Early Life
Safran was born in Melbourne, Victoria. After attending North Balwyn Primary School he was sent to Yeshivah College, an Orthodox Jewish high school in St Kilda East.
In Year 12 he formed the hip-hop group Raspberry Cordial with his friend Chris Lumsden. They played to some success, receiving high rotation airplay on the city's community radio, playing many gigs in Melbourne and coming second in the RMIT Battle of the Bands competition. Their debut album was Melbourne Tram, of which Safran apparently has hundreds of unsold cassettes in his bedroom to this day.
After winning a government youth music initiative, they followed up with Taste Test, of which 500 copies were pressed. Of those only 93 sold, so the remaining 407 had to be crushed. Interviewed on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope show in 2003, he said that Raspberry Cordial "broke down the wall that Eminem's been able to walk through".
Safran attended RMIT to study journalism, a career he tried for a while but eventually dropped without completing his degree. He then began work in advertising for Clemenger Harvie. During this time he wrote copy for Mazda, Village Roadshow and Sea World.
Read more about this topic: John Safran
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again.... No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)