“It kind of began a family thing,” he says of his encyclopedic love of music. “My cousins were mad Rolling Stones fans, and we used to visit them every Sunday to kick the footy around. When I was around nine, all of a sudden rather than wandering out to the backyard, we’d make a right turn down the corner into the bungalow and they would play the Stones. One day I had the temerity to ask about The Beatles, and they were utterly shocked. ‘We don’t play them. We’re Stones-only here’. And it kind of all developed from there.”
Nankervis is now a dab hand at entertaining vast rooms of complete strangers, but his confidence behind the microphone has a rather unlikely source – teaching. Maintaining control before a room of children equipped him with the necessary poise to take centre stage.
“Teaching was absolutely invaluable, and was really the start of quizzes for me,” he says. “I would do a Friday quiz that was so popular that it was often still going on come Tuesday. I think I realised that things are best taught by a kind of subterfuge. So if you put things in a quiz, suddenly it’s fun, suddenly there’s an element of competition. So having to teach kids definitely – though I only did it for six years – was invaluable to where I am now. That and doing warm-ups for TV shows. For Jimeoin I used to do a few poems, but I also introduced a music quiz for that. I put 15 songs on cassette and the audience had to guess what they were. It worked really well.”
It was during one of these warm-up gigs that Nankervis caught the attention of RocKwiz’s future producer, who felt it was the right time for a music quiz show to rear its head. They sat down and swiftly devised a quiz format that remains essentially unchanged a dozen years later.
“It’s been so enduring and seems to stay so fresh that we’ve only ever had to make a handful of tweaks. The last lot of shows were all themed to a different decade, for example. But it’s also kept fresh because we always have these nutty folk from the audience, these eccentrics who just love their music. I get 24 of them up before each show and ask questions to narrow it down. I think that keeps it fresh.
“I remember the first show we filmed, we had Paul Kelly, and we asked if there was anyone he would like to perform with. And he said, ‘Well, there’s a new band out of Perth that I quite like called Little Birdy. So how about we get Katie Steele, the singer?’ We did, and it worked so well. There was a household name coupled with someone that people didn’t necessary know yet. That became the blueprint. And everybody likes to be able to say, ‘Oh, I saw this new artist on the telly the other night I’d never heard of, but wow.’
“Now with this [live show] people all over the place are going to be able to go into a theatre and say the same thing. And live, there’s so much more room to improvise, to not have to worry as much about keeping to a time limit. It’s going to be a lot bolder. I mean,” he laughs, “there are certain things you can’t really say on television that we’re going to have a blast with on stage.”
BY ADAM NORRIS
