Adrian Eagle ready to soar to new heights

When Adrian Eagle was 16 he weighed almost 300kg and didn’t care if he lived or died — yet last month, he sang in front of the largest MCG concert crowd in history with his musical heroes.

Adrian Eagle.

Adrian Eagle is holding court, dropping a set of soul-infused RnB and hip-hop for an adoring young crowd at WOMADelaide.

“I’m Adelaide Housing Trust y’all!” he tells the kids, proud of his humble roots.

“And yo, I’m just so happy to be here, I really am.”

When Eagle, 29, says that he’s “happy to be here” he’s talking about the WOMAD stage, obviously – who wouldn’t want a prime Sunday evening slot at one of Australia’s biggest music festivals?

But he’s also talking about “here” as in here on planet Earth, because there was a time when the young singer had almost given up on that.

The teenage Eagle, damaged by childhood trauma that he’s still not ready to speak about in depth, found comfort in eating. He dropped out of Pasadena High School and spiralled into despair.

“I was huge man,” Eagle says during an interview at WOMADelaide’s shady backstage area.

“I was close to 300kg. I used to get weighed at the hospital because no other scales could weigh me. I was like 16, I’d dropped out of high school, and I was in a deep, dark depression. Mad depression.”

It’s obvious that Eagle (it’s not his real name, but it was bestowed upon him as a “spirit name” by his little brother Mason) is in a better place now.

He’s a regular hugger and payer of compliments, a man who looks you in the eye when he speaks. A man who’s found his true self through his music.

A man who’s found his true self through his music.

“I was born in Adelaide,” Eagle says. “My dad is Fijian Indian, born in Fiji, and my mum was born in Port Pirie. My grandma is Maltese – shout out to mum and my nana Gemma.”

The young Eagle moved around a lot between Housing SA properties in the city’s inner-southern suburbs – “Burnside, to Goodwood, Edwardstown then Pasadena – where mum is now”.

Mum Carmel is tone deaf, so there wasn’t a whole lot of music in the Eagle household when he was young, but despite the lack of access he managed to put together his own soundtrack. It began with the “very sweet songs” he’d write down in a special book as a little kid – “I was always dancing around singing and writing these songs.”

Then as he grew older and things got tougher, he found solace in the music of Michael Jackson. “I just connected with his message,” he says. “And when I found out that he’d been through a lot of pain and trauma with his father and stuff, I could automatically hear it and relate to it. You can hear the pain in his voice. Even just looking at the guy you could tell he’d been through a lot, you know?”

After MJ it was Christopher George Latore Wallace, better known as Biggie Smalls. The young Eagle was obsessed with not only the New York rapper’s seamless flow, but also his size. For a moment at least, Biggie made it OK to be … big.

“I related to Biggie straight away,” he says. “And he was raised by a single mum and his whole message is about turning a negative into a positive, so I could relate.”

And while the young Eagle grooved on Michael Jackson jams and Biggie beats, just up the road from his Pasadena home a bunch of blokes calling themselves the Hilltop Hoods were rapidly rising to the top of the Aussie pop charts and would eventually write an important chapter in the Adrian Eagle story.

“My earliest memory of the Hoods, I was in the last year of primary school and I remember seeing flyers for their shows but the shows were always 18-plus so there was no way I could go,” he recalls.

“I remember hearing that the Hoods sold out this place and the Hoods sold out that place. And they were from not far from where I lived, so that really inspired me. They showed me that you don’t have to be American, you can be true to your environment. That’s what I respected about them.”

Adrian Eagle at 17 years old.

Eagle did eventually get to see the Hilltop Hoods live, but it wasn’t in Adelaide.

It was in Melbourne, a place the depressed and lonely young man hoped would give him some refuge. Perhaps even a new start. But before he could run away to the big city he first had to hit rock bottom.

“I was having mad heart palpitations from my weight,” he says. “I thought I was going to die. I was 16, at home, heart fluttering like crazy and I was like, ‘mum I’m having a heart attack’. I literally wrote my death letter and everything. Mum called the hospital, they came straight away, and that’s when they weighed me at 270kg.

