Sam Netterfield plays the keyboard and sings in the Brisbane indie pop band Cub Sport. He and band member Tim Nelson recently revealed they were engaged and Netterfield talks about how it was Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life that gave him the courage to come out. He also speaks about the series he read and reread when he was younger and his secret tattooing career.

What’s nostalgia inducing

One of my best friends is Tim Nelson, the lead singer in our band Cub Sport. We’ve known each other for about 15 years and we both grew up in very religious upbringings. After school finished, we became friends and started playing in the band together. I quickly realised I had feelings for Tim and basically there was a whole world of things keeping us apart, most notably religion.

It took until last year for anything to happen and it was the book A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara that really was the catalyst for that. The characters in A Little Life, I could draw so many parallels with their lives and my own life – it was pretty frightening. Seeing how their lives were so centred and underpinned by friendship was what I initially was drawn to. I was resigned to the fact I was going to be happily single forever and I was fine with that, I was content knowing that I had meaningful friendships that underpinned my life and I was willing to accept that.

I remember crying in the first few pages of the book just reading about basically exactly that. The friendships of the four characters in A Little Life were all they had to pin them through the difficulties of figuring out who you are, especially in your early 20s. As I kept reading, it literally changed the course of my life. As the story of the main characters, Willem and Jude, develops, they eventually get together. I was so struck by that . I think I had buried so deeply within me what I really wanted that it took me seeing it play out in fiction to actually have the clarity and perspective to look at my own situation and give me strength to realise that life is too short not to follow.

I did know I had feelings for Tim but I think other people around me saw it more clearly than I did. I think a lot of people thought it was something that would happen at a similar age to the characters, maybe in our 40s.

I think I realised early in the book I was drawing direct correlation with those characters and with myself, then seeing one character die really shook me. I was suddenly hit with the notion that if Tim was to die, how could I have not said something. I realised I had to put everything on the line and I was willing to potentially jeopardise and lose our friendship to get everything that I suddenly realised I wanted and needed.

We were on tour for two months and on the very last night we had a couple of drinks and went to bed. I said, “I don’t want this to ruin our friendship but I want to be with you, I love you and I want to be with you forever”, and then Tim started to cry and said, “So do I”.

I don’t think I would be where I am today, both personally or with the band if it wasn’t for having read A Little Life at that specific moment.

I am sentimental about the smell of Dettol. I’m a tattoo artist, just on the side, purely for friends. There’s something about tattooing specifically that I find meaningful, in making a visible mark of an important time in my life and that’s how I like to do it. The smell of Dettol [reminds me of] me and Tim and our old housemate who we lived with for a number of years. While we wrote the last album and through the whole period of coming out, we would mark significant events with tattoos. So every time we smell Dettol, it pulls us straight back into that sort of trance life stance of getting a tattoo. I’ve just got a new batch of coloured ink so I’m really excited to play around with that. I find something powerful about the ownership and marking your body. Some people don’t like the thought of it but I personally find it empowering that I can mark my body the way I want it with beautiful art to mark special times in my life.

What’s thrilling

The last 18 months has been so crazy, we’ve moved back to being self-managed so I don’t really have time to read much at the moment ... but there is one thing I keep coming back to. I feel like it’s almost outlandish to say but it’s my horoscope book. Having grown up religious, it was always something that was completely taboo and now that I don’t identify in a religious sense, I’ve completely moved on from that. I do feel I’ve formed an affinity with that sort of thing. I got a 12 month overview of the year from a newsagent and I’m shocked constantly at the comfort and the excitement it gives me about what’s to come.

Just before Christmas last year, I started dying my hair ... but before that, through the course of many names, I’ve landed on a nickname with all of my friends that feels like more than a nickname, it’s Bolan. It felt like it came at a time when I was learning a lot about myself and understanding a lot more things. I didn’t feel like my name, Sam, necessarily felt right. The energy around it didn’t feel right. I felt like once I landed on this name after having so many others, I had found a new energy. So at the end of last year, something I had wanted to do for ages was go blonde, and I did. And in a similar way, I feel there’s a power in changing and owning the way you look. I don’t think I would be the person I am now if I didn’t do it.

What I keep going back to

There are a few that I return to. In my childhood, it was CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I think I read it from start to finish maybe three or four times and that’s what really got me into reading as a kid and then I was entranced in science fiction and fiction. Then I read the Wheel Of Time series, which was a colossal series of books. I would read them from dawn until dusk until I finished all 13. And then I read the Harry Potter series, now I’ve read that series many times as well.

I have a pretty natural approach to beauty, I just use water to wash my face, and I don’t really wash my hair more than once every couple of weeks. But now that I’m dying it, the John Frieda avocado oil is perfect.