100 people - #7: Aleksandar
Now Playing: aleksandar habus - having a drum machine doesn't make you an industrial band
Topic: 100 people



Once upon a time, about a year before Myspace existed, there was a social networking site called Friendster*. My younger brother, Peter, invited me to Friendster; and after realising that, no, my brother wasn't inviting me to a dating site, he was using it to network with other musically-inclined folk, I joined and set up a profile.

Aleks contacted me through Friendster as he was moving from Adelaide to Melbourne and looking for like-minded friends in his new city.

As it happened, we had a lot in common, and ended up chatting through IM for many hours before his move. Our first date, when he arrived in Melbourne to look for a place to live, consisted of gelato from Trampoline, 2.5 bottles of red wine, and Lost Highway. There might also have been some tag-team vomiting in there.

We went out for what seemed like a much longer time, but was actually only a few months. We no doubt appeared an odd pair: my 5'2"ish self next to his towering 6'5" stature. We spent most of our relationship watching arthouse films, and competing against each other at Scrabble.

Hailing from the former Yugoslavia, Aleks is a musician and a composer who moved to Adelaide with his family when he was about 13. His previous bands I know of were Teenage Girls, Booster Suction Inlets, Aleks Habus & The Amateurs, The Toys (a band I was a member of, playing glockenspiel and egg-shaker (w00t!) and reluctantly singing back-up. Playing some of Aleks' original compositions and covers of pieces as diverse as 'Alone Again (Naturally)' [Gilbert O'Sullivan], 'A Gentleman's Honour' [Philip Glass] and 'He Needs Me' [originally performed by Shelley Duvall in 'Popeye'] The Toys formed for a one-off gig at The Laundry in Melbourne, where all the band members played... well, toy instruments), and the last I know of, Under the Roofs of Paris.

I was commissioned by Aleks to photograph Under the Roofs of Paris shortly before I moved from Melbourne to Brisbane, and this image is taken from the shoot. By this time Aleks had swapped his trademark black death metal t-shirts, black jeans, oversized cardigans and unruly hair-hanging-in-his-eyes for a more suave suited-and-booted look, replete with a variety of funky cufflinks.

*I just went to see if my profile is still on the Friendster site, only to find it is now a social network for gaming; not the site it was when I joined. I am surprised it still exists in any incarnation.