Kiwi Zane Lowe might be the best interviewer in music at the moment, consistently chopping it up with the biggest tune makers on the planet. However, if it weren’t for his family basically telling to him grow some balls and leave Aotearoa, he’d just be yarning with us regular folks.
Lowe appeared on the latest episode of Apple FItness+’s audio service ‘Time To Walk’ and said all the way back in 1997 he felt like his career in New Zealand was “bottoming out a bit”. He had been working as a presenter on Max TV and performing with bands Urban Disturbance and Breaks Co-Op.
He got an email from a Kiwi in the UK that was running MTV Europe, and so, Zane decided to move to the other side of the world. He then ceebsed, it. Like really ceebsed it.
So much so that his whānau had to sit him down and tell him to leave, to spread those Kiwi wings and fly.
“That's when New Zealand really set in for me,” he said. “Like, 'What more could there possibly be other than what is here?' And I said, 'I don't know if I'm going to do it'.”
“That's when my family privately got together and decided that they were going to stage what could be only be described as, kind of, a lifestyle intervention where they just decided that I should go,” he added.
"They did that thing that only families and those closest to you can do and recognised something that you just are too scared to recognise yourself. And I was really, really freaking out. I had the ticket booked, but I was by no means going. I wasn't 100 per cent certain.”
His mum and him then went for a walk on the beach. By the end of that walk, Lowe was ready to go, keeping a rock his mum picked up on that beach as a reminder of home.
Twenty-five years later and it was a great call from the Lowe family to intervene. Zane gets illuminating insight into the most unique and talented musicians on the planet on his Apple TV show.
Not to mention he's a friend of the show, even calling our resident DJ EMWA's track 'Show Me The Way' "a fucking heatrock".
