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It was Geoff Knight's "Alice in Wonderland" moment - mere seconds when he watched his booze and drug-addled gang life spin through the air and skid to a halt in the middle of a state highway. In that fantastical moment he understood his life had to change.
Tattooed, bearded, leathered and patched, the Highway 61 motorcycle gang member they called Trawler had clipped a timber truck with the handlebars of his Harley Davidson on the road at Puhoi, north of Auckland.
In a flash of bravado, Knight had throttled to the front of the pack of seven gang bikers, trying to prove he was still The Man. He was, in fact, an emotional mess. His stripper girlfriend had left him while he was working at sea, he was facing a prison sentence and he'd just bought $28,000 worth of gleaming grunt machine to ease his pain. The bike somersaulted. "I was spinning around on my bum, feeling like Alice in Wonderland; spinning in slow motion and total silence," Knight recalls. Bloodied and grazed, he looked to the sky and said: "I get the message."
"I walked into a farmhouse and the farmer's wife cleaned the gravel out of my legs with hot water and Dettol. I'm standing there with my long hair and patches, with my pants around my ankles, feeling like a little boy. "I said to her 'Don't tell those guys, but this is the last time I'm riding with them. I want to live a good life. I want to be a good man. I want to see the world.' And she said to me 'Good on you son, you go for it'."
Three weeks later he left the gang. "When I put my patches in a bag and handed them back, I realised the last five years of my life fitted into a brown paper bag." Fifteen years on, if Knight, now 38, was to pack up his life, it would be overflowing from Louis Vuitton luggage - his transformation almost as bizarre as Alice's adventures, or the bones of an opera. The toddler scarred by a dog mauling; the dyslexic, obese and bullied teenager who dropped out of school; the hard-working deep sea fisherman who joined a gang but changed his life to become an actor and proud father of five; and now the strapping, handsome, opera tenor, poised to burst on to the world stage.
Knight is just as astonished by where he's ended up. For the past seven years he has been studying opera and, under the guidance of renowned bass Grant Dickson, he's building a repertoire of the most popular tenor roles so he can step into the shoes of a leading man anywhere. He's already performing internationally, most recently a four-month stint with Rockdale Opera in Sydney, singing the lead tenor role of Captain Fitzbattleaxe in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Utopia Limited; and earning comparisons to the great Italian tenors.
"Providing he can build on what he's got - and his voice is an incredible instrument - he can go a long way," says Dickson, his Auckland-based vocal teacher. "Geoff has wonderful life experience - it hasn't destroyed him and he's been able to draw on it in a positive way." Dickson's challenge is to keep Knight from bursting at the seams - he has a voracious hunger to learn and a huge work ethic, instilled by his horticulturalist father who turned a West Coast swamp into a thriving plant nursery. Dickson likens his student to a thoroughbred stallion - "you dangle the carrot in front, but you have to keep the reins on".
In Knight's company, you hang on for the ride. Over a three-hour coffee at a tranquil restaurant, Knight leaps from the table to boom into song, wrestle an imaginary bluefin tuna and swear like a Chatham Islands' boatman - and then apologise to the other diners. He swerves from tender to rough, intimidating to enchanting as he recounts his life-story so far. One of Knight's first memories is "basically being eaten alive". As an 18-month-old he was attacked by his babysitter's dog, his left ear almost torn off.
A thick scar still marks his left cheek and the scarring was emotional, too. "Whenever potential danger came my way, I'd turn defensively aggressive," he says. Growing up in Westport, the second son of English parents (his swarthy looks come from Montenegrin ancestors), Knight struggled with his massive height and weight - he was 122kg at the age of 12, which he thinks was his body's defence mechanism to bullying. But he found solace in performing, staging lunchtime skits singing with a piano-playing friend. "I had a wonderful teacher called Adele Bull, who loved music and she could hear my gift. I sang Harry Belafonte songs in the choir and I shone for that time in my school life - two years when I didn't care about anything else. But when she left, it all fell away," he says.
On his first day at Buller High School, a teacher singled out Knight in front of the class as trouble. "My trouble was that he was the music teacher. I made it my mission to make his life hell. He had a mental breakdown and I left school at 14," he says. Unknown to his "loving, hard-working" parents, Knight was wagging to hang out at Buller's unemployment centre, where he first met gang members.
"I identified with these guys; they were powerful, no one screwed with them," he says. He worked as a farmhand, then on ferris wheels at West Coast summer fairs before he got a job at Talleys Fisheries. By 16, he was running the coolstore but angling to get to sea. His chance came on the Amaltal Explorer, a freezer trawler built for orange roughy.
The Japanese fishermen on board called him "Jumbo": a powerful man who would lift anything and learn everything. After 40 days at sea, he'd strive to find a way to spend his hard-earned cash. At 17, he bought his first Harley Davidson, got a taste for tattoos and Chivas Regal, then drugs. He met a Highway 61 member who'd grown up in his hometown and was looking for recruits. "We started hanging out when I was onshore. He was fun, life was good," Knight recalls.
