Unfortunately, there are very few facilities which offer courses in the arts. Not all the secondary schools offer the subject for CXC examinations.
I went to this boy's choir school when I was growing up, and I think that the first time that I consciously started making music was when this one kid joined our class. He was an amazing pianist and would come up with all these ideas. I've always had a really competitive side, so I saw him doing that, and was like, "I have to try writing songs as well."
ACID Kreationz was founded in 2008. I formed this business with the purpose of paying my university tuition because my teaching salary would not be able to cover school payments.
When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.
We lived in a suburb in Johannesburg, which is a massive city of about 8 million people, and my parents would drive me to school every day and over the weekend I would go to the mall and then occasionally on Safari. Pretty normal stuff, apart from the Safari.
When I was 10 I went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, which is this idyllic Harry Potter-esque music boarding school in the mountains in South Africa, and that's when everything started to change for me and I realised that music is my thing.
A pretty pivotal moment for me was having a songwriting class with Paul McCartney when I was at LIPA, and then being called in a few days later by the headmaster of the school to tell me that Paul McCartney likes what I'm doing.
I remember my friends at primary and secondary school admiring my work and even paying me money for some of my pieces.
I also got encouragement from my teachers at primary school but one person in particular who had a significant impact on my lean towards art is Mr. Luigi St. Omer. Mr. St. Omer was the one who always reminded me that I should not settle for less than greatness in my art. He saw that I had the potential and he helped me develop that talent.
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