Sharing image

Dave Ma:
Coming of Age

Words by Davey Spens

Photography by Laura Eckert and Dave Ma

Roughly 1192 words

4 - 6 minutes read

“That was the moment. I genuinely didn’t know what the fuck I’d just seen, but I knew that it was for me.”

Dave Ma's life was changed by a music video.

“The sound of those opening chords, the way the camera tracks in past the bleachers and the cheerleaders to these guys who look like some dudes that I could imagine down the street at the garage. They didn’t look like superstars, they didn’t have these stupid buzz-cuts with tracks in the sides of their hair, they weren’t wearing baggy pants or doing a choreographed dance routine, they were shying away from the camera, and then at the end of the video smashed the fuck out of everything. I was like, ‘Sign me up! Everything else I’ve known up to this point is irrelevant.’ I’m articulating in hindsight in a much nicer way but that’s how I felt at the time.”

In September 1991, “Smells like Teen Spirit” hit the music video channels in Sydney. A young Dave Ma bought Nevermind on cassette, and wore it out over the summer break. Now living in Los Angeles, present day Dave Ma works as a filmmaker and photographer. His recent music video Clair de Lune is picking up awards on the festival circuit. A coming of age story - two girls, one car, and a night wide open in front of them - it pushes a button inside anyone who’s ever been a teenager that snaps you back to a time and a space when you were happier to drift, experiment, and dare yourself to do something you would never ordinarily do. In just under eight minutes, it takes you back to your teenage self, and leaves you to remake the introductions.

This sentiment isn’t unique to the Clair de Lune film, there’s a nostalgic-yet-fully-present spirit at play in other pieces of his work, nowhere more evident perhaps than in the video for Olympic Airways he directed for Foals. Hanging out on a patch of grass by a reservoir near his home in Silverlake, our conversation flitted back and forth between his teenage years and the present. Most people can think back to a zeroing moment, a clock-counter reset, a period of his or her life when they encountered something that seemed to make sense of themselves for the first time, but there can be few for whom it was such an obvious baptism as Dave Ma.

article_54150933bb4a5ec4ac8181878b49ccc2.jpg

“Fugazi was the first time I saw a band not just play their songs live and get through a set, but take themselves and everyone in the room to another level and another place and keep doing it! They came back on for three encores. I was flipping out, crushed against the barrier but I was happily crushed. Being in a mosh pit has got to be one of the most uncomfortable positions to be in - you get there early and wait for ages and there’s always a lot of arseholes in the pit - but isn’t that what it’s all about?”

To Dave, live music has an addictive quality, both for the band and the audience. When he’s asked to create a picture of it, he dunks his brush in human experiences and slathers it across the screen - the adrenaline rush, the momentary overabundance of adulation, the chase for the perfect moment, and that feeling of knowing when you get there without looking at anyone else. In directing Foals Live at the Royal Albert Hall, the venue, no matter how legendary and historic, was servant to the human narrative; Dave is as keen to document as much of those textures at play as he is to create a record of a gig itself.

article_eea1f19f63e8dbacb5ae3395951e7638.jpg -

From Foals 'Olympic Airways' video by Dave Ma

Growing up, he and his brother Jono (one third of Jagwar Ma) would get up early on a Saturday morning to make VHS video mixtapes from an all-night TV programme on Australian TV called Rage. Somewhere in amongst MC Hammer and Big Audio Dynamite II, he had his Damascene experience with Nirvana. Grunge and punk rock fed a hunger in him for something outside of his normal life. He refers to live shows as ‘collective experiences’. It doesn’t matter who you were before you walked through the door, for the next few hours you’re not a schoolkid that’s got homework or a middle manager with a deadline. When the door shuts behind you, you leave everything outside, and everyone in the room hones in on a singular thing. When he was a teenager, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Beastie Boys (as Quasar) and High-Pass Filter were playing the Rectory at Sydney Uni. He knew he had to be there but didn’t have a ticket, so found himself climbing up on top of the university building, and ripping up the roof tiles to find a way into the attic before being ejected by security. He managed to get a ticket stub off someone who was leaving, and splashed himself with water in the public toilets to make it appear that he’d been in the pit the whole time, faking a smudged stamp on his arm like it had been smeared by sweat. He tells me it was the best gig ever… though confesses that he can’t remember anything about the show. For Dave, reliving those memories, and recounting those stories is not an exercise in preserving history, but a prompt to stay hungry.

“Nostalgia makes you really think about, in hindsight, what was it about that period or that time or that thing you really loved and how can you have it again in a different way? Nirvana and grunge and 90s music will never happen again, and I’ll never be innocent and pure and 15 again, but I can still chase those experiences in the same way.”

Chasing those experiences is what pushes him from Sydney, via London to Los Angeles. He takes the attitude that the earth is one big round thing, he’s from that rock, and he’ll always be from that rock. He knows he has to be out there experiencing something, or writing something down that he thinks he would want to see and put into the world. For Dave, ‘home’ is where the fire is. And that puts him at odds with his conventional upbringing.

“My dad is an old-school Chinese guy. He doesn’t drink, has never partied, and I’m here on the other side of the world. He sent me an email the other day, after he had a ‘good conversation’ with my brother – ‘I wanna have the same chat with you and find out what’s your game-plan.’”

As we wrapped up our conversation he scrolled through the vault of Nirvana live recordings he has on his iPhone. He did eight or nine swipes and was still only a quarter down. I couldn’t help but feel that the joy of Dave Ma is that he’ll never need a ‘game-plan’. He’ll always have Smells Like Teen Spirit.

article_902afe17b891175408823dae1467da4d.jpg -

From Foals 'Olympic Airways' video by Dave Ma

Davey Spens

Davey Spens is the Creative Director of soundhalo and Boat Studio. He has 27 registered domains.

Dave Ma

Dave Ma is a filmmaker and photographer based in Los Angeles.