Home Has Never Been So Sweet

One of the most significant movie directors that’s ever lived famously said: “Movies are just like life with the boring bits cut out.” 

That was Alfred Hitchcock whose movies included sequences of birds pecking out people’s brains and other horrifying events that are yet shown up in my life or yours. 

‘Highway Blues’ is a surf movie by Toby Cregan that’s “like life” with all the boring bits cut out. It’s “like life” if your Spring days are spent surfing the sandy surf parks along the New South Wales coast. “Like life” if you’re capable of manhandling a board with the sweeping, powerful, raw lines of Creed McTaggart. “Like life” if your days are punctuated with kissing tins of Coopers and cracking jokes with Australian surf heroes Laurie Towner, Ryan Callinan and Matt Hoy. 

This ten minuter is Toby Cregan’s reentry into surf flicks and of course, it’s with his long time collaborator. From ‘Yeah Dude’ to the ‘Real Axe’ series Toby and Creed have spent years bouncing between countries making vibey and candid clumps of surf video.

Toby’s loose, natural edit style is the perfect compliment to Creed’s insoluble charisma and the perfect partnership that looked set to go on forever, or at least until birds inexplicably attacked their brains, but a couple of years ago Toby packed it in. 

The surf world lost Toby when his band Skegss started bumping the ceiling on the Australian music charts. Skegss went on to international success and the obligatory non-stop gigging worldwide. Great fun for Toby but horrible news for me and all the other fans of his inimitable character-rich edits.

This year, with the world police’s strict orders for all musicians to take some time off touring, the Stab office started fizzing with the possibility of linking up the old buddies. Creed was in, camera wizard Mikey Mallalieu joined the team, as did surf jester Jake Vincent, we slapped a handicam in Toby’s hand and our friends at Coopers Brewery were more than happy to lubricate the adventure.

The boys taking Creed’s panel van on the windy coastal roads from Byron Bay to Newcastle is the first of two episodes. Stay tuned for ’Spring Blues’ dropping November 21 where the boys return to the punchy points of the Northern Rivers.