When Frankie Venter decided to drop out of high school to pursue music, she initially got mixed reactions from her family. “I really didn’t enjoy school,” she admits. “I had a good friend group around me, but I wasn’t good at focusing and it just wasn’t a really good environment for me .
.. I think now that I’m out, I’m much happier.
” Venter, 17, made the decision to finish school after Year 12 and says her parents were “super-supportive” of the move - though her grandparents took some convincing. But she counts herself “really lucky to know exactly what I want to do”, adding, “I’ve always been super set on it.” She can trace her love of music back to when she was around 8 years old watching videos of Taylor Swift performing online.
“She was playing all these shows to literally thousands of people, and watching those videos and getting goosebumps and thinking that’s what I wanted to do, that’s when I kind of realised,” she says. That determination has got her where she is today, as she recalls how she wrote her first song during a camping trip with her family. “There was no Wi-Fi.
I locked myself in a tent. It was so hot, the middle of summer, and I was like, ‘I’m not coming out ‘til I’ve written a song’, and that was how I wrote my first song.” She entered it in Play It Strange, a songwriting competition for high school students, and won funding to record the song.
She went on to make the move from her hometown of Mt Maung.