Partying With Cricketers & Starting Rumours: Joyride Plays Two Truths & A Lie

“Being in a flight path - it’s beautiful, man. 180 different stories and reasons to go to the Gold Coast! It inspires thought.”

Profound, right? But Joyride (Rowan Dix on his passport) can espouse something that thoughtful in the same breath he tells me he spends way too much time Photoshopping joints into Indian cricketer Virat Kohli’s fingers on the meme page he runs on Instagram. The One Day crew member is one of the cheekiest personalities on the Aussie music scene, with a sense of humour that’s so offbeat, you sometimes don’t know whether he’s deadpanning or not. 

In November he dropped his debut album, Sunrise Chaser, a euphoric set of songs as diverse as Joyride himself, and later this month he’s setting off on a national tour around the country. Also, this is the first Two Truths & A Lie column of 2019 and it’s probably one of the funniest I’ve ever done – here’s to hoping the rest for the year are filled with as many laughs and ridiculous stories as this one! 

Truth

Joyride: My first truth is one that’s fun to wheel out every once in a while.

Uppy: At parties or?

J: Yeah or with mates who would find it impressive. Because it’s like… a lot of my friends, outside of music, are always like… they either have too grand an idea of what you do, or not grand enough an idea? 

U: Totally, like nothing in between!

J: Yeah, yeah. They either have a perception that, like, ‘Oh you MUST be rich because you have a song on triple j!’ Like, nah man! 

U: What do your mates do? Like what kind of industries are your non-music mates in?

J: Oh, offices or doing a trade or whatever. So the perception is – you must be killing it because you’re still doing it, or ‘can you please come play my cousin’s 21st for $50?’ 

U: That’s a joke, right?

J: So this story, it puts it in a nice perspective. We’re NEAR the people that are making money. 

U: True. 

J: We, being One Day, we were asked to DJ for Drake’s tour a few years ago. 

U: Sick, okay.

J: We were doing the opening slot and then organising the afterparties. So as you expect, we met Drake once when he was looking for his hair gel. 

U: [laughs]

J: Our changeroom was next to where his tour barber was set up. 

U: Of course, ‘cause he needs his clean fades and edges or whatever.

J: Yeah, so he accidentally met us. 2Chainz was on that tour and we walked past 2Chainz and he was always trying to kinda rile up his security guards because it was a big tour. He’d be like, ‘Yeah look, that guy can take you!’ pointing at me. I know it’s a joke, but I don’t really like these jokes. The big crazy moment… do you follow the cricket at all?

U: Ahhh look, a little bit. My background’s Indian so like, heritage-wise my dad is always watching it so I get a bit of that.

J: Fair enough. Well the T20 World Cup was on in Australia the same time that Drake was out here and I was a little faded one night and thought it’d be funny to invite Chris Gayle to one of the Drake shows. And this was before the Australian public and media turned on him, deciding he was problematic. We all thought Chris Gayle was still lovable at this point! 

U: Yep, still a good dude.

J: So I’m like, ‘Hey mate, wanna come to one of the Drake shows? It’ll be good.’

U: Did you know him?

J: No. Just reached out randomly. Thought it’d be a funny thing to do. He never got back to us but then we were in this bar in Perth and him and Sulieman Benn walked in and he walked straight over to us and goes, ‘Hey man, I got your DM on Instagram, I looked through your profile. You seem like good fun.’ I was like, ‘Oh… hectic.’ So I’m like, ‘Well, do you wanna come to Drake’s show?’ and he’s like ‘Nah, I don’t really wanna be seen at Drake’s show, but I’ll come to the afterparty.’

U: Ooooh. Right.

J: So theories started going around between us about like, Rihanna rumours and things like this.

U: Oh, what do you mean?

J: There were whispers at one point – and I’m no Perez Hilton – but there were rumours that maybe Chris Gayle and Rihanna had become friends? So anyway, he was like, ‘We’ll come through to the afterparty’ and sure enough, he came to the afterparty and he got straight up on stage and he was MCing? While I was DJing? 

U: Just took it upon himself. [laughs]

J: Yeah! And there were people in the crowd looking up going… ‘Is that fuckin’ Chris Gayle? What is going on in here?’ Anyway, Preme who’s one of Drake’s mates, got up to do a 15-minute set at the afterparty and his chain went missing. 

U: Like a gold chain or something?

J: Yeeeeah, so he’s come over to us, he’s like, ‘My chain’s missing, stop the music.’ Everyone’s out in the crowd looking for this chain. I’m kind of standing on the side with Raph, another one of the One Dayers, and Chris Gayle’s standing there. And Preme’s like, ‘Have you seen this chain? It’s worth like $50,000.’ We’re like nah. And Chris Gayle goes, ‘Well, just buy a new one.’ [laughs]

U: Jeeeeesus. [laughs] 

J: We’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is really hectic.’ Anyway there’s no music playing still and the vibe’s getting a little weird in there. So sidenote: there was an all-ages on in Perth that day, I think it was called Good Life Festival? And Lil Jon was on the tour, and he’d come to the afterparty. So he’s gone on stage to liven the party up again, and he turns to me and he’s like, ‘Hey man, do you have Get Low on your Serato?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah man, I do.’ He gets on the mic and starts pointing to the windows over here and the walls are over there, you know what to do. 

U: Yep, sweat drippin’ and all. 

J: So he tells me to drop it, ‘Brrrm rum pum pum’ it starts and he starts rapping it, I’m basically DJing for him with Chris Gayle standing next to me.

U: Wow. What a night. 

J: Yeah, so I’m next to money allll night.

