Noa Deane’s the type of guy who really doesn’t need much of an introduction.

So we won’t really bother writing one. The wildest rock and roll frontman to put his feet on wax. In a world where surfers all try to draw an interesting point of difference, he stands alone. Eccentric, unconventional, not afraid to launch himself into the flats, but above all, always a fun, nice person to chat with and all that good stuff. He just spent the past few weeks tearing it up in France at the Quiksilver Festival and he’s got a new edit on the way. Long-winded intros can wait. Reading all about everything Noa’s been up can not.

Noa! How have you been and how’d your little Euro stint go all I know is I got a photo of you getting in a personal Mercedes in Capbreton. It was amazing. 

That was real funny, hey?

Yeah, so good. I was like, Fuck, wow I really missed Noz and Bal (Balaram Stack) and everyone by not even twelve hours. That's so brutal.

Yeah, that’s a stitch, hey. We were going to try to stay and surf a bit more but kind of wanted to go somewhere else because I felt like we had already gotten pretty sick waves in France and I didn’t want to ruin that by not surfing in the comp. I mean it was pretty sick being able to surf with no one out and the waves were actually real sick.

So how did it all work with the Quiksilver Festival then? Because obviously, it wasn't like a contest contest.

A friend’s friend got me hooked up with it but then Jeremy Flores sent me a text maybe two weeks before asking if I was, you know, keen. And I was like, ‘Yeah! Sounds sick.’

I mean the personal call-up from J-Flo is massive. 

Well, yeah and they paid for everything and put us up in the hotel and gave us a car (laughs). It was a sick experience. And no one was tripping about it or even really cared how they going in the heats. It was a pretty stress-free event.

Technically it is a comp, and the waves were sick, but it seemed nice that it was still just loose enough that you wouldn’t feel bad for going out to, like, a dinner with all your mates the night before a heat.

There wasn’t much too much pressure on performance and I think that’s what made a lot of cool stuff happen. Just having one score a heat, having to get one score a heat, if you’re actually trying, but I think Balaram and I were cruising just trying to get fun waves in our heats, but if you’re trying to win only having to get one score a heat just makes it better. It evens it out, really. Because even if you have a crappy heat with bad waves, you can still get a five or whatever. And then if you get a sick heat next you can get a nine, add it to that last five and you’re back in it. It’s almost a better way of competition. It’s more fair when you’re judging just one wave.

So did you do most of your filming for MASH down at home on the South Coast or anywhere else that way?

It’s like West Oz and home pretty much. Oh, there’s some Hawaii stuff too.

And James Kates is on the tools?

Yes, he’s been on the edit for a couple of weeks now, so that’s exciting. We made a lot of the music for it too and had some friends' bands and some other bands that KT knows on it too.

SCREEN GRABS BY JAMES KATES

How did you and KT first link up? He started popping up on my radar from all his stuff with DRAG Board Co.. You had an appearance in their third film right? 

I’ve known KT for a while. Before he started filming he used to play drums in a couple of bands when I played, so we would do music together. And I knew that he was a bodyboarder but we would just talk surfing and how he filmed and stuff, but we didn’t link up properly until he was filming Creed a bunch. But, yeah, we were always talking about surfing and it’s funny because he’s filmed heaps of my stuff but we’ve never really had a real project together. 

I guess it started after that last one that I did, and he did a lot of the trips for that and filmed a lot of that movie too. So it was pretty sick to buddy up for an edit then because I love the way he edits. And he's put out so many movies a lot of people wouldn’t know. He's probably done, like, twenty or thirty bodyboard movies and then a lot of surfing movies too. So he’s done a lot of stuff and he’s got his style.

Plus he’s just classic. When you go on a surf trip with him it’s manic. We’re driving around like psychos trying to milk everything out of it and be in the moment and enjoy ourselves. But there’s still a bit of whip-cracking going on (laughs).

Someone's got to do it, unfortunately.

He’s been editing a bunch of stuff in the meantime too. He did Shaun’s (Manners) edit, so he had a bit of a little warmup with that. Which I thought was really sick, that edit. We were already thinking of doing something and then he put that out so, I was like, ‘Sick.’ He’s already in an edit mindset so we’ll see what he does.

Did you have a specific vision in mind when you were initially planning it out?

We never really had a vision. It was kind of like, I stopped filming for the Noz Vid in June of last year and I kept getting the same clips, well not really the same clips, but you couldn’t replace one with the other and it was, like, what do you do? It’s hard to decide what’s better when there’s a lot of footage and it starts to look the same. 

So with this one, we sort of started fresh because Noz Vid probably took two years, or a little bit longer maybe. And I was thinking it would be cool to put one out that only had three months of footage but have it be the same length. It’d be interesting to see the difference between them and see what other people would like more and what I would like more. But it blew out and now it has been a year, at least, and we’re trying to get the best shit we can. So that went out the window, what I thought would work. 

We just kept getting waves at the start of this year and the end of last year which is a weird time for it to be that good. I think it was La Niña, so yeah that blew it out. And then not editing as you go along blows it out too and then you have to go and sort it out and find all the clips.

There are few things worse than sorting through every file in a massive hard drive. 

KT is sorting through it now. And now we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do about music budgets because like, fuck, it’s just a nightmare. To get stuff you actually really want costs so much money. And it’s fully fair enough for the bands and everyone, it should cost money. But, yeah, if you don’t have that money… you can’t send it.  

That’s when you just use something and ask forgiveness later or just produce your own sounds, which is always fun but another task in itself. 

Yeah but it’s also good because then you can search out those really deep cuts which makes a lot of songs cool that you maybe wouldn’t hear before. I hear stuff on people’s clips that maybe wasn’t from the most popular band or anything like that and I’m like, “Oh, that’s sick.” And it's just because it was in that one video. It’s pretty sick to make music and be nearly making everything with the edit. There are some other songs from some other people but most of it is stuff that James and I made. And some of it is just noise stuff but we’ll see how it all goes.

I'm sure it'll be electric. Well, I’ll leave you to the day then. Thanks for chatting Noa!

Cheers!

Get tickets to MASH here.