Corey, how's it going?

Good, mate, good, we're getting there

Tonight's the night of the debut of your first official website for the Contagious CD. How are you feeling with the whole set up with the new web page?

Great. Lovin' it - goin' off. & I'm really excited about it and looking forward to telling everybody about it.

What sort of things can people look forward to seeing on the website?

At the moment there's some of the new tunes on there that we've just put out. Eventually we'll also bring in some older stuff, such as some old demos I've done in old past bands and some stuff I'm singing. There'll be some new material and I'll be showcasing my new band, CRASHPIT, in upcoming months.

What we're actually going to be doing with this interview is forming somewhat of a bio for the Contagious website, so let's start from the beginning for you: You were raised heavily on Rock from a very early age. Tell us a little bit about what really got you into that in the very beginning and what about music got you at a very early age.

My mother listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Elvis, Beatles, Suzi Quatro. Tubular Bells was a very big album when I was very young, which scared the shit out of me a fair bit.

Why did it scare the shit out of you?

There's a certain part in it where it has a devilish voice. I don't know what the hell's going on through that part, but it has this devil-like voice. I remember when I was a kid, Mum used to crank it up and turn all the lights off.

So basically, what you're telling me is that you had a completely versatile array of music at such a very early age.

Yeah, and mum used to always play it loud. We used to have people knock on our doors, telling mum to turn it down.

So your mum's a lover of music as well then.

Yeah, for sure, definitely.

& she's been a keen supporter of all the bands you've been in and so on?

Never... (laughs) - no, of course she is. Yeah, you gotta kinda control her sometimes because she gets pretty excited.

Obviously, you've spoken before to me that school wasn't such a big thing for you when you were growing up. What was it that was the biggest thing for you when school just wasn't doing it for you?

KISS. KISS was what is was all about to me when I was growing up. If I wasn't collecting the KISS cards, I was putting on the make-up, or I was listening to the songs. When you're 8 years old, and KISS comes out and they're huge, you really get into it pretty deeply.

But that's the thing about being a KISS fan though. It's so much more than the music, isn't it?

Oh yeah. It is more.

That's why there's a lot of bands, singers and musicians out there that claim KISS to be their biggest influence.

Yep. That's right. & you know, it sounds so much like a cliché, but I have to say the same. They were the ones that broke it out for me.

It was the starting point for you.

Yeah.

What was it about KISS that grabbed you that first time in the very beginning?

Probably just the whole entertainment value of it. Things like, you know, remembering a lot of lights - I remember seeing the I Was Made For Loving You video clip, and at the time it looked like a billion and one bloody lights hanging above the stage. There was nothing bigger than what they were doing. Ever. That's kinda how it came across to me at an early age. Everytime they brought a video out or when there were pictures of them in magazines, it just got better - and you had to get it, or you had to collect it, or you die trying.

So with all those things coming out when you were in primary school, like the collector's cards, the t-shirts and the badges and things like that; that really gave you something to channel into.

Oh sure. It was all I channelled into.

& did that continue for you into high school as well?

Yeah, I kept following KISS. But when I got into high school, for me it started developing also into listening to bands like Motley Crue, W.A.S.P. This was before those bands really broke out in Australia. It was a couple of years later when Hard Rock and Heavy Metal sort of became mainstream over here. I got into it all a few years beforehand.

Did you find that you were one of those kids at school that was ALWAYS getting into bands, like W.A.S.P. and perhaps even bands like Metallica, WAY before anyone else was getting into it?

Yeah. Everyone used to say things like, "What's a Mötley Crüe?" (laughs). Yeah, and with Metallica, I remember when Master of Puppets was released. That was when I was getting into them. Actually I wasn't too big into Metallica. I liked them, but people around me like Nikzilla were into them much more. Nik used to be the one singing Master of Puppets while walking through Hillarys. We knew of them, and they were another heavy metal band in our heavy metal magazines - and they were cool.

Apart from Crue, W.A.S.P. and perhaps even to a lesser extent, Metallica, what other bands really grabbed you during the times?

