John Lacey

John is as John does. And I think there’s something in that for all of us!

Please sir. Can I have some more?

MORE?! You want MORE?! You want THE TRUTH?! Well YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!

Okay if I’m being entirely honest, I don’t expect anyone will feel overly compelled to read this page and thus I intend to make it as silly as possible.

John was born… No, wait, John is writing this! John talks about himself in third person far too often. Let’s try again.

I was born on January 21, 1982 on the South Coast of New South Wales (Australia). A little place called “Nowra.” A little piece of trivia you might like to know about Nowra - Microsoft Word Spell check had never heard of the place and routinely suggested “Nowhere” in its place. Something a good number of my peers agreed with wholeheartedly!

I went to school, lost and gained teeth, grazed limbs… I remember at one time watching some kind of motorcycle racing on television. I was really impressed by the way they could take corners at 45 degree angles. I tried replicating the feat on my push bike with bloody results. Whenever I would touch or bump my leg for months afterwards it would bleed. I’m guessing that event later contributed to my disdain for the study of Physics. (DAMN YOU GRAVITY!)

I became completely fascinated with our then new Commodore 64 computer. Back in the days when floppy disks were floppy. (I pause for a moment to realise many people won’t remember disks of any variant, let alone the floppy kind. For the teenagers reading, suffice it to say Disks were the USB Storage devices of their era.) At a very young age I immersed myself in computer programming, starting with the faithful Commodore 64 Basic. I still own a floppy disk with my original programs. A collection of fairly simplistic, but rather cute efforts.

Thus, I suppose, I was flung into the degree of nerdom in which I currently reside.

Growing up I fell in love with music and writing. I recall waking up at 5 or 6 am on weekends hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever was on Rage (an Australian Music Video Television show). I suppose it was the time when Stock Aiken Waterman ruled the world and the charts; Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan were the Australian pop heroes at the time.

The earliest piece of original writing I have is a poem I wrote during my second year of school about bunnies. It included a fascinating rhyming scheme that coupled words like “cute” and “beaut” (an Australian colloquial abbreviation for “Beautiful”). As I recall I also illustrated it with pictures of fluffy animals. I’m sure you can imagine.

While also in primary school, we had an excursion to a local bush walk. I subsequently wrote a short piece about the walk, likening the flora to characters in “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.” For reasons I still struggle to understand a local newspaper published the piece.

The truth is even from an early age I liked writing; I liked piecing words together in order to communicate some kind of meaning. I felt more comfortable with the written (or typed) word than I did with communicating in other ways I suppose.

I continued writing short stories and (bad) poetry. My English teachers seemed happy with my results. Beyond that, however, they didn’t get much of an audience.

In my final year of High School I put together a multimedia CD entitled, “Metallic Scream.” It featured original musical compositions performed by computer through the wonders of MIDI, and a multimedia presentation which included more writing, photographs and a short video. I don’t think many people really understood what it was, or why I had made it. I sold a couple of copies to friends. CD Writing technology was a tad temperamental in those days, still I hoped my messages were received in spite of technological complications.

As much as I loved computers and programming I spent so much time around “computer nerds” in high school that it made me realise if I had to endure another “PCs are better than Macs” (or vice-versa) argument I would stab someone with a particularly blunt pencil. Perhaps computer science wasn’t for me?

At the same I used my love of music to venture out into the world of community radio. Announcing was a sharp learning curve for someone who felt more at home with the written word. I shudder to think just how bad those early shows were. It was such an important time for me. I guess as a writer I really appreciated the metaphor. I was “finding my voice” in more ways than one. I loved singing and did it often, though I was invariably bombarded with criticism for the sound of my voice. There were, I concede, times when I thought of myself as a poet because I couldn’t get my head around the mechanics of music. There were times I thought of myself as a songwriter because I didn’t think I could sing or play. It seemed always as if the things I craved the most were always just outside my reach.

I decided I wanted to learn about audio production and music business management, so on completing high school I enrolled into the JMC Academy. It is difficult to pinpoint another time when I’ve enjoyed learning as much as I did then. I still felt like a chronic loner, but I was immersing myself in something I really wanted to do. It was glorious!

It was around this time I think I was beginning to appreciate the real value of the internet. While living in Sydney I had broadband for the first time, it really made me stop and think about what this medium was and what it could do.

I was also learning about myself during this time. You don’t appreciate what a strange experience traditional education is until you get out in the quote-unquote “real world.” A lot of things I accepted as being self-evident proved to be anything but. In a lot of ways I had to “unlearn” a lot about life. I had to stop reading about life in self-help books and actually start living it. I still do. Its a continuing process.

With such introspection came a lot of poetry. I compiled Smoke & Mirrors as a reflection on this period of my life. A number of pieces were also included in publications produced by the Shoalhaven Branch of The Federation of Australian Writers.

Also during this time I started recording demos and improvisations… vocals and keyboards. This was done mostly in private. I knew my contemporaries at the Academy had vastly superior musical experience and I didn’t want to make this public. But that was something so wonderful about these recordings. They were so organic. Such a reflection of any given moment. Any given thought. What I lacked in technical proficiency, I like to think I made up with enthusiasm and passion.

That wasn’t very long ago, if I’m being honest, yet it feels like a lifetime. Things like my interest in photography and video making are such comparatively new things. I would like to tell you more - indeed I intend to, but for the time being this will have to do.