LEAD Magazine Issue 2018 | Page 7

8 JAMES REID CHANGING THE WORLD, ONE SONG AT A TIME J James Reid reached the milestone of forty years old recently, but the singer/songwriter and frontman of ‘The Feelers’, New Zealand’s most successful rock band shows no sign of slowing down. In fact his recently vibrant solo tours with his album ‘Saint’ have shown New Zealand a new part of the complex mind and heart of James Reid. Entrepreneurship and Business can be difficult enough, but what about in the music industry, where it can be fickle, notoriously filled with shady characters and broken promises? Surely after 20 years at the top one would have a healthy dose of futile contempt for even new promises to be broken? Not for James. As the writer of twenty top twenty hits and ten top ten hits James has found a way to rise above all of that and focus on the one thing that has driven him his whole life: The music. Born in Christchurch he started The Feelers with a few college friends and in 1997, after what is always called a lucky break in the music industry, but what really means - someone with influence actually saw how good they were. (They won the South Island Battle of the Bands) The quality of LEAD | January 2018