Manuel Sharrad, Infusion

Manuel Sharrad is one-third of Melbourne dance trio Infusion, famous for their loose and unstructured live shows.

MANUEL SHARRAD: I certainly did. My mum was a primary school music teacher at the time and my dad, you know, he was just musical as well. He doesn’t really work in the music industry at all, he’s just an English professor [laughs], but he could play the guitar and liked to sing around a bit. They definitely had a bit of a record collection on them, so it is a quite musical family. I was thrown into the deep end to learn piano and various other stuff as a young kid so definitely a lot of musical theory and general knowledge of it was put in me at a very young age.

So that big record collection of your parents’, what kind of music were they into?

MS: Well, they were old folkies so there was a lot of early ’70s, very embarrasing early ’70s bands, but y’know a lot of good stuff as well. Everyone I’m sure had Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel and things like that to feed off. They also had some random Abba singles and some very strange electronic albums as well, which were quite influential for me. Like Everything You Always Wanted To Hear On The Moog But Were Afraid To Ask, which was one of those very late ’60s attempts to do classical music on a synth, like purely on synth, and it’s fascinating. And I don’t think it’s ever been released on CD so it’s very hard to find.