Saved by music and doctor in the house

SURVIVOR: Rock 'n' roll survivor Lennie "T" Te Whare believes music saved his life, and staying real keeps you sane. PHOTO/FILE

Veteran Wairarapa guitarist Lennie "T" Te Whare had a heart attack on stage while performing one night and believes music - and fellow musician "Dr Rob" Maunsell - saved his life.

The 59-year-old father of four said he had been jamming alongside his friend and frequent bandmate at a musicians' night at the Claireville Bakery in 2013.

Dr Rob, a Wairarapa GP, had called on him to play a solo guitar riff, but there was silence.

"I died for about six minutes and the amazing thing was the room was full of doctors and nurses. Rob called out 'solo Lennie', but he never heard anything. I was having a heart attack and if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be alive today.

"An ordinary doctor would have only gone so far, but Rob just kept going and going and going and going. Music saved my life," Lennie said.

Lennie is from Waitahanui in Taupo and he shifted to Wairarapa as a 17-year-old after playing with a band in the capital city, where he met his wife, Gael Karaitiana.

Lennie said he took to music as a child after watching his saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist father Abie, who worked in big bands.

The first tune he learned "as a little kid" was the theme to the 1952 Gary Cooper western High Noon, a hit by Tex Ritter.

Today Lennie is a multi-instrumentalist and singer who, besides lead guitar, plays drums, bass, saxophone, trumpet and violin. He has done studio session work but hasn't yet laid down his original compositions "because I'm always too busy working live".

Lennie and his wife raised their family in Wairarapa and in 1995 shifted to the Gold Coast in Australia, where he played a live land-locked circuit and cabaret band work aboard show boats.

He was considering a return to the boat gigs, he said, after new offers of work were made to him this year. "I'm thinking about going back because the money's so good, you know."

While in Australia he shared stages with stars including Ian Moss, of Cold Chisel, English entertainer Tony Christie, The Drifters, singer songwriter Jade Hurley, and Australian musician and actor Andy Anderson, who hit the charts in the 1960s with the Missing Links.

In 2009 Lennie and Gael returned to Wairarapa where he has since played in a succession of bands including Grafia alongside Dr Rob, Kingston Brown Trio with Stefan Brown, with Pat McKenna, and in the Ruamahanga River Band with Hartley Towersey.

Lennie plays in Comfortably Numb alongside Vern Thorne and Jeff Thorne and Ricky Luff and in The Cuzzie Bros with Ronald and Eddie Karaitiana, and "Ging" Nooroa. "They don't want me to go ..."

He steers clear of the politics in music. "I just do my own thing," he said. "I go and play and go home. I take off that mask of being a musician and become a normal person. If you don't do that, you go crazy and lose track of what life's all about."

Lennie T will play his next solo show at Dish Cafe in Lansdowne on May 1 and perform with Comfortably Numb at the Masterton Cosmopolitan Club on June 20. Tickets to the band show cost $10.