From Makoura College to New York?s mean streets

By day he campaigns from the ivory towers of New York to conquer the world, dollar by dollar. By night the former Masterton boy slaves underground to put a new musical spin on the globe called revolution. Welcome to the secret life of Philip Kelly.
For Mr Kelly, in New Zealand visiting family, his corporate global day-job with multinational advertising prime mover JWT - J.Walter Thompson Company, the world's first full service advertising agency ? is very well paid.
" I get a lot of money for my work with JWT. But where my collaboration in music is concerned, I work for free or for next to nothing."
As well for Mr Kelly, who has worked stateside for the past eight years as a "legal alien" concepts designer and type director, his life has taken a brand new turn that he hopes will further widen his already international horizons.
He has just gained his green card that allows him to permanently live and work in the United States along with his partner, Tracey Lee, also an expatriate New Zealander and successful corporate marketeer in The Big Apple.
Mr Kelly "wears two hats" at JWT, he said, firstly as the company's type director and when called upon acts as a primary ideas generator for accounts needing new directions or angles of deployment. He is also design director for thompsondesign, a company subsidiary he founded himself.
But when the workaday lights dim in uptown Manhattan and the gloss and glory is packed away, Mr Kelly picks up his cameras and keyboards and heads toward the pages of breakout publications like Big magazine, that features the street culture cream of international photography and design.
And he will head even further downtown, to places like the inner-city "post-industrial ghettoes" of Detroit "where you really do have to watch where you walk at night".
"Truly. It can be very dangerous. But there is where you also find the heart of electronic soul, and not the techno of skinny white kids jumping up and down to repetitive tunes while they're out of it on drugs, but the real Afro-American godfathers of that genre of music. They're political, militant and very, very smart."
Mr Kelly counts as a personal coup, photographs he took of "Mad Mike" Banks, founder of music label Underground Resistance and one member of "The Holy Trinity of Techno, as they're called" that also includes Derek May and Kevin Saunders.
"Mad Mike made his name as an illegal street racer and being Detroit, everybody is defined by the car they drive. The music labels these guys set up were a reaction against the industry corporates who grow fat off the artists' bones.
"Myself and a friend took photos of these guys with their cars, and Mad Mike is notorious for giving no interviews, you know, no pictures, no public profile. But we got a picture of his 1970 Dodge Challenger with him in it. It was unbelievable, even though we had to retouch him out of the photo because he wanted to maintain his stealth."
Mr Kelly first took up art, photography and graphic design at Makoura College, where he studied Bursary Art under the then college art department head, Trevor Morris, before graduating in the early 1980s from the Wellington Polytechnic Design School.
Pacing art studies for Mr Kelly was his passion for music. He took up the clarinet while at college and was tutored before his regular classes started for the day, he said, at the same time as he taught himself bass guitar and played in a Masterton punk band.
Soon after graduating he worked with a succession of organisations in the capital including Downstage Theatre, The City Gallery, and the Wellington Media Collective.
It was in Wellington that he also pursued his more personal muses and first exhibited his private photographs and sculptures. The acquisition of one of his sculptures by the advertising company Saatchi and Saatchi led to his hiring by the firm as a graphic designer.
While at Saatchis, Mr Kelly worked on several New Zealand marketing concepts that included print and multimedia work for the Lotteries Commission and the creation of the "Metal Nikau Dancer" icon for the International Festival of the Arts.
Soon after his work took him overseas where the money trees grow taller, hawkers shout louder and the echo lasts longer. "My company is a major global player, New York is a corporate global hub, and a good chunk of clients are there because of that fact."
Mr Kelly regularly returns to New Zealand and Masterton to visit and stay with family and friends. While here, his passion for art and music still finds expression.
He has played and traded tunes with members of Wellington band, Fat Freddy's Drop, and carries cover design credits for Bic Runga's latest album, Birds.
Mr Kelly is keeping his eyes firmly on the opportunities opening with the New Year. Now he has gained his green card, there may be more freelance work beyond the corporate boundaries of the mighty greenback dollar and the national borders of a Bush-led America.
"New York is a state of mind and a couple of islands floating off the coast. If I maintain my involvement with the underground, with people who think like me, anything is possible."
For now though Mr Kelly and partner Tracey will soon return to the cut and thrust of media creation above ground while feeling for the tremble and roar of what thrives beneath.
"I live in two worlds. The corporate global and my secret other world I guess, where the punk ethos has stuck, where you grab the means of production and create your art and record your music in your spare room, and especially with the fluidity and ease of exchange through the interweb, where you can still win a world of hearts and minds."