Max Lavergne

What do you do? I work in community radio at 2SER. I present the Overdrive show on Fridays.

And you play the trumpet. Yeah, I haven't played in ages. I used to go busking all the time and for a little while that was how I made money. It was really up and down. Sometimes I made $300 in a day and sometimes I'd come home with $20.

How long have you been tooting that horn? I started in Year 5 but I haven't played for 18 months. I guess I realised that after a while you've got to know whether you've got where you are because of a natural ability or from hanging in there [laughs] and I think I was just hanging in there.

Why are you in Martin Place? I am here because there was a flash mob - a three-minute pause. I'm not sure how many of us there were in the end. I think someone said around 150 but I was fixing on one point on the ground so I couldn't see how many other people were actually frozen. We'd heard about other people doing it overseas in New York and London - just freezing - so we had a meeting about it a couple of weeks ago and we decided that we should do it for ourselves. 

Was it just a fun thing to do or did you want people to stop and think? We like to say there was a higher meaning behind it - like how when you move out of your house and you notice the trees on your street for the first time, that kind of thing. It was more for other people to have a look around and notice Martin Place.

How did you organise it? At the initial meeting there were 15 of us and we all invited more people to come.

And you used the trumpet to stop and start the flash mob? Yeah, I had my phone on silent in my pocket. There was an alarm at 5.33 so I suddenly stopped playing and then there was another one at 5.36 so I started playing again.

Can you actually play noughts and crosses on your shirt? Yeah, it's actually Velcro (pulls off a cross). I got this a few years ago from a store in Glebe.

Where did you get your jacket? From C's Flashback in Newtown.

Are you from Sydney? No, I'm from Wollongong and now I live in Redfern.

What do you like about Sydney? I really enjoy the atmosphere around places like Newtown. Enmore, Glebe and Redfern and places like that. People say that Sydney has no soul but I don't think that's really the case, I think that's a lazy observation, just because Sydney doesn't have trams.

What do you not like about Sydney? I really hate the public transport. I really wanted to be here before 5pm, but my bus was 20 minutes late.