Matt Gibb on why nerves are essential to live TV

Matt Gibb has been on New Zealand TV screens for more than 20 years, debuting on the children's television show Squirt as a teen and currently guiding city dwellers around beautiful rural homes on the property show Find My Country House NZ.

Although the 45-year-old used to struggle with performance anxiety in the past and could go to pieces at auditions, nowadays, he's learnt how to cope with nervousness and even enjoy the feeling.

"Nervousness gives you that ability to operate at a level that heightens every sense, I think. And you need that in live TV, because anything can happen, you need to be on your toes… If you're not at least a little bit nervous, then your brain is not going to give you that ability to fire on all cylinders," Gibb tells Music 101's The Mixtape.

Gibb started DJing at 18, once thought that would be his career, but improv comedy was a passion too. His first acting gig was with Family Planning, visiting high schools to teach safe sex via songs and skits.

"If you think talking to a 3D animated penguin is hard, try singing songs about sex to an audience full of 17 year olds," Gibb said in an audition for the Saturday morning children's TV show Squirt.

"They kind of went,'Oh, he's got a bit of something, this guy. Let's try him out'."

Living in Dunedin while he filmed Squirt, Gibb was a regular at the night club Bath Street, and drove up to Christchurch every second weekend to go to drum and bass gigs and hang out DJing with my mates.

"All my friends were completely under the spell of drum and bass. Coming from Christchurch, there was something in the water. We all collected records. We all had friends with flats, with turntables. We never watched TV."

After Squirt, he worked on the kids' show Studio 2 then moved over to U Live - a daily three-hour youth music show that was a launchpad for comedians, including Rose Matafeo and Guy Montgomery.

"I was studio dad, and I loved it, man. It was the most rewarding few years."

In her audition to be a U Live host, the young Rose Matafeo blew everyone away with her natural humour and strong sense of self. 

"I've never met anyone at that age who knew exactly who they were…

"It was so obvious within the first 30 seconds that this was the host of the show. This was now the style of the show. This was the blueprint for what every presenter we needed was going to have to be. It was incredible. She just was breathtaking to watch."

After U Live, Gibb worked for six years in Sydney as a TV producer for the ABC. In the years since, he's popped up all over the media landscape, hosting Kiwi Living, Good Morning, the Lotto draw and co-hosting The Breakfast Club on More FM.

"Sixty-five year olds will now come up to me in a cafe and say they love Find My Country House, then their kids might've watched Studio 2. I'm trying to tick off every demographic and genre, that's the idea."

Gibb's strongest memory of hearing music in his childhood was on road trips from Christchurch to Nelson. Paul Simon's 1986 album Graceland was a constant.

"When I was trying to pick a song from Graceland to kick off this road trip, I was like, it kind of has to be the first track, right? It sets the tone, starts the road trip right, and it's an amazing song."

"When I have to narrow down the greatest album of all time, for me, I have to go Siamese Dream. I think it's perfect from start to finish.

"'Mayonnaise' represents what I love about that band. The emotion in Billy Corgan's writing. The light and shade. The classic step down into the pedal.

"It makes me feel everything I felt when I was in my bedroom screaming it when I was 16, 17. And Siamese Dream is an album that has stuck with me since then. I listen to it so regularly. I love it so much."

"I could have given you 500 drum and bass songs that mean something to me. It was everything to me for a while, especially when I was DJing on bFM every Saturday night or every second Saturday night.

"That first Reprazent album New Forms was different from anything I'd heard before. There was an element of musicality to it that hadn't really been seen in drum and bass as much at that point.

"This one song stood out to me because it kind of, again, represented the album for me. It wasn't one or another, it was light and shade. It had a beautiful vocal to it, but it also rolls out in the second half with some little bongos that come in. So it's dance-floor, but it's musicality. It's a period of my life where I was just falling in love with this music."

"I remember listening to this at house parties at three o'clock in the morning, because it was everywhere. The crescendo it builds to at the end, the tension and then that release…

"I'd moved up from Dunedin. I'm living in Auckland. I'm again finding my community, my people, and even just now thinking about it, it was such a wild, fun, amazing time, and the song just gives me goosebumps every single time I listen to it."

Once known by a "problematic" name, Dave Lee is an amazing house DJ, Gibb says.

"I just love his remixes. He just takes classics and just gives them a bit of a sort of a toughening up, basically, for the dance floor. But this song is, for me, an absolute banger, and it has to be played at every house party.

"If I'm ever DJing, this will be in my set at some point, because it just doesn't fail to get every single person up on the dance floor. It just brings people together. It's joyous, it's fun, it's funky, it's disco, baby. It's amazing."

"I love this song. Man, I don't know what else to tell you. This song just follows me around, over the last couple of years, especially, I just keep hearing it in moments that are somehow kind of important to me.

"The reason I've chosen it. I'm gonna get all soppy here. It's a love song. I've been together with Jenni for a year and a half now, and honestly, my life is just in this place where I'm just really feeling so, so blessed and happy.

"She's got a six-and-a-half-year-old, so I've got a completely different outlook on life through His eyes. And yeah, the song just, it's a straight up and down love song, no nonsense, no frills. The lyrics are just so simple and straight. He loves her. She's there for him. He's gonna be forever down the line… That's simple, that's beautiful."