How Elton John’s bodyguard became a distinguished science professor

Gavin Reid knows how to size up a room. Consider his time as a black belt karate instructor. Or working the door as a bouncer at one of Melbourne’s most notorious Underbelly-era nightclubs: the Tunnel. That’s even before you get to his stint as Elton John’s bodyguard during the star’s tour with Billy Joel in the late 1990s.

These days, though, Reid faces an even more intimidating set: the lab coats of academia. Reid is now a distinguished science professor at the University of Melbourne. And he’s just become the Australian Research Council’s executive director for mathematics, physics, chemistry and earth sciences.

Gavin Reid says his days bouncing some of the underworld taught him great people management in preparation for the halls of academia.Credit: Jason South

“I barely finished high school,” he chuckles. “People look at me with my bald head and tattoos, my motorbike, and well ... I’m not your typical professor.”

Today we’ve joined the rowdy lunchtime throng at Carlton institution Jimmy Watson’s, just a few streets from Reid’s lab. It’s Friday and that means he’s back at Melbourne University for a day “quarantined” for his own research. And gnocchi.

Alan Watson, the celebrated winemaker (and son of Jimmy himself), wanders over every now and then to offer up a sip from his latest barrel.

Reid, 54, recalls first coming to Jimmy Watson’s as a country boy of 17, when the chef would bang around loudly in the kitchen and demand patrons returned promptly to collect their meals. “Everyone’s so polite now,” Reid laughs.

Still, he adds: “I’ve been kicked out of a lot of places in my life, but I don’t think this is one of them.”

Alan, back again to clink his glass, quips: “You’re not anyone ’til you’ve been thrown out of Jimmy’s.”

Gavin Reid (left) in his bodyguard days of the late ’90s with his former karate instructor Rod Woods, who introduced him to the security industry.Credit: Gavin Reid

If Watson keeps wandering over, Reid might be the one testing out his old bouncing skills.

He admits he had wanted to know if his years of karate training “worked” when he took that gig at the Tunnel nightclub in the early ’90s. Back then, it was a place for people who liked having their photograph taken to rub shoulders with those who didn’t.

Reid was quickly promoted from keeping the crowd in line inside the pulsing beat of the club to working the door, where he got to know some of its more infamous guests better, from football stars to the late gangland leader Carl Williams.

Reid isn’t game to offer any gossip (“to protect the innocent, and protect myself from the guilty”) but says: “Some you had good relationships with, some not.”

“Of course it turned out, that job, it was all about conflict resolution, de-escalation. You’d rarely have to do anything if you know what I mean.”

I’m leaning forward over my steak. I want to know exactly what he means. “It was a great skill to learn for academia,” he laughs.

Elton John appreciated Reid’s discretion when he came on as a bodyguard for the star’s Duelling Pianos tour with Billy Joel. “Elton was an artist, professional, focused,” Reid says. “This was his whole life. Billy Joel was like the songs say, a downtown man. He was working class like me, up for a chat.”

The gnocci at Jimmy Watson’s in Carlton.Credit: Jason South

Speaking of working-class origin stories, it turns out Reid’s stint at Tunnel also coincided with Premier Daniel Andrews’ own days slinging hot dogs out the front of the club. Reid admits he doesn’t quite remember Andrews (“I’m sure we both look very different now”) but he remembers the hot dogs. “They were very good.”

So is Reid assessing the crowd around us now? Is that Watson coming back with some more (delicious) sherry – or a potential threat?

“You’ve seen too many movies,” Reid laughs. “I was basically a glorified driver. Most of it’s boring.”

What really excites Reid is figuring out how things work. “Whether that’s pulling apart a motorbike, maybe even before you understand how to put it back together. Or, to be blunt, blowing shit up.”

Was it an afternoon loose with a high school Bunsen burner that gave Reid “the science bug”? “Not exactly,” he says.

Reid’s family came to Ararat, in western Victoria, with the gold rush. He recalls playing in abandoned gold mines as a kid with his brothers and sisters. They inherited the family farm and Reid could have taken it on but, he grins, he “never had any motivation for hard work. My parents, my school report cards, they’d all say: ‘Gavin needs motivation’.”

That motivation arrived in the form of his Ararat High chemistry teacher, who had never had a student fail his class before. “And he decided I wasn’t going to be the first. He came around to tutor me at the dining room table. He wouldn’t let me slack off. His class ended up being the only one I got an A in. ”

Reid, who also ran deliveries around town at night for the local pharmacy, really did have hopes then of becoming a chemist. “But I didn’t get the grades for uni.”

Instead, he caught a lucky break, scoring a job as a lab assistant at a cancer research institute in the city straight out of school.

“Still, it took me 12 years to become a professor,” he says, studying nights or by correspondence and bouncing on weekends. Reid was accepted into postgraduate study without a formal bachelor degree, and then onto a PhD.

“A lot of people gave me a go like that,” he says. “I ended up the first in my family to get a tertiary qualification.”

Now Reid develops complex technology to study proteins, helping in everything from cancer research to, ahem, illicit drug detection.

The steak at Jimmy Watson’s in Carlton.Credit: Jason South

Has his career come full circle? Reid shrugs.

The “high stakes” world of the Tunnel nightclub, the thrill of karate battle competitions, the nerves of delivering a lecture to a packed hall: it all taught him the same skills, he says. “It’s about reading people. Learning how to work with them. And staying calm.”

Reid assures me his wife Claire is really “the social one” but he’s great company. I settle in for more stories over the chef’s special of the day: a wickedly good tiramisu.

The bill at Jimmy Watson’s after a long lunch.Credit:

In the end, it’s been science and not celebrity “minding” that’s taken Reid all over the world – to conference halls in Korea, summer schools in Italy and Croatia, and state-of-the-art labs in the US, where he spent a decade working as a professor.

“I never dreamed I’d get paid to do this,” he says. “Travel used to be a weekend in the Grampians or maybe to see an aunt in Mildura.”

In the US, Reid recalls wading through metre-high snow and tapping the trees in his yard for maple syrup. “I brought a gallon of it back with us from the States. We only just finished it.”

He also brought his Harley-Davidson motorbike home, though he admits, these days he’s downgraded to “an old man’s BMW”. “It gets me around. I can still pretend.”

Unsurprising then that Reid’s favourite spot on campus is the old South Lawn carpark beneath Melbourne University – where they filmed the original Mad Max movie. “I love it there, especially at night.”

Still, as soon as he dons the white coat of the lab, he says he’s boring Professor Reid again to his students. “They keep me young though. One thanked me for introducing him to [the music of] Prince and Purple Rain.”

Now settling into his new three-year gig at the ARC, Reid is peering behind the curtain, on the other side of the table helping decide where to grant research funding. After our lunch, he’s off to Canberra to oversee the main round of science grants for 2024.

Following a review of the ARC, Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has just ended the controversial veto power of ministers over research grants (save in matters of national security), drawing a line under a contentious history of Liberal ministers blocking research, particularly in the social sciences.

“There’s a lot of excitement [in the sector] now about the reforms, ending some of that damage done,” he says.

It’s hoped more research funding may be on the cards too when the government’s accord review of the university sector delivers its final report at the end of the year. In the US, Reid’s starting package was more than he made when he returned to Australia as a tenured professor, he sighs.

But mostly, Reid wants to see “more kids like me at uni”.

“Here I am, proof that you don’t have to follow the traditional path.”

Or, at least, that you can travel it just as well on the back of a Harley-Davidson.

Watson, timely as ever, arrives at our shoulder with another wine taster.

This time a toast is definitely in order.

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