On board the 43m trawler San Waitaki, Cliff Eggeling was skipper and 19-year-old Knight was his bosun, in charge of the fishing platform and 29 salt-hardened crew. Eggeling knew Knight was a bikie, but was pleased to have him onboard. "He was strong, he could handle himself in a bar and he did a good job controlling those guys on the boat. He was an excellent worker and a gentleman - a real West Coaster," he says. But weeks on end at sea were losing their appeal.
Knight bought himself a new bike and began to spend more time with the Highway 61s. Four days after he got his gang patch, he wrote off the bike and broke an arm and a leg in a crash in Kaikoura. "In my head I thought, 'is this really a smart game to play?' But bravado pushed it away." Over the next few years in Auckland, Knight became more heavily involved in the gang - fights, drugs and criminal activity that he's reluctant to talk about, but admits he was "staring at a prison sentence, until the judge gave me a break".
He headed back to sea to keep a low profile. It was the freak accident at Puhoi in 1993 that convinced him to take a new direction in life. Friends advised him to do some personal development seminars. "At one of them, a guy asked me what I would do with my life if I couldn't fail? I said 'I'd be a movie star, man.' Then I stood up in front of everyone and sang Like a Virgin."
That throw-away line planted a seed - Knight suddenly wanted to be an actor and sought guidance from New Zealand theatre legend Raymond Hawthorne before winning a place in the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art in Christchurch in 1995. On graduating, Knight returned to Auckland with his new wife and young family to work in television with roles and stunt work in Hercules, Xena, Shortland Street and Jackson's Wharf.
Theatre drew him back to Christchurch, where people began to notice his voice. "With three kids to support, I was moonlighting in a restaurant, singing while I waited tables. One guy said I should sing opera," he says. Grant Dickson had suggested the same when he first heard Knight sing at the academy five years earlier. Recalls Dickson: "He told me he wanted to be Harrison Ford, or sing Phantom of the Opera. I told him he was setting his sights a little low. He was a very raw boy with a tremendous passion underneath."
Unabashedly, Knight knocked on the door of the Canterbury Opera Company and said: "Everyone says I should be an opera singer, so I thought I better check it out." In the chorus of Turandot, he finally found his calling. He sold software during the day, tucked his five children into bed and then worked on his voice in the garage by night (incensing neighbours who complained to noise control).
Others listened more positively - solicitor Richard Burtt gathered a group of opera buffs who financed Knight's weekend trips to Auckland for lessons with Dickson. But his marriage broke up and Knight had a nervous breakdown, temporarily losing the top octaves in his vocal range. Another fortuitous meeting got Knight back on track.
In 2005, he sang in front of Richard Jeffery, the CEO of Manukau's TelstraClear Pacific Events Centre, and explained how he used to race on the driveway of the events centre site in its previous life as a Highway 61 headquarters. "So I knew our meeting was meant to be," Jeffery says. He invited Knight to sing at the opening of the centre, then arranged an investment vehicle to launch his international career.
Similar to the arrangement which saw Indianapolis 500 champion Scott Dixon's career take flight, Knight is now a company with 480,000 subscribed shares. "I reckoned it would take me five years to get to the startline, to pole position, and I'd need $500,000 to do it," he says. "I can chew through $5000 a month in tuition, flights and accommodation" - travelling between singing and auditioning in Australia, training in Auckland and visiting his children in Christchurch.
Jeffery says the company owns Knight like they would a racehorse and the singer will eventually pay back his investors with six per cent interest. "It's a high-risk, low-return venture, but essentially it's a philanthropic investment. Geoff didn't want handouts but we didn't want to see him selling his soul to a chorus section of an opera company," he says. "He could do pop opera, be a two-year wonder, but he loves acting and singing a whole opera on stage without being miked up. We want him to be the next Pavarotti, and that's not a big ask."
Today, Knight is back in Auckland training intensively with Dickson who, at 75, continues to sing around the world. Knight "loves him like a father". Together they're working on some of the top 10 most popular tenor roles - Tamino from The Magic Flute, Rodolfo from La Boheme and La Traviata's Alfredo - so Knight is well-prepared to step in at a moment's notice if a leading man stumbles anywhere in the world. Dickson has had to work on Knight's voice after the tenor got caught up "trying to make sound" rather than expanding his speech to tell a story.
"I don't want people to hear his voice. I want people to hear Geoff - what he feels, what he gets from the words. He's not just wowing them with sound, he's reaching right into their souls," says Dickson. Knight has done some soul-searching of his own. His friend Kirsteen Britten, widow of motorcycle designer John Britten, helped him to recognise he suffered from dyslexia and put him on to the Davis Dyslexia Correction Programme, helping to slow down his thinking.
Teamed with his inspirational story, Knight's powerful, lyrical voice, is a big hit on the corporate event circuit. He laughs long and hard about his next engagement, singing before the New Zealand School Trustees Association: "Not bad for the boy who they said would never amount to anything."
* Geoff Knight performs at the TelstraClear Pacific Events Centre on November 12.
