ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT INTERVIEW: NATALIA SHEPPARD
The beat goes on… By Heather Barker Vermeer
MC Tali in Le Roys Bush next to her Northcote Point home. ©Serena Stevenson.
Pioneering musician Natalia Sheppard is better known by her stage name, MC Tali. The musician, writer, producer, performer, author and documentary maker has chosen to positively push the envelope during the last two years and, when the time arrives, plans to accelerate out of the current red setting at light speed.
When Natalia and her UK-born husband Natalia recalls travelling by bus from New Benn Rolls Sheppard (aka Chiccoreli) Plymouth as a 16 year-old and the experience moved back to her native New Zealand opening her eyes to the magic of large, live after making waves in London, the couple gigs. chose to make the North Shore home. A year later, ‘U2 weren’t that cool anymore’ That was November 2011, and Kiwi dance - and her view after experiencing a ‘proper DJ’ music icon MC Tali is as much in love with playing live was rather different. the place now as when it first stole her “I remember seeing everyone raving and heart. the way it united people of all genders, skin Down a steep driveway, Natalia’s house is colours, ages. Nobody cared who anyone encased in Le Roys Bush in Northcote Point, was or how anyone looked… I saw that dance bordering onto Little Shoal Bay. “It has these music unites people. I knew there and then incredible bush views,” she shares. “When I that was a culture I wanted to be a part of. was in London, I said I’m not moving back to “Drum and bass had a tribal element that I New Zealand and moving anywhere without loved. It made my body move differently than either a bush or a sea view and this was love at the way I would dance to other music. It was first sight.” deeper. Then there would be some beautiful Growing up on a farm in Taranaki, playing soulful gospel vocals over the top and that just MC Tali, AKA Natalia Sheppard. a wonky old piano was Natalia’s first taste of blew me away.” playing music herself. She was a standout in After gaining her degree in English the local area schools’ choir and took part in theatre productions. Literature from Canterbury University, a Diploma in Performance Art Her mum is artist Margaret Scott and her parents hosted plenty of from NASDA, and a Teaching Diploma from Canterbury College of parties on their dairy farm, where Natalia feels her love of music – and Education, Natalia headed to London, the UK home of drum and bass. partying – derives from. Investing in piano lessons for their daughter There, in the UK, the list of dance music icons she encountered was a when she was 12, they upgraded their old piano to the one that now dream-come-true for the young Kiwi. sits nostalgically in Natalia’s Northcote Point home. “It was an exciting time. It was the birth of drum and bass, and it was The first ‘big concert’ she went to was U2 at Western Springs. where it was all happening. When I saw my heroes like Dynamite MC
70
Issue 128 - March 2022 www.channelmag.co.nz
