Day 1: Tāmaki Makaurau
Welcome
Yesterday we played in Tāmaki Makaurau, the first show of our small tour of Aotearoa.
I wanted to start the day by taking the readers of Breakfast and Travel Updates on a tour of my home suburb of New Lynn, one of Auckland’s greatest and most powerful suburbs. If you open up Google’s map website and type in the name of this suburb you will find that an unusual photograph presents itself, a wide-angled shot of a back yard that we can only assume reflects the ideal of a West-Auckland suburban paradise; the trampoline, the playset, the tree swing, and the deck with wicker outdoor furniture speak to a lifestyle of daylight savings-embracing utopia. How Level 7 Local Guide Lucileni Amadeo managed to get her photo selected as the default picture for New Lynn is a mystery for another time, but for today’s blog I wanted to be able to present these streets to you, the common reader, through my eyes.
This late-winter Friday morning had brought with it a most typical statement of weather conditions for this city, and although it wasn’t particularly cold outdoors the sky was grey and overcast with gently moving air punctuated by regular bouts of rain. I donned a parka and headed out for my run soon realising that the garment I had chosen was in fact a mere windbreaker constructed from a moisture-absorbent material that was rapidly sodden.
I passed my local corner shops, some of the finest small businesses you will find in this nation: a pharmacy staffed by a pair of men wearing warm and welcoming knitwear, a dairy with a huge selection of locally manufactured and internationally imported soft drinks, a liquor store with aisles so narrow you have to shuffle along them sideways, and a takeaway that serves everything from pies to roast pork to Cantonese street food.
Continuing towards central New Lynn I passed one of my three local hardware stores, a fine example of a Bunnings Warehouse, and one of the rare examples of this chain that is open until 9pm on weeknights.
The Delta Triangle was the next landmark I passed, a triangular intersection between two major thoroughfares that is marked by a healthy lawn and a memorial to New Lynn’s historic terracotta industry. Across the other side of Great North Road is Warren Viscoe and Bill McKays’ sculpture Portage, a work referencing the significance of this area as a land bridge between Tāmaki Makaurau’s two harbours, a route Māori would travel carrying their waka to the waterways on the opposite side of the isthmus.
Portage.
This sculpture is perhaps overshadowed by the incredible arrangement of conifers and palms in the background, similar to the way that the modernist architectural feat that we call the Lynn Mall Sign Tower has now been overshadowed by the corrugated-iron-clad sprawl of the mall itself, leaving this unusual concrete tripod uncelebrated and on a solitary watch over the broad outdoor carpark it was designed to signpost.
The Lynn Mall Sign Tower
I left the mall behind and ran along the western cycle path, enjoying the section of elevated pathway that contained one of my favourite surfaces to run on, a fibre reinforced polymer by Gracol Composites that is both gentle on the feet and extremely non-slip – a bonus in these wet conditions.
Suddenly I was in the neighbouring suburb of Avondale, jogging passing our venue the Hollywood Theatre, which was still blissfully quiet at 10:30am, seemingly ignorant of the impending hours of setup required for the evening’s show.
My route home took me alongside the Whau River, a beautiful tidal waterway lined with mangroves and flood-prone riverfront properties. Then it was across the Ken Maunder Bridge, a small pedestrian span with a concrete composite walkway, another grippy surface but one with a sprawl of digits depicting a number so high that is certainly not for the faint of heart.
A couple of kilometres of quiet back streets later and I was on my front doorstep, dripping wet and hungry for my first meal of the tour. After cleaning up I began assembling my plate of food, slicing some bread and pulling ingredients from the fridge, as well as grinding some beans and putting on a plunger of steaming hot coffee. I had two loaves of naturally leavened bread from Florets bakery, one that they called overnight oats, and the other a European rye style. I began with buttered slices from both of these loaves and continued by adding sauerkraut and pickled vegetables from the fridge, as well as half of a fresh avocado from the fruit bowl. To finish off I boiled a pair of eggs and served them sliced and salted, still moderately warm.
The afternoon found me back in Avondale, arriving at the Hollywood Theatre in a small white hatchback full of bass guitars and their accessories. Setup was well underway at this cinema-cum-concert hall, with the old wooden boarded floor strewn with the empty road cases of lighting and audio equipment. Gabe had flown in the previous evening and was working away on his end of the proceedings while I found Tristan heavily involved with a freshly purchased drum set that was about to make its Beths gig debut. Jon and Liz arrived soon after with a car full of boutique New Zealand-made amplifiers, and we began to set the stage, the same process we had done all these hundreds of times, but so seldom with our own amps and drums, characterful instruments and equipment that could not be sacrificed on the altar of touring life. We had played the Hollywood before, but it had been a good four or five years, so we spent plenty of time at soundcheck getting to know the feel of the stage, a process that was especially pertinent given that the floor is on a shallow forward slope, and if you don’t watch your balance you could end up taking an accidental stage dive.
By 5pm we were sitting pretty, satisfied that our gear still worked, and excited to play these songs to an audience in the southern hemisphere for the first time in a while. We parted ways, leaving the theatre for a short drive to our houses to experience the strange phenomenon of dining at home before a show.
Several hours later, rested and fed, I returned to find a room full of patrons and a five-piece band named Great South lighting up the stage, the project of a talented Papakura songwriter named Payton Taplin. These guys had spent most of their soundcheck in silence, patiently setting up an elaborate array of electronic equipment to augment their instruments and the result was sonic perfection, a polished performance with depth and intricacy decorated with the emotive singing of their frontman.
It was 10pm when it was our turn to grace to the stage, and we were relying on adrenaline to carry us through our jet lag which even a week after getting us home was reminding us of the feeling of Eastern Daylight Time. Our first Auckland show of the year began smoothly as we rolled into our usual flow of songs, enjoying the atmosphere of this handsome old theatre and the sloppy vowel sounds of the New Zealand accents that politely heckled us from time to time. Half an hour had passed when we hit our first hiccup, a noise that sounded like a hiccup amplified 10,000 times and pushed out through the PA. The speakers died and the music came to a halt. While Gabe calmy began troubleshooting we stood on stage and waited for information. Something was quickly fixed, and we began playing again, making it through half a song before another deafening series of bangs were delivered and hands were flung over ears by every member of the audience.
We eventually left the stage while the search for a solution began in earnest with Gabe and Jon huddled together brainstorming, two of the brightest technical minds in the room who were our best hope of us finishing the evening on a powerful note. The problem was the cable connecting the mixing desk with the PA system; this string of copper wire which had been functioning normally at soundcheck was now wreaking chaos inside our audio systems. The solution was simple and elegant and required us to do an extremely speedy soundcheck in front of the audience, a process that I’m sure must have been enjoyable for some of those watching. Gabe would use his iPad to connect directly with our in-ear-monitoring system which would be connected directly to the PA. Jon and Gabe rapidly reallocated channels and organised the mix so we would still be able to listen to ourselves on stage, but Gabe would have control out the front once more – and the show could continue. Drums were hit and guitars were strummed and EQs were established with a haste verging on reckless, but by the end of ten awkward minutes on stage we were up and running again.
The patience and courtesy of this audience shall not be forgotten. They enthusiastically applauded us as we recommenced and supported us graciously as we played right to the end of the setlist, ending well after everyone’s bedtimes but with a happy quartet of musicians on stage thankful at not having had to cancel the show. Later, the culprit was found. A lighting stand had slipped onto the audio cable and gradually crushed it over the evening, a process that ended with the complete failure transmission we all heard around 10:30pm. Mistakes were made and lesson were learned, and we all went to bed exhausted and hopeful for a less eventful evening on our second night at the Hollywood Theatre.