Growing up on the south coast of NSW provided the perfect playground for the sandy-haired grommet. “When I was younger, big waves looked like mountains charging towards me,” he says. “I’ve been scared in the water a lot.”
But even a few close calls couldn’t prompt him to hang up his wetsuit for good. “Once I thought I saw a crazy, weird animal in the water. It was huge and had loads of fins and was lolloping around like some kind of dying alien. I was totally freaked out and went in to the shore. It was dusk in a remote part of Mexico. Early in the morning I saw it again and pointed it out to a local. He was a bit spooked but paddled over to it. He gave it a little nudge and two enormous sea turtles were so startled that they stopped having sex and swam off… and we laughed our heads off. They’d been going all night.”
Churchill’s warm, laidback manner is a huge part of his appeal. He first picked up an acoustic guitar at four years old, and has been making music ever since. He began writing lyrics as a teenager and can still remember the first song he ever wrote.
“It was called Qui Languit D’amore or something like that,” he laughs. “I was 15 and it was a super cheesy love song for my girlfriend. I’d just watched the Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, and I wanted to write songs so badly. It was crazy. Fortunately I was such a naïve judge that I didn’t hate my first attempts. I actually got quite psyched by having songs. It was the first step for sure. I recorded albums – terrible stuff – and went and sold them while I busked. It was the exciting beginning of my career.”
He’s now 25-years-old and already has four albums under his belt. The travelling troubadour shows no sign of slowing down, either. Prior to packing his van and hitting the road for Urban Spread’s Summer Series, he’s at home working on his fifth record.
“I’m back here putting the finishing touches on the new album and getting the pieces stage-ready,” he says. “The most difficult thing is the drum parts. I’ve never tried to do such complex drum parts with my feet before. A lot of my rehearsals at the moment are just the foot drums, set up with the Pro Tools session on a big TV screen in front of me, practising like I’m on one of those arcade dancing machines.
“It’s down-time though,” he adds. “I’m surfing and painting and cooking each day. It’s the closest thing to time off I could handle.”
Visual art has been a passion of his since a young age. “Art and reading were big for me [growing up], but as I grew they were naturally taken over by sports, girls, partying and that kind of stuff. But now I’m touring, so I’ve constantly been finding that I prefer the quiet hotel room and some paints. It’s lovely to be reunited with art, to be honest. It’s also cool to be so terrible at something that I never have any expectations. If the tiniest little corner of a painting I do looks OK, then I’m over the moon. It’s a nice change from music, where I’m an incredibly harsh judge of every minuscule part of my work. Being a beginner is really liberating it seems.”
While the multi-instrumentalist may be a novice at some things, he has songwriting down to a precise art. “Some songs have taken me minutes to write, and then five years to really appreciate. I think the hours spent busking and playing little bars were really helpful though. There really aren’t any shortcuts around putting in the hours.
“Sometimes I’ll write poems, sometimes I’ll write the music [first]. Whenever that’s the case, I find it’s more of a complex process of compromises and delicately finding harmony within the two elements. Sure, it’s totally doable, but I find my best stuff is [written] when it happens all at once. The chords are happening, and the melodies and lyrics just come out fully formed. I just have to hope I was clever enough to push record.”
BY NATALIE ROGERS
