Ray Mann, The Ray Mann Three

Ray Mann leads a trio of soulful funketeers in Sydney. Previously, he played guitar in the band Kid Confucius.

Do you come from a musical family?

RAY MANN: My parents are not particularly musical. Well, they’re not really musical, but they definitely introduced us to a lot of music growing up. I think my mum’s father was a bit of a renaissance man. He died when she was very young, but apparently he was a poet and a violinist and a whole bunch of other things and apparently that’s where our parents and aunties and uncles can trace that, back to him, this artistic inclination in me and my cousin Andy who’s in Kid Confucius. In our house at least most of the music that we were hearing, my dad would only ever listen to an Egyptian singer called Ummm Kulthum ’cause we’re Egyptian. She was like the Elvis of Egypt back when he was growing up. Mum mainly listened to Elvis, you know, who is the Elvis of the rest of the world. Between them they definitely put a lot of things in front of me. Everything from Michael Jackson to Simon & Garfunkel to whatever, you know? So most of that stuff came from listening. I decided to pick up a guitar based on everything they were putting me onto rather than them encouraging me to go and learn to create music.

When you picked up the guitar did you want to be the Elvis of Australia?

RM: I think at the time I wanted to be Ritchie Valens from La Bamba.