It was Geoff Knight's "Alice in Wonderland" moment - mere seconds when he watched his booze and drug-addled gang life spin through the air and skid to a halt in the middle of a state highway. In that fantastical moment he understood his life had to change. Tattooed, bearded, leathered and patched, the Highway 61 motorcycle gang member they called Trawler had clipped a timber truck with the handlebars of his Harley Davidson on the road at Puhoi, north of Auckland. In a flash of bravado, Knight had throttled to the front of the pack of seven gang bikers, trying to prove he was still The Man. He was, in fact, an emotional mess. His stripper girlfriend had left him while he was working at sea, he was facing a prison sentence and he'd just bought $28,000 worth of gleaming grunt machine to ease his pain. The bike somersaulted. "I was spinning around on my bum, feeling like Alice in Wonderland; spinning in slow motion and total silence," Knight recalls. Bloodied and grazed, he looked to the sky and said: "I get the message."
"I walked into a farmhouse and the farmer's wife cleaned the gravel out of my legs with hot water and Dettol. I'm standing there with my long hair and patches, with my pants around my ankles, feeling like a little boy. "I said to her 'Don't tell those guys, but this is the last time I'm riding with them. I want to live a good life. I want to be a good man. I want to see the world.' And she said to me 'Good on you son, you go for it'." Three weeks later he left the gang. "When I put my patches in a bag and handed them back, I realised the last five years of my life fitted into a brown paper bag." Fifteen years on, if Knight, now 38, was to pack up his life, it would be overflowing from Louis Vuitton luggage - his transformation almost as bizarre as Alice's adventures, or the bones of an opera. The toddler scarred by a dog mauling; the dyslexic, obese and bullied teenager who dropped out of school; the hard-working deep sea fisherman who joined a gang but changed his life to become an actor and proud father of five; and now the strapping, handsome, opera tenor, poised to burst on to the world stage. Knight is just as astonished by where he's ended up. For the past seven years he has been studying opera and, under the guidance of renowned bass Grant Dickson, he's building a repertoire of the most popular tenor roles so he can step into the shoes of a leading man anywhere. He's already performing internationally, most recently a four-month stint with Rockdale Opera in Sydney, singing the lead tenor role of Captain Fitzbattleaxe in Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Utopia Limited; and earning comparisons to the great Italian tenors.
