never be defeated by anything or anyone." — Drew Garrett
In 2002, James Hollands created a team of local musically-minded, young people at his recording studio, the Creative Music Production, in producing a new album, titled United. One team member, Nadia Cope, called this team - Young Ossies Unite (YOU).
Young Ossies Unite is not a band, but under the directions of James Hollands, each individual have written and produced their own materials, while at the same time they learnt various aspects of the music industry. They learned the technical aspect of recording an album, such as recording, mixing and mastering.
They have also been given the opportunity to practice or learn new musical instruments: including vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, drums and keyboard.
Some members already have some backgrounds in music - some have played in the bands and a couple have actually done some recordings.
From the left: Nadia, Drew,
Jimmy, Con & Sammy
In the album, you will find original compositions of the songs, either written individually or with partners.
Each song was written for creative skills, with inspiration from a bit of personal experiences. The album contains a great mixture of styles, which include rap, R&B, soft rock, blues, and we have even a song in Greek by Con from his album The First Steps.
The blues and rap songs (Cold Honey and Tears of Pain) were composed with partners as sort of musical exercises, as well as showing creative variety of styles in the album.
One composition that is not original is the instrumental music using the Greek bouzouki, titled Eyes Like Yours. This is traditional Greek music. Instead of replaying the Greek traditional music as it is, we have mixed it with modern dance beats and modern instruments. Con showed us his talent and mastery of the bouzouki.
Since the albums are distributed freely to local schools and libraries, and there are limited copies of the album, you can download any of these songs from this website.
(Please note that the original server for the site has been down for some months. Due to this, there was opportunity to re-design and update the site, with the permission of James Hollands. The site, UNITED, now has a new look and interface. We hoped that you like the new look.)
This site has been validated in accordance to W3C standards:
Last modified: 31/5/08.
Designed by Jimmy Joe.