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In My Double Life, Kiwis – and some international guests - share the side hustles, hobbies, dual careers or career pivots that keep them busy. Here, award-winning children’s author and illustrator Donovan Bixley talks about the real-life musical inspiration behind his latest book The Fantabulous Animal Orchestra and how living in Taupō feeds his love of music and theatre.
“I’ve been a percussionist, a useless pianist and a relatively good guitarist. But all these things are completely relative because as soon as you start playing with really good musicians, you go, ‘well, I thought I was a really good guitarist...’
Saxophone is my main thing now. I had a poster on my bedroom wall when I was a kid of David Bowie – in his Thin White Duke era, I think – with a saxophone. I thought, ‘a lot of people want to have a guitar and be a guitar hero, but I’m gonna stand on stage with a saxophone.’
It’s amazing to live in Taupō and have the kinds of opportunities to get involved in bands and theatre because I’m not sure that that would happen in bigger towns and cities. There’d probably be someone else who’s far more experienced who would come along and say, ‘you can’t do this, you’ve never done it before.’
I say it’s because we’re in a small town that I got into Hot Tub. It’s a 17-piece funk band and, I joke, that they’re really desperate for musicians because we live in a small town, so they said, ‘why don’t you come along and play some of these pieces?’ I play with Hot Tub, the Taupō Concert Band, the Great Lake Big Band and a youth wind band which is mainly students and some teachers.
I started learning saxophone when I was around 45 [Bixley is 53], but I’d been a percussionist and singer. I was always standing out front, looking like the guy who runs the band, but really our band leader in Hot Tub is the baritone sax player.
Watching him play, I thought ‘man, I really wanted to play saxophone ever since I was a kid’, so I decided to knuckle down and just do it. I did an hour a day every day for about three years and, of course, being involved in bands and being surrounded by band members who are all incredible musicians, you ask questions and pick up so much.
Practise is almost enforced, because you have around six hours’ worth of band practice a week if you’re in three bands. Slowly, slowly you get better – and I just really enjoy it, even though I am probably the most useless person in the band.
My biography of Mozart [Mozart: the man behind the music] was the first book I tried to make, so was it only a matter of time before I wrote about an orchestra? I thought I could do an amazing book about an orchestra because it’s got the opportunity for lots of musical onomatopoeia.
So, in The Fantabulous Animal Orchestra you can imagine musicians playing the wind instruments and the sounds through the trees and the different animals making their noises, the buzz of bees. The animal characters aren’t based on any of my bandmates! They’re more intuitively based on famous people.
The keyboard player is an octopus, but he’s kind of a Stevie Wonder character and the lion kind of reminds me of Bono. But our flute player was thrilled that there was a flautist in the book, and it was a panda.
I’ve always liked and been interested in music. When I was about 8, mum and dad came back from America with a Diners Club Card. You could go out and just ‘stick stuff on the plastic’ so I wrote a song and did an a capella version of it. I was having piano lessons, but I didn’t even finish my first year because it was all Trinity Piano exam kind of stuff and that just wasn’t me.
When I was at high school – Tauhara College – we had a band called The Illness because we weren’t The Cure! I could barely even play guitar, but we managed to get up on stage with the absolute bravado of teenage boys and play rock and punk metal songs. Just to have the sheer front to stand up in front of the school and belt it out!
My wife, Jo, and I moved to Auckland after high school and I went to AUT to do graphic design. That was a real eye-opener for me to be surrounded by so many people who I thought were amazing. They were talking about overseas magazines and artists and were all up with pop culture. I felt like such a country bumpkin.
It was the same with trying to get into bands. I was like, ‘these people actually know how to play music’ and I don’t even know the chords, so I dropped music for a long time. Jo and I moved back to Taupō in the early 2000s; we had three kids, and it was just too much to live in Auckland.
I wanted to reconnect with the community; you know, be part of your community. I went along to the local theatre, Centrestage, and I said, ‘I do a bit of design work. I did quite a lot of poster designs for Titirangi Theatre while I was living in Auckland’.
I’d turned up to design posters, but they were like, ‘you’re mid-30s and you’re a man! Can you sing and dance?’ It was at an open day for Les Misérables, and hundreds of people turned up but there was only about 20 men and of those, only five were in the right age range. I ended up landing the role of Marius Pontmercy, which was intense because he’s one of the characters who survives until the end of the show, and he’s got about 18 songs to sing.
I haven’t looked back since and have been really involved in the theatre appearing on stage – and designing the posters and building the sets. To work with your local community and all these people who are giving time for free and doing creative stuff is great. I do have a creative career so you’d think in my spare time, I might want to go off and dig holes or something that isn’t so creative but I like continuing to be creative, but not having to make money from it, that’s really liberating.”
The Fantabulous Animal Orchestra, by Donovan Bixley (Picture Puffin, $21), is out now.
