Musician and composer Fred Cole has lived in the Northern Rivers since 1981, playing in bands, studying and teaching music, and writing the scores for large scale events like the Lismore Lantern Parade. He’s also the area’s go to guy for tuning, repairing and restoring pianos.

I was born in a small village in North East England, where my father was the local vicar. I went to St Andrews University in Scotland and did two and a half years of an astronomy degree before I got glandular fever. As a result I took what was intended to be a year break, and went down to London. It was the ‘70s and there was lots of music and change. Lots of pub bands. Punk was just starting. 

In the '70s Fred Cole worked in a music studio where he recorded sessions with the likes of Thin Lizzy. PHOTO: Supplied/Wikimedia Commons. 

I ended up getting a job as a recording engineer. It was just a demo studio but we did demos for bands like Thin Lizzy and The Nice. I played a lot of sessions, and I met Marianne Faithful, Tim Hardin and quite a few other talented musicians. 

Around that time I met a Polish girl called Emillia and we got married and went travelling around Europe, but when the Russians invaded Afghanistan she thought the world was coming to an end, so she left me to it, took off around the world and ended up here in Australia. 

A couple of years later I was helping run a jazz club in Munich while tour managing for American artists. It was quite an interesting time, but I wasn't particularly happy. Eventually I decided to visit Emilia while she was here living in Terania Creek, so I came over here to have a look, and I've been here ever since. She's now an artist and yoga teacher in Oxford, England, so it's funny how the world works.

We got divorced after 10 years, but while we were together we had a child, my son Patrick, who now lives in Canberra. Six months later I met Jill. That was 30 years ago now, and we’ve been happily married ever since. Jill already had a couple of children and we’ve now got four going on five grandkids. 

In the early days I would play the piano and fix people's pianos in exchange for food, but eventually I moved into town and started teaching music and studying classical guitar at NRCAE. 

There was a thriving music scene back then, which would have been ‘82 to ‘86. I started playing with Barry Ferrier, who is better known as Dr Baz. We had a rock band called Innerspring and we used to play at the Italo Club and the Commercial Tavern, which were the only two venues that allowed original music; every other venue you had to be a cover band. 

It was a very loud, head banging and drinking culture back then and every venue that we played at was good except the Lobster Pot in Ballina. You took your life in your hands playing there.

In the mid ‘90s I met Aquarius Festival organiser Graham Dunstan who asked me to do the music for one of his events in North Lismore. They built an enormous papier mache giant and set fire to it with the participant's hopes and dreams written on pieces of paper and placed in the giant's belly. It was the first local solstice celebration - this was before the first Lantern festival started - and I wrote all the music. I remember the sound delivery system was a ghetto blaster, which I carried around on my shoulder, but that got me interested in making music for large scale events. 

Fred Cole composed the music for 15 Lismore Lantern Parade fiery finales. PHOTO: Supplied/Natsky.

I think ‘97 was the first time I actually wrote specific music for the Lantern Parade fire event and I did that for 15 years in a row. The years I enjoyed the most were when I was given a theme, a script and a little bit of a budget. Most years there was no money, because it's run on the smell of an oily rag. At the time I thought it best that the money went into production, so the music sounded good. The best year was probably 2005, "The Sound of Colour”. That was one of my best shows, and there were over 20,000 people in the audience down by the river.

When Lyndon Terracini came to town to lecture in theatre performance at NRCAE, and he and his wife Liz founded Norpa, I started writing the music and collaborating with him on shows such as ‘The Cars That Ate Paris’ (which we toured to the Perth Festival and the Adelaide Come Out Festival), ‘Faces in the Street’ and ‘Conversations at the Ryan Hotel’. He is now the head honcho at Opera Australia!

In the mid '90s I played with a soul funk band called Hip Pocket for 5 years, with Greg Lyon, Steve Hopes, Ned Sutherland (and later Jim Kelly), Tony Buchanan and Jo Jo Smith. I also toured in the backing bands for international artists such as Eartha Kitt.

I then took three years off live performance work while I completed my PhD in compositional techniques in Australian Electronica.

After this I played in ‘The Big Band at the End of the Universe’ for a year or two, and when this ended I formed a jazz trio with Hans Lovejoy and Ben Cox, and we still play the occasional live gig around the area as ‘Cole Cox Lovejoy’.

More recently I've been writing music for 'Sprung', a dance ensemble with choreographer Michael Hennessy, and found that inspirational because the majority of the performers are mixed ability. They’re doing extremely well and have been nominated for a variety of national dance awards. 

Fred Cole usually has about 50 to 60 pianos in his workshop at various stages of repair and restoration. PHOTO: Will Jackson.

The piano business is steady. The calls keep coming in. I particularly love restoring old instruments. I think the thing that gets me going the most is the sense of the history. Back before radio, and even, for a while, before stereos and televisions came along, pianos were people’s sole entertainment. Everyone used to gather around the piano. They would all have singalongs; they would have dances in old halls. That's where people often met each other - met their life partners - at a dance with somebody belting out tunes on the piano. 

Tuning, repairing and restoring pianos, you get to see that every instrument has its own unique history. It's not often that you can find out exactly what that history was, but you can get a sense of it, get hints. When you're working on something, by seeing where the wear is, you can almost see what sort of player they were, or what sort of tunes they played.

About a year ago I joined this website called numberonemusic.com. I think I've got 30 or 40 tracks of my various albums on there that people can listen to, review, leave comments and subscribe. I've got over 1,500 subscribers and I’ve had over 800,000 plays. At various times I've been number one globally in different genres, like ‘ambient’ and ‘house’. You can listen to them for free at numberonemusic.com/drfredcole.

I've also been working on my own site, ambientpiano.net, where people can buy my original music, and my piano website, specialtypianos.com.au, where I've assembled all the interesting info I’ve collected on pianos over the years. You'll also find the repair operations of every single part of the piano, with a photo or description, plus there's a blow by blow account of the reconditioning of a Steinway, which is quite interesting. It’s also got a FAQ and a section with the current pianos available for sale, with pictures. 

I'm hoping that now I've got the websites out of the way I can focus on creating more music content. It’s also the 35th anniversary coming up for the Lantern Parade, and I'd love to be involved in that from the word go and write fresh music. I'd love for somebody to come forward and put up the money for me to do a proper job on that. 

I've enjoyed this area for its artistic stimulation and I hope to continue contributing to the musical life of the community for many more years.