Matty J Ruys Dreams Come True

Rip It Up, Issue 218, 1 October 1995, Page 6

Matty J Ruys Dreams Come True

"1111-. first band was a rock band in Whangarei I IVlyjoined when I was 16," admits Auckland soul singer Matty J Ruys. “I was singing Rolling Stones and Cars songs, which was a lot of fun, but not really where my heart was.”

His heart, he explains, was and always will be in soul music — dodgy territory, some would say, for a New Zealand white boy. Over the years, Matty J has had a fair amount of flack for trying to succeed in a genre pretty much exclusive to black musicians. “Sometimes I get hassled because I’m a white guy doing black music, but I think people’s ideas on this are changing,” he says. “Like now it’s okay for Supergroove to do funk, even though they aren’t

black.- But yeah, .I’ve had a reasonable amount of backlash and it used to really hurt me personally.” | . Matty J is. soon to release his debut' album, Deeper, which, he says, has been a long time coming. .

“It feels like it’s been a lifetime in the making. It’s something I knew I wanted to do since I was a little kid singing along to the radio.” No one is more surprised Matty J has an album on the way than Matty J himself. Growing up in Mangere, and later Whangarei, in what he describes as a “dysfunctional, pretty rough home”, Matty J didn't think he had a chance in hell of ever making a record. “When I was 14 years old and I’d just had an epileptic fit and my parents were arguing again and it was porridge for dinner, I wouldn’t have dreamed I could have been sitting here at EMI, doing interviews, with an album coming out. But I think if you have a dream, there’s no reason why you can’t achieve it. That sounds corny, but I really believe that.” The album is produced by Strawperson Mark Tierney, who also directed the video for Matty J’s new single, a cover of the Smokey Robinson standard ‘Cruisin’. The video was shot amongst the palm trees and art deco structures of Miami, Florida, but Matty J claims it cost no more than any of his other videos. “We did it on a shoestring budget,” he says, "staying in cheap hotels and flying over on the most budget fares.”

‘Cruisin’’ is one of two covers on the album, the other being Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Love Everything About You’.

“Stevie has had probably the biggest influence on me. As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved the way he sings, the way he writes," he says. As well as Wonder, Matty J cites Luther Vandross, Alexander O’Neil and, more surprisingly, David Bowie as being major influences. “I was a huge David Bowie fan,” he says. “I was so hooked on him that I went along to the Serious Moonlight concert dressed in a David Bowie outfit, which is so rude when I think about it now.”

DOMINIC WAGHORN