael Smith’s first impression of Altiyan Childs was of “a nice, polite, but quietly intense young man.”
That was sometime in 2003, when Childs was in his late twenties. John Martinovich, the future manager of Masonia and a friend of Smith’s, spotted the band Childs was with at the time, Atlantic Slide, and was so impressed with that earlier group that he brought them into The Drum Media, where Smith is senior Associate Editor, to introduce them.
Martinovich was an “old hand” in the industry and very happy to have found Childs, who he followed to Masonia after Atlantic Slide's break-up. Only one other member of the band stayed to form Masonia with him, the keyboardist Daniel Rivers.
"Altiyan is the best frontman I've ever seen," Martinovich said in one interview. "Super-theatrical but so honest about what he's doing that I've sometimes seen tears in his eyes on stage.”
"Being aggressively original and nothing like most of what is happening out there at the moment, they’re bloody hard to break, that’s for sure, but I was so tired of listening to music that always had the sort of songs that I’d heard over and over before, that I couldn’t go past them ... As a band they know what they’re doing. They don’t stuff around.”
There was never any question about the source of inspiration for either group. To quote Daniel Rivers, “Altiyan is a driving force, and if you have someone so expressive who can capture what a band is all about, what it’s striving for, it makes it easier for someone to come along and play it.
“He’s very articulate, you know what he’s on about and that makes it easier to soak in the songs, whether you’re in the band or the audience.”
Smith was also impressed by Childs, and over the next few years, he wrote a number of pieces about Masonia for the Street Press.
His first interview was of Childs alone, just prior to the release of their first and most successful single, Simple, in late October 2004. “I wrote it right back at the beginning of the band,” Childs told him; by which he meant, the beginning of the original band.
“It comes from a time when I was a little more innocent, when I could look out into the world and I wouldn’t see what I see now ... Simple is obviously about a girl, but a girl that I never knew, that one day I might meet.”
The B-side track, Luna Maria, Smith describes as a piece of “musical embroidery” with Eastern as well as Western influences. That’s not really surprising when you consider that Childs' parents are both from the Balkan states, and the family spent time living in Croatia when Childs was very young.
That cultural background probably also has a lot to do with his effect on both the media and the public. For Masonia, those Eastern influences were no less inspirational but also no less troublesome, at least until their musical depth and Childs' obvious talents built them a reputation on the local scene.
“That was one of the hardest things for us in the early days,” Childs said to Smith in that first interview. “People would ask, ‘Who are you? What do you want to do?’ Today no one asks ... Finally I can be a little Eastern and be a little Western and it’s effortless. We’re quietly breaking the mould in our own way.”
The single reached #2 on both the Australasian ARIA chart and the Independent chart, despite the fact that Masonia weren’t contracted to a label. Bianca Dye, who was then presenting for Nova, said “I can’t believe this band is not signed!”
That success resulted in large part from radio and TV exposure. Simple was picked up by NovaFM, who liked the big sound and had a broad enough audience to take it on. It got play from Triple M and community stations as well, and the video was popular with the TV program Video Hits.
In the end Simple sold over 5000 copies nationally. “Which was no small achievement,” Smith wrote, “considering it was competing for attention with all the festivals and major label best-of albums traditionally swamping the marketplace.”
“If it wasn’t for Nova in Sydney and Video Hits on national television, forget it,” Childs said. “We’d have been lost in the cracks.”
In 2005, reviewing the album World on Fire, Smith described Masonia’s music as “rich, anthemic rock” with “the grandeur of the best U2 or Tool.”
“Masonia haven’t compromised on their sound, and that, I imagine, has worked against them. The idea of “stadium rock” carries too much derogatory baggage these days, unless of course you’re a hugely successful international stadium rock act. In an inner-city Sydney pub, it’s all too easy to dismiss as pretentious.”
“Imposing, layered, textured, ambitious,” another reviewer called it.
But, even if Simple made it through the minefield, the cracks were still there. The “rich, anthemic” sound of World on Fire left it outside the dedicated indie labels and networks like Triple J. The power and passion of it were too easily interpreted as mainstream; and it may be that their broad range of musical influences locked them out of stations like Triple M as well.
“For a long time reviewers and critics ran away, they didn’t know where to put us,” Childs said in one interview.
“When I started to write people told me I was confused but that’s not the case. A thread relates every song to the other ... I can be emotional and esoteric and I sometimes have my dark side visiting, but I love people, I’m highly compassionate.”
Yeah, that sounds like the same guy; and Smith's ongoing rapport with Childs all those years ago, as if by magic has fixed in words many of the things I’ve struggled to express in a few weeks of watching YouTube videos.
To be continued.
Motion into Lyric: Altiyan's Child Blog and Website
World on Fire can be ordered online from JB HiFi.
© Kathy Tuppurainen 2010