“Not long after that I became a little bit more aware of what the f..k I was doing. I wasn’t in my body. I was just in a darkness that I can’t describe. It was like killing myself without actually getting the knife and ending it.”

Day after day Eagle did the only exercise he could do that wouldn’t put him in the public gaze – he walked the 10m length of his mum’s hallway. Over and over until the weight began to move. Once he started gaining some control, leaving Adelaide was the only move that made any sense.

He needed to break his habits, get away from bad memories, make a fresh start. In the movies, young men go west. In Australia, they go east. East to the big smoke.

So the Eagle left his nest, but such was his fear of failure that he couldn’t even tell his friends what he was planning on doing.

“I told them all that I was moving to the country,” he says. “Not that I had a lot of friends – I had, like, two friends.” Adrift and alone, the directionless high school dropout experienced what he can only call “some kind of divine intervention”.

He saw an ad for a course advertising diplomas at the Melbourne Insititute of Business Technology for people who wanted to go to university but didn’t finish school. It was a chance. It was something.

“I knew I was smart enough to go to uni,” Eagle says. “Dad never went to uni and he used to hammer that into me, and I guess I wanted to prove to him that I could do it.”

He signed up, but first … well first he had to watch his childhood heroes.

“That first week in Melbourne, the Hoods were playing,” Eagle says.

“I didn’t know a single person. I remember I was front row. I remember clearly being front row by myself and relating to them as a piece of home.”

Adrian Eagle’s debut EP Mama is set for release later this year.

At MIBT the Eagle made friends, close friends, friends who saw his talent and encouraged him to make music.

“I felt like I had a proper friendship experience that I’d never had at high school,” he says. “High school was just an uncomfortable experience for me. I wasn’t severely bullied – I wasn’t beaten down or anything – but I had so many negative voices in my head already and I was so paranoid about what people thought about me.”

His new friends had one message for him – you need to get your music out there.

Reluctant at first, he finally uploaded his first song to Facebook on the day before his 26th birthday. Expecting it to disappear into the ether, Eagle was as surprised as anyone when he woke up to find that the track had been shared by prominent Aussie rapper 360.

It was a turning point. Eagle found himself collaborating with Adelaide rapper K-21 and then landed himself an early slot on the Adelaide 500 stage opening for the Hoods – “I told them how much they meant to me and how much they had paved the way.”

Then he dropped his first official single 17 Again, which received radio airplay and connected with listeners in a big way. It’s a memoir of a life lived hard. Not Straight Outta Compton hard, just Housing Trust, can collecting, too many bills, daily struggle hard.

Then Eagle found himself contributing vocals on Hilltop Hoods’ ARIA-winning track Clark Griswold, the first single from their new album The Great Expanse.

“He came in, laid down the track and we were just blown off our seats,” Matt Lambert, aka MC Suffa, told the ABC after the recording session.

And that brings us to the Melbourne Cricket Ground on a warm February evening and 80,000 hip-hop fans – a concert record for the iconic venue. “I was just thinking I wanna hit my notes. It was only after that I looked back and thought, ‘that was pretty cool’,” Eagle says. “I was grateful as heck just to be on that stage.”

So what’s next for the boy from Pasadena? Well there’s a record in the mix, that’s for sure. And there’s a band to put together.

“Five years down the track, I want to have the sharpest band in the country, be vocally on another level to where I am now, and just have songs that people can put on and relate to in a major way,” he says.

And the kids. He wants to help the kids. “I’d love to meet them all,” he says.

“Kids that are too big, kids that are mentally messed up like I was, I just want to say to them, ‘keep on living. Things will get better’. There’s light after the dark, and when you do see how beautiful things are, those little moments, it’s like … ah! This Earth is nice, you know what I mean? There’s a lot to be thankful for.”

Adrian Eagle’s debut EP Mama is set for release later this year. You can hear his Like a Version cover of Ocean Alley’s Confidence at www.abc.net.au/triplej