U: So did they find the chain? I thought you were gonna say Chris Gayle had it. 

J: Nah, so Chubbs, one of Drake’s guys, he gets mentioned in a lot of songs as well. He’s like the tough one. Chubbs was out in the crowd, like, aggressively asking people where the chain was and stuff, it was intense stuff. So this guy DM’ed Preme the next day saying ‘Hey I found your chain’, and they flew him and a mate to Brisbane the next day for the show.

U: To deliver the chain?

J: It felt like a bit of a sting to me, to be honest. We’re gonna fly this guy to Brisbane to beat him up, but they didn’t! They just did a meet and greet! 

Truth

J: My next truth is that I feel kind of guilty that I spend most of my creative energy these days on a meme page. 

U: [giggles] And which one’s that?

J: It’s on Instagram, it’s called @KickOnCameron.

U: I’m gonna look it up. 

J: Yeah, look it up. It’s this character I kind of developed and turned into a meme page. You might know the guy that’s the avatar – Virat Kohli. 

U: Yeah, I was gonna say! 

J: So in the early stages, Virat Kohli kept posting photos of him doing the O-K symbol? Index finger and thumb together? He kept posting photos doing that, and it’s really easy to Photoshop a joint into that.

U: [knee-slapping] It is. 

J: Yeah, and I feel like there won’t be that many people familiar with Virat Kohli’s selfies as I am, the intersection there about… memes about drugs and Virat Kohli’s Instagram. 

U: Yep, that Venn diagram is an interesting one!

J: Yeah, so I thought I’d use Virat Kohli as the face of @KickOnCameron and still no one’s said anything.

U: Do you make all these memes?! 

J: Most of ‘em! 

U: Jeeeesus. 

J: And as I was saying, I’ve diverted a lot of my creative energy into making these and it feels good. It feels nice to connect with people on that level! It’s very immediate. 

U: Memes are the future though. 

J: 100%. And to develop them around a character, there’s scope for so much more down the track. I’ve written three short stories with Cameron as the main character that I put out last year with these songs I put out, and I wanna do maybe a radio play about Kick On Cameron and his mate, D&M Dan, and they have a yes night where they have to say yes to everything! 

U: I love this. This is good. So is Virat Kohli meant to be Cameron? I haven’t come across these joint photos yet but the memes – I’m impressed. 

J: They’re real deep because he stopped posting normal photos taken on a phone. All his photos lately have been like, professionally shot and he’s always selling new fucking Puma runners or Oppo or some shit. I need those grainy phone photos. I was thinking of switching it up – do you know Hardik Pandya?

U: Nah I don’t.

J: Oh man. He’s like a younger dude playing for India now. He might be the hottest guy alive? Go to his instagram, his captions are insane.

U: Ohhh, he’s got that soul patch and goatee happening! 

J: He’s so hot, dude! He’s got this little dog! 

U: So wait, how did @KickOnCameron start? Like you made these memes and didn’t wanna post them on your own page?

J: I needed a creative distraction because I was getting so caught up in music and music-related shit. ‘I have to finish this song’ and ‘I have to make a video for that’, like argh! I just wanna make things for the sake of making them.

U: Yeah, and have them be dumb and not have too much depth to it sometimes. 

J: Yeah, exactly. Just silly shit. With the promise of being able to tie it back thematically into what I was doing with my music, it was just another string on the bow. 

U: And on that note, I just found all the joint ones. They’re great. 

J: A part of me really hopes that he stopped doing that pose…

U: Because of you!!!

J: Yeah! I really hope so. 

U: That would be making it. That would be your new party story. 

Lie

J: Okay, so, I tell lots of lies all the time but not consequential ones. Well, not consequential for me. I like talking shit and making shit up because it’s funny. One that I’m trying to spend, and it slowly is kind of spreading, is that Scott Morrison shat himself at Engadine McDonald’s in 1997 after the Sharks lost the Super League Grand Final. 

U: [laughs] What made you think of that?! That’s so specific, Rowan! 

J: That’s the thing, it has to be specific. You have to provide what seems to be a lot of credible details, but all of those things are like… you pick a place, pick a time. 

U: And a reason. 

J: Yeah, you throw all the information in there. I don’t know what triggered it but I was going through a phase on Twitter where I would reply to tweets to politicians I didn’t like, saying ‘whatever, you shat yourself at McDonald’s’, like one near their house or in their seat. Like, David Leyonhjelm shat himself at Drummoyne Macca’s. 

U: I know that Macca’s. 

J: Right? You can just picture that slimy Libertarian cockhead shitting himself there! So the Scott Morrison one just– I’ve had someone say it to me and that’s how I knew it was getting there.

U: Well, will this ruin it now? Now they’ll know it’s a lie? I mean, no one who is in politics at that level will read this, obviously.

J: I have faith that whoever reads this would want to be in on the gag anyway. 

U: You’re safe until another couple million followers. 

J: Yeah, I have friends who are like, ‘I can’t tweet anymore because there are too many normies that follow me, I can’t tweet shit because they’re too normal and take it seriously.’ But I don’t think anyone normal follows me. 

U: Well, I just followed @KickOnCameron!

J: Beautiful! 

Joyride will be heading off on the Sunrise Chaser tour from January 31 until February 23, with his new album Sunrise Chaser in hand. 

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If you’re a musician and have some stories to share and some secrets to tell – be it hilarious or heartbreaking, humiliating or honourable – send us an email at twotruthscolumn[at]gmail.com.

We might be telling the whole world about the time you accidentally killed your brother’s pet snake and replaced it without anyone knowing in no time.