WelCom September 2023
Maureen Phillips
Life in education always has new learning adventures on the horizon, some alongside children and others alongside fellow teachers. The latest is one we hadn’t expected. Our music teacher, John Phillips, has become a TikTok sensation.
John has been teaching music for 34 years and writing children’s songs for over two decades. One morning earlier this year, he came to school and casually mentioned his daughter had rung him to say people were uploading videos to TikTok using a clip from his song Bad Hair Day. As staff we were excited, watching the viewings and videos as they went from hundreds to thousands then into the millions. I believe they are now over a billion.
At the same time John was starting to get calls from across Aotearoa and globally with magazines, newspapers and TV shows requesting interviews. It got even more exciting when the local radio station and newspaper came out to interview John and photograph St Paul’s children performing their version of Bad Hair Day. When their performance was uploaded to TikTok, our students and staff shared a moment of fame with John.
John remembers writing Bad Hair Day ‘really quickly’ one morning 20 years ago. ‘My son had really curly hair, and one day it just looked like this big mess – a big “fuzznut”, which is where the lyric comes from.’ John sat down and started writing – he had the bad hair day concept, he landed on a hook ‘and away I went’, he recalls. The song soon became a staple of Kiwi kids. When a social media thread reminiscing about favourite school songs took off recently, John’s track started to feature heavily. ‘It blew up from there. The kids who listened to that song growing up and now in their twenties, started posting themselves singing and dancing to it on TikTok. It spiralled.
John’s music has been widely known in New Zealand schools and parishes for the last 20 plus years. Favourites from the school setting are My Dad Loves His Rugby, Lost Property Box, and The Wobbly Tooth. In our parish setting his songs include God’s Love, Through The Breaking of This Bread, Jesus is My Rock and At Your Feet.
John is also well known in the Nelson/Tasman area for bringing Rock da House to our region. It is a musical extravaganza getting students together from schools from all over the region for concert events.
Many positives have come from John’s TikTok moment of fame. We have always known he is incredibly talented, but it is exciting to see this shared globally. And, it has also been great seeing the positive side of TikTok when often in the educational setting schools can experience the negative side of social-media platforms. To see the Bad Hair Day videos bringing joy across the globe has been fun for all of us.
John is pretty modest about his talent. He and his family have deep faith and share a lot of musical gifts, which they recognise as God given. Perhaps best known are Broods, the brother and sister musical duo from Nelson, who are John’s niece and nephew.
It is a privilege for us to work alongside this talented, humble and faith-filled man. We are grateful John generously shares his gifts with our students and the wider community. When we celebrate family Masses each term, I see the smiles on the faces of our parishioners as they enjoy our students’ talents fostered by John.
You can watch St Paul’s School performance of Bad Hair Day on TikTok at: tiktok.com/@johnphillipsnz/video/7202530263409151233
Maureen Phillips is principal, St Paul’s School, Richmond, Nelson.