Standing Up Hollywood Style

Jag’s passion for playing music pretty much stems from a second hand Iron Maiden T-shirt. To this day he still hasn’t heard any Iron Maiden songs and at the time, he didn’t even know they were a band. The shirt was a gift from a family friend and quickly became the pick of choice for school casual days. Unintentionally disguised as a music fanatic, Jag stood out to the year level’s token musos, three guys named Cooba, Combi and Space Cadet. Under their collective wings, Jag was shown how to read tablature and play the stereotypical guitarists first song… Nirvana’s “Come as you are”.

Apart from C, C and SC’s coaching and a brief stint of piano lessons (He couldn’t play Greensleves which made his teacher angry so he quit) Jag has never had any formal music tuition. When he finished school, his neighbour was tragically killed in a car accident and Jag was fortunate enough to inherit his nylon string guitar. Jobless, he spent a solid year teaching himself how to play this guitar before finally emerging from his room and re-joining society by getting a job as a pizza chef, where he would often write songs during his lunch breaks.

A few thousand pizzas later, Jag left the restaurant business and spent a year travelling around Europe with two best mates. Together they filmed an independent doco series called Backpackers (www.backpackers.tv) about their adventures along the way. He took a small travel guitar on the journey and wrote many songs in the back of their motor home as they travelled between countries. The sound recording and editing experience gained during this project carried across to Jag’s passion for music and he now records and produces his songs on the same makeshift home editing suite that was used for the TV series.

In late 2007, Jag met Kat Chishkovsky, a talented fiddle player with a flair for music production and they began to collaborate, working under the name “Standing Up Hollywood Syle”. Their live setup consists of vocals, an acoustic guitar and a violin but when recording, the instrumentation is much more diverse and includes keyboard, mandolin and sampling. The music has a pretty alternative, rocky and emotive sound for an acoustic act and lyrically tends to be a bit edgier than what you might expect from the instrumentation. Their songs are often about very random subject matter as opposed to over saturating the clichéd love-song market and are inspired by everything from an 80’s cartoon super villain to an erotic dream about one of the Golden Girls.

Early solo acoustic versions of some Standing Up Hollywood Style tracks were featured in the Backpackers TV series which has been screened in over ten countries around the world. These tracks have since been re-recorded to include further instrumentation. Check out the video on this page to see some examples... (read less)

Jag’s passion for playing music pretty much stems from a second hand Iron Maiden T-shirt. To this day he still hasn’t heard any Iron Maiden songs and at the time, he didn’t even know they were a band. The shirt was a gift from a family friend and quickly became the pick of choice for school casual days. Unintentionally disguised as a music fanatic, Jag stood out to the year level’s token musos, three guys named Cooba, Combi and Space Cadet. Under their collective wings, Jag was shown how to... (read more)