100 people - #19: Peter
Now Playing: my hyde & the jeckyls - you may have horses in your eyes, but you're no fuckin' cowboy
Topic: 100 people
I can't remember the specifics, but Pete and I met back in early July 1978. I was about 14 months old; he was fresh from my mother's womb and had a hole in his heart.
I'm sure we got on fine initially, though our friendship has been a bit up and down over the years. You know, the usual sibling competition and quarreling. I remember lots of horse bites and duck bites, and fights for the television remote, and pinning each other to the floor (usually these things were related).
I remember Pete knocking on my door with eerie regularity almost every afternoon when I was in primary school and early high school, asking what I was doing, to which I usually responded "Homework!" and closed the door on him. At the time I found it irritating and responded accordingly. Later I realised it was just that he wanted to hang out. I guess I found this kind of foreign as I was used to doing so many things alone: reading, writing, playing piano, etc.
Back then he always seemed to get away with everything, being the youngest and all. For example, if he didn't clean his bedroom, even after being grounded and flaunting that punishment, Mum would do it. He was always cuddling up to Mum and won her over with his affection.
These days he's a bit of an enigma to all of our family. He goes off and does awesome things, and then we find out afterward when he decides to let us in on what he's been up to:
his record label, his bands, his travels (where I am drawn to the UK, he is drawn to the US, and he seems to spend about 3 months there most years).
He's been in numerous bands over the years: H*A*W* (depending on who you talked to, this was an acronym for Hippies Against Whaling, Hairy Axe Wound, etc., etc); Mr Hyde & The Jeckyls,
Whitehorse,
Occult Blood and
Collapsed Toilet Vietnam. He also posts photographs to
Never Nothing.
About the only thing he doesn't seem to do these days (which I miss) is paint or draw. He has the painting and drawing skills that I've never had, and jealously wish he'd use more.
Where Rob used to introduce me to his friends as "my little sister", Pete would tower over me and introduce me as his "big sister". Still most people who meet all three of us together don't believe we are siblings.
Though all of us Hyde kids have reddish hair in some lights (whether head or beard hair), Pete has killer genetics when it comes to facial hair and for years has chopped and changed between styles. He would grow a full beard (often down to mid-chest length), then trim to a goatee, or a 'chin curtain' (what I refer to as a 'reverend beard'), mutton chops, or what Pete affectionately terms a "wife-swapper" (somewhere between a trucker moustache and a porn star moustache, in my estimation).
The night I took this photo, the night before I left Melbourne on my road trip with Phil Ivens, he and the lass in the background of this portrait were playing distortion pedals in the open mike night at Bar Open's Make It Up Club, on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy.
Last week he turned 33.