A voice familiar to Newcastle surfers last night turned the chair of Queen frontman Adam Lambert on The Voice Australia.
Former professional surfer and commentator Terry "Teza" McKenna sang Billy Idol's Rebel Yell at a "blind audition" in front of The Voice judges Lambert, Guy Sebastian, Kate Miller-Heidke and LeAnne Rimes, a studio audience, and tens of thousands of viewers across Australia.
Now a member of Team Adam, McKenna will go on to compete in a "battle round" against his teammates.
Today he's at home in Newcastle, nursing a (slightly) sore head after a few beers at his place last night while watching The Voice with some good mates.
"What a 12-hour rollercoaster it's been," he told the Newcastle Herald.
"It's been a hard secret to sit on, let me tell you ... especially for a guy with a mouth as big as mine!"
McKenna has the gift of the gab and a huge personality to boot, and it's served him well working in radio for the past 35 years. While still a regular on Triple M Newcastle and the host of Teza's Newcastle Surf Report, he's also performing a Billy Idol tribute show (The Oz IDOL XPERIENCE) and is frontman of Newcastle bands Primal Roxstar and Roxzon.
Before he was a surfer, McKenna was a musician. Growing up at Maroubra, south of Sydney, he sang and played guitar in a band.
"At school I was in a band called GX, which is a tribute to Generation X, the punk band Billy Idol was in before he went solo," he explained.
"We played at a few parties and then when I was 17 my parents told me we were moving to Port Stephens. So I ended up at Fingal Bay, went on a world surfing tour and the rest is history, but the other guys in the band, they went on to have musical success with different bands and travelled around the world."
At a school reunion in 2015 McKenna spoke with his former bandmates for the first time in more than 40 years, and something they said to him stuck.
"They said 'You should have stayed in music, Tezza, you would have been a great frontman'," he said.
"Anyway, I thought about it for a few years and then COVID hit.
"I was working as a surf commentator and that came to a grinding halt so I decided to pick up the guitar and see if I could remember any of those Billy Idol songs. I started banging them out and within 12 months I had my Billy idol show."
The decision to audition for The Voice came about when McKenna was confined to a hospital bed in May 2023.
"They wheeled me out of the operating theatre and I was a bit groggy and they told me to take it easy for nine days, so of course I reached for my phone," he said.
"I swiped it open and the very first thing I saw was a call-out for applications for season 13 of The Voice. Because I played in a band I thought 'That's a bit of an omen, isn't it?' and applied."
He didn't think about it again until a week or so after leaving hospital when his phone "pinged".
"I was driving in bumper to bumper traffic through Jesmond and I got an email notification and the subject matter said The Voice," McKenna said.
"I couldn't pull over anywhere and I didn't have my glasses so I was squinting to read this email, looking for words like 'sorry' and 'unsuccessful' but instead I saw 'congratulations' and I was like 'Are you kidding me?' and I just pulled straight into some random's driveway to read it."
Driving to the blind audition in Sydney "in full character mode", the nerves settled in.
"I didn't want to go as Terry McKenna, I wanted to go as Teza McKenna, and from memory I was the only person who went in costume," he said.
"When I was driving down the highway I looked at myself a few times in the rear vision mirror and I was like 'Are you kidding yourself?' but then I thought 'No man, you know what? You look good. Let's do this.'
"And when I got there the people from the show were so excited that I was in costume, and I think that really played in my favour in the end ... taking a punt and doing something different.
"Normally I'm pretty good with nerves, having been an emcee for 35 years, all the way back to the Rock Eisteddfod days, the earthquake concerts, you name it, but standing on stage ready to sing I felt quite exposed and naked, vocally."
McKenna says he's thankful for any doors The Voice might open for him.
"I'm 62 this year and didn't want to be one of those guys who sits at a bar and drinks himself into oblivion, thinking about what could have been," he said.
"I made a rule for myself in my early 20s: I don't want to be somewhere that I don't want to be, doing something that I don't want to do, no matter how much money it will get me. Life's too short, so I tend to live for the day, it's just the person I am.
"I'm hoping this experience might help me with my gigs.
"It's hard when you've got a benchmark of being really good at something and then age takes it away from you. My surfing days ... well, as you get older it does go downhill, so jumping onto something that I can get better at even when I'm getting older is a real treat at my age.
"Now I'm like a kid in a candy store when I go to the Rock Shop ... a frothing grommet [laughs]."
McKenna's grandchildren were at the audition, side of stage, cheering on their "Poppy Tez". His daughter Lahnee asked Lambert to autograph her arm. It was a night he will never forget.
"I'm feeling a lot of gratitude today, let me tell you. Last night was almost like a montage of my life, and the show's producers portrayed me as a family man, a musician, a surfer and someone who loves his city," McKenna said.
"They got it right. There is nowhere else I'd rather be."
And he'll ride this wave wherever it takes him?
"That's it. Spot on. I'm having fun, enjoying life, and I'll just keep riding that wave."