More obscure ones really. I mean, I could go on about Bon Jovi, Poison and whatever, but I was probably more into bands like Mercyful Fate/King Diamond, Queensryche... There were so many bands that came out that were really cool back then. I really kind of swallowed as much as I could - swallowed the music, not anything else (laughs).

Obviously, you've spoken before that school just wasn't doing it for you at all. I believe you left school at an early age...

I left when I was 14. There was nothing there for me. I got into trouble a lot, simply because I wasn't focusing on what I was supposed to be doing. Me and my mates used to really fuck around a lot and get into a lot of trouble, just really to get us out of there. If we got kicked out of school, then that was kind of a bonus. I remember waking up, getting ready to go to school, getting on my push-bike, stop at my mate Jason's house (he's now known as T-Bone). His mum and dad would go to work, we'd stay and wait for them to go and then we'd go into his brother's bedroom and pull out all of his Metal albums. We thrashed Accept, Judas Priest, Motley Crue and all that stuff. We wouldn't go to school. We'd stay there, drink coffee and eat from their biscuit-tin all day.

So your education wasn't really built on the three R's, but built on Metal instead.

It was VERY Metal. The teachers would go, "Have you got your pen and paper?" We'd be like, "No." So they'd tip out our bags and find all these Metal magazines instead, that we'd gotten that morning from the newsagents on the way to school. That's all we really cared about. That's all we really went for. Metal.

So, really when you think about it, after all that time with such a huge focus on music, that you'd eventually pick up a guitar.

It took a while. I started only singing first, in my very first band, back in 1988. When playing gigs around 88/89, I'd always been the singer only until 1992 when I got back from Sydney. I started playing a lot more guitar from that point on.

We'll talk a bit more about Sydney a little further on. What was the very first band that you were involved with?

A bunch of guys that were a lot older than me. We really didn't have a name, but they kinda let me jam with them a few times. They were really big KISS fans as well. They were kinda much more mature musicians than me, but we had a good time. My first real band was called Branded. That was the first band I ever did a gig with, in front of about 20 guys at a bucks party, which isn't really a good time to get up and sing You Really Got Me and songs like that. Yeah, that was a bit of a weird situation.

& you were predominantly a singer at that stage?

Yeah. That's kinda where it all started out, in the vocal territory.

But, when did you start playing guitar on a serious basis then?

It would have been around the same time I was singing with Silent Scream. I was starting to write my own stuff on guitar. I'd always written lyrics, but writing stuff on guitar I was starting to really come to terms with, and then starting to put the lyrics on top of that. I'd written a couple of songs in Silent Scream that I didn't play guitar on, but that I'd written and passed on to the band. After that band broke up, and we started up Fortissimo, I'd pretty much written over half the stuff before that band had actually gotten up and started playing. So, it's been pretty much from there on that I've been heavily into writing with both guitar and, in particular, I'd also use guitar a bit live, as well as vocals. So I was crossing over in that period.

You left school at age 14, went off and started working. Around the age of 17 you started getting involved with bands singing and starting to play guitar in your own time and writing material. What was the music scene in the Perth area like at the time you were starting to become involved in bands?

There wasn't a lot of original stuff happening - at all. Everyone was playing covers. Cover bands were really big, in a way that they were filling venues that are much bigger than the ones that are around today. The scene seemed a lot more alive back then, but now there's a lot more original bands it doesn't seem as if it just doesn't have the same energy that it had back then. It's kinda crossed over. There's a lot more original bands out there now, but a lot more aren't going out to see them as well. It's come a bit late I think...

Do you find it goes in cycles in the Perth area? Like, for a few years, people really enjoy going to see original bands and then the next thing it's all covers. Do you find it goes in a cyclic wave?

I think as far the original scene goes, it was really cooking around '92 - '95. The original scene in Perth, especially in the Hard Rock and Metal area, that was...

Click here for PART TWO of
A Conversation with Corey Hodgetts