Big hair, big future for hometown rock star

By SUZANNE McFADDEN

Phil Urry was once a Westie boy who dug ditches and styled hair in Ponsonby.

Today his alter ego, Phil Joel, is a rock star whose band has notched up three Grammy Award nominations and four gold records in the United States.

But he won't be upset if you have never heard of him.

Joel is a singer and bass player for the Newsboys, one of America's top Christian rock bands.

He has come home to New Zealand - with his television star wife, Heather, and 3-month-old daughter, Phynley - to headline at the Parachute Festival in Matamata, starting on Friday.

He makes a point of coming home once a year - not just to see his parents in Blockhouse Bay but to get his wild blond locks trimmed.

The former hairdresser does not trust Americans with scissors, so he waits to have his tresses cut back here.

"My hair drives me nuts. Maybe I'll have it all chopped off one day," he says. But not quite yet. The hairdo is 28-year-old Joel's trademark, and it no doubt helps now that he has also gone solo.

His own album, Watching Over You, has already sold more than 50,000 copies and he has started writing songs for another.

He is still with the Newsboys, who have sold more than three million records worldwide. He lives in Franklin, on the outskirts of Nashville - arguably the music capital of the world.

"Not bad for a kid from West Auckland who had never been on a big plane before," laughs Joel, who had to change his surname when Americans struggled to pronounce Urry.

Phil Urry went to school at Lynfield College, but he admits he was more interested in his music.

He was lead singer of local Christian band Drinkwater, and tried to make it a fulltime job.

"But in New Zealand, if you don't have a huge smash hit it's pretty tough," he says. "We were playing lunchtime concerts in schools, and pub gigs and churches at night. But after a while we realised it was a lot of work for not much return, so we gave up."

Joel returned to hairdressing part-time and digging ditches for a mate before Drinkwater played their last gig, support for a band of Australians and Americans called the Newsboys.

"A couple of months later, Newsboys phoned me and asked if I could play bass for them," Joel recalls. "I was guitarist, but I thought it can't be that hard to play bass.

"Next day I was flying to the States - the first big plane I had ever been on. They picked me up in a honking great Cadillac, took me to the rehearsal room and asked me to play. I was terrible - just horrible."

But when Joel asked to use a pick on the strings, instead of his fingers, things sounded better.

The band still locked him in a hotel room for three days before he was allowed to play in public.

That was seven years ago. Now Joel writes most of the Newsboys' songs, sings most of them and, of course, plays bass.

The band were doing 200 shows a year, but they are now cutting back to one three-month tour with their inflatable dome venue, using a truck trailer for a stage.

That suits Joel now that he is a dad. Little Phynley has already made eight long-distance flights in her three-month life.

Mother Heather has her own musical career, hosting a show on Country Music Television.

The couple, who have each other's names tattooed on their wedding ring fingers, love coming to Auckland, especially because they are not recognised in the malls and don't have strangers standing on their front lawn.

"We don't have, like, Michael Jackson status, but some fans in the US are just ballistic," Joel said.

"New Zealanders don't really mess with celebrities. It's quite refreshing that no one here really knows who we are.

"My parents have my gold records all around the mantelpiece, but I still don't know if they know what it all means."

Joel will play three times at the four-day concert at Totara Springs in Matamata - with the Newsboys, on his own, and in a reunion with Drinkwater.

Organisers of the drug-free, alcohol-free concert expect a crowd of 25,000.