Paul Alderton was born in Te Aroha and grew up on dairy farms across the Waikato as the family moved from Te Aroha to near Rotorua, walked the cows to Ngaruawahia, and eventually settled on a block near Hamilton. He left school at 15 with School Certificate and went straight into a fitter and turner apprenticeship at Mullen and Nooyen, finishing it despite wanting to quit several times. The plan was always music.

He started playing at 15 in an old-time dance band with Joe Raines at Fairfield hall: drums, piano, squeeze box, and sax playing foxtrots, maxinas, and quicksteps to full rooms of Hamiltonians. He would drive himself and his gear there, play four hours, and come home with $36. By his late teens he was in the house band at the Wedgwood Academy on Ward Street, playing behind Billy T James, Tina Cross, and Ray Woolf, watching a host named Paul Fisher work a crowd every night and learning how entertainment is actually done. One afternoon at the Lady Hamilton a red-headed guy was playing piano in the break, they got talking, and Paul ended up joining The Politicians. Tim Armstrong's band.

He played with them for eleven years. Pub circuits, tours up to Kaitaia, and cruise ships. The Fairstar out of Sydney ran to Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and around the islands. Every first night of every cruise the passengers got blind and there was vomit in the ashtrays, and then the seas would turn rough and the piano had to get strapped down. He does not miss it. Back on land, the North Island pub circuit was full rooms Thursday, Friday, and Saturday until drink-driving laws came in, at which point Hookers Tavern went from 300 people a night to 15.

Between music and sheds there was farming. Dairy first on the family block, then deer, with the velvet cut off above the base with a handsaw and sold into the Chinese market. Then the family went back into dairying on a bigger platform, then Paul headed to Tasmania with a plan that he will be the first to tell you did not go as planned. After that came a stint managing a thousand-cow feedlot near Sydney for a Yugoslavian family who owned Auburn Racecourse and had contracts to collect spent grain from pubs across New South Wales. New Zealand's dairy deregulation hit while he was away. He came home, did stainless welding and landscaping to pay off what he owed his parents, and eventually saw an ad for contract shed building. He rang up, got offered thirty dollars an hour, turned it down for a sixty-five-dollar-an-hour digger job, and then the shed contractor called back because his main guy had gone overseas. That was fifteen-odd years ago.

He raised his son Stan as a solo dad from age thirteen. Stan and his brother Billy at some point emptied a fire extinguisher in Paul's bedroom, coating the drum kit, bed, clothes, and everything else in greasy waxy powder. They had tried cleaning it up, which made it worse. The TV went in the tree on a separate occasion.

The episode was recorded the morning after Paul went to Stewart Copeland's seminar in Auckland. His advice: if you enjoy what you do, you never work a day in your life.