ACTOR and musician Colin Petersen returned to his old school in Ipswich on Friday to speak with music students.

Petersen was a boarder at Ipswich Grammar School in the class of 1963.

He had already starred in the movies Smiley, The Scamp and A Cry From the Streets before attending the school and was about to climb to greater heights as his interests shifted back to music at IGS.

He started writing songs with Ipswich schoolmate Carl Groszman and they formed Steve and the Board with Stevie Kipner, and after moving to London, signed on as the fourth member of the Bee Gees.

Petersen was on stage with Bee Gees tribute band the Best of the Bee Gees at the Ipswich Civic Centre on Saturday.

Returning to the school brought back memories as he pointed out his dormitory in the old boarding quarters and visited the Great Hall.

“Boarding, being away from home was a difficult adjustment when I first came here, the discipline involved and lack of freedom,” he said.

“But what it taught me above everything else, apart from making a couple of music connections, it prepared me to leave home. It gave me that confidence to go to Sydney with Steve and the Board, that stepping stone to England.”

His message to students was to listen and to always be ready to seize an opportunity.

“When you are playing the drums, what you don’t play is just as important as what you do play. A lot of drummers are trying to prove themselves all the time. When you play, try to leave silence because the next thing that you play will have so much more impact,” he said.

“Music is a conversation between musicians. When you have a conversation, certain rules impact the conversation. First of all if someone is saying something important, you never interrupt. The second thing is you always have to listen to what is said; musically that is listen to what is being played.”

He was humble about his achievements, talking about how he seized the opportunity when it appeared in the audition for Smiley and attributing his success to having the opportunity to work with the incredible talent around him.

“In Smiley I had a great script to get across and 10 years later when I moved back into music and I started to work with the Gibbs as a drummer, I was very lucky to have great songs to play, so I was very fortunate in both of those parts of my life.

“At an event a girl, about six-years-old, told me her mother had got the Smiley DVD to watch the night before and she said to me, ‘I love Smiley’. That’s coming from a six-year-old and there’s a movie that I did 60 years ago and that same character gets that reaction, ‘I love Smiley’. That to me is the greatest heritage. The records I made with the Gibbs, they will live on forever because they are great songs, but that character is my greatest triumph.”