Despite his regal gaze, 52-year-old model and TV presenter Colin Mathura-Jeffree has no time for snobbery. "The one thing I cannot tolerate are the people that go 'We're part of a set and you're not invited'. I come in like a bowling ball and just smash that aside because I'm like 'No, we're all here and let's all have a good time'.
" Mathura-Jeffree talks to Music 101' s Charlotte Ryan about growing up as an olive-skinned boy named Colin in '70s Auckland, his passion for India and the songs that tell his life story so far. "The resonance of music does save you. It does bring back memories and comfort.
I always notice when I'm in a little uneasy in life - because no life is perfect - I will turn on music and instantly the energy shifts." Although he's now grown into his "strong, sharp" first name, Mathura-Jeffree hated it as a young child growing up in Mt Albert with his Indian mother and British father. Adults openly told him that for a boy with olive skin and hazel-green eyes the name 'Colin' was somehow wrong.
"My teachers said 'What an unfortunate name for a boy that looks like this'." On his first day at Auckland University, though, Mathura-Jeffree's looks caught the eye of a modelling agent. "In the early '90s, there was a shift in who the world viewed as beautiful.
Back in New Zealand, it was [still] very Eurocentric but all of a sudden the world was looking for more ethnic models, and I was in that new wave." Mathura-Jeffree soon left university and Aotearoa and began .
