Once i heard "Kill 'Em All" that was it, i had to play guitar and i had to play metal. I was probably about 12 at the time and up until then the heaviest thing i was listening to was Bon Jovi, which, once i had discovered bands like Anthrax, Slayer and Megadeth, never defiled my stereo again.

I hooked up a band in highschool, which we called 'Nadir' and we mostly played covers of the bands we loved, playing Carcass alongside Alice In Chains, Deicide next to Soundgarden and Jimi Hendrix along with Pantera - i guess 'death grunge' was never really going to take off though.

A few band members came and went until we found Duncan as our bassist, who stayed up until the end of Nadir in 2001. I had managed to poach Kori (drummer) from another metal band in the area and hooked up a second guitarist (Nathan) and we recorded our debut album 'Rust' before deciding to drop everything, pack our lives into a van and tour up and down New Zealand. I don't quite know how we survived, but we slept on a lot of floors and Kori seemed to have relatives in every part of the country that we bludged off.

Nathan left within about 6 weeks of the tour and we decided not to replace him and to become a three piece instead. We recorded an EP 'With Fury' and were set to leave for Australia when Kori announced he was staying in NZ. It was pretty devastating as things had been going ok up until then.

We moved to Australia anyway and ended up going through another two drummers before Nadir finally called it quits. Thinking about how many players the band went through leads me to conclude that maybe i'm a bit hard to work with - or just a complete prick!

I couldn't really be bothered with the band scene for a while, though at the time a friend of mine's band had also split and we tried to get something happening, but for whatever reason it never really came together unfortunitely, though we did jam on some early versions of what are now Shift songs.

I continued to write songs and was happy just doing that for a while until we had a one off Nadir reunion gig, which gave me the kick in the ass i needed to get my songs off my hard drive and onto yours!

I decided that i didn't want to do the usual band thing where you tour, play to no-one and hopefully over time build a following - i'd been there and done that, and i see many great bands that were doing that 10 years ago and they're still doing that today and getting nowhere. I just wanted to release some songs that i was happy with, i didn't care if the songs were heavy or soft, just as long as i was happy with them. If people like it then that's awesome, if they don't, i can deal with it, it's the best i can do at the time.

- Rob