Friday February 29, 2008
Growing pains
MUSIC has been around the Ayesa household since Miguel (Mig for short) was a child. “My parents' taste in music was pretty conservative. I started listening to Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel when I was really young. I first began to play music when my mom bought me this dilapidated piano from WWI, which probably had not been tuned since 1914,” Ayesa quips.
Classical lessons were inevitable but Ayesa’s stint as a student didn’t last long because of his teacher, whom he described rather comically. “I used to learn piano from this midget nun. She looked like Yoda ... honestly ... and she would whack my knuckles with a ruler when I played wrongly. Not long after that I gave up on lessons and started playing what I wanted to. I used Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder song books and learnt chords shapes, and later, began to write my own songs.”
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Rockstar finalist Australian Miguel Ayesa plays the lead character Galileo Figaro in the Queen musical We Will Rock You. |
He already has a covers album in the market, where he even duets with Peter Frampton on the Briton’s classic hit Baby, I Love Your Way. But plans for an album of originals is already in the pipelines and should surface sometime this year.
“The fact that I got a chance to record an album was due to my participation in Rockstar: INXS. And now, that experience has opened more doors for me. Rockstar: INXS was shown all over the world and I get the impression that many people voted for me, which is really nice to know. I had a surreal experience in South Africa recently where they are only now showing that Rockstar season, so it was really out of this world that some girls came up to me at a shopping mall when I was having lunch to ask for my autograph.”
As for the dream collaboration, unsurprisingly, Ayesa would love to work with Brian May and Roger Taylor, the two Queen members who have endorsed We Will Rock You. “It would be great to work with Billy Joel and Bono as well.”
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