The reason I went so underprepared is that my expectations were incredibly low. I wasn’t expecting to have the night of my life. I didn’t want to be in the moshpit. I'd asked a mate at the last minute to come see Stone Temple Pilots with me. It felt like a curio. This wasn't a big show. It definitely wasn't a big deal. At that point, the San Diego grunge-rockers were well past their prime. Their self-titled sixth album had landed with little fanfare the year before. The world had changed. Calvin Harris was headlining Rhythm & Vines.

Besides, by then, Vector Arena had put Aotearoa on the touring map. The world's biggest artists were visiting us in large numbers. Metallica, Lady Gaga and Gorillaz had just played shows there, and Katy Perry, Bob Dylan and The Chemical Brothers were all on their way. A night out with Stone Temple Pilots felt kinda lightweight in comparison. Sure, I liked them at school. Dubbed copies of Core and Purple were on high rotate in my Walkman. But I hadn’t listened to them much since.

The other problem? Reports surrounding Scott Weiland’s extracurricular activities were getting increasingly concerning. He had well-documented addictions to heroin and opiates. A year after that Vector Arena show, Weiland played his final show with Stone Temple Pilots. The band sacked him and hired Linkin Park screamer Chester Bennington, a man battling his own demons, to take his place. “Not sure how I can be ‘terminated’ from a band that I founded, fronted and co-wrote many of its biggest hits, but that’s something for the lawyers to figure out,” Weiland said in response.

So, just after 9pm on March 26, 2011, it was absolutely thrilling to see Weiland swagger onto Vector Arena’s stage in sunglasses, a bomber jacket and a wispy green scarf. He carried a megaphone and began swinging it around, then used it to bellow the hook of ‘Crackerman’ –“Get away, you gotta get away” – into it. Weiland didn’t just look good. He looked great. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I can hear someone mutter, “He looks pretty mint,” at the start of this footage from that night…

What followed was a night of pure nostalgic thrills. Standing there in my jandals with a mate, we sang along to every word of ‘Silvergun Superman,’ ‘Plush,’ ‘Interstate Love Song’ and ‘Sex Type Thing’. The crowd was really into it. In the handful of videos of that night still on YouTube you can hear them singing every word as loudly as I was, as loudly as Weiland was too. No one knew what was coming at that point. I guess no one thought it would be the last time we’d ever be able to see Weiland play with the Stone Temple Pilots in Aotearoa.

Scott Weiland died in 2015 from an overdose on a tour bus in Minnesota. He was 48. Today, I celebrate my 48th birthday. Maybe that's the reason I've been listening to a lot of Stone Temple Pilots over the past week. I’ve been thinking a lot about that night in 2011 too. I’ve never considered it among the best gigs I’ve been too. I've never ranked that show anywhere near my top 10. But what is the mark of a great show? Surely it’s seeing a great band next to a mate in your jandals and bellowing out every word?

Have you got a gig you can’t stop thinking about? Tell me about it! I’d love to hear from you…

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Wigmore and her husband Jason Butler, frontman for American punk-rockers Letlive, returned to Los Angeles after the birth of their second child. There, the epiphanies kept coming and Wigmore and Butler decided to separate. To recover, Wigmore returned to Aotearoa late last year. It was back home she realised she no longer wanted to live in America. “I was like, ‘I’m just gonna get out … and be around family while I make these massive life changes,” she says. “I was only supposed to be here for a couple of months.” When her dog got her kicked out of her no-dogs-allowed Grey Lynn rental, Wigmore walked into a building for sale on New North Road and told a shocked real estate agent she wanted to buy it. When the sale went through, she texted Aiden Williams, who she’d met at a nearby coffee shop, at 3am. Her message said: “Dude, I bought a building.” Williams’ reply? “Cool.”

Wigmore is telling me all this from behind the counter at her New North Road premise. Eight weeks ago, she and Williams opened Wigmore’s Deli, a coffee and sandwich destination offering risqué options like the “Prosciutt-hoe” (sun-dried olives, prosciutto and provolone on toasted focaccia). “You’ve gotta go for it … give it some snazz,” she told a customer too embarrassed to order using that name. I’d arrived an hour before opening time for a pre-arranged interview but Wigmore initially refused to let me in. She later apologised for being “a fucking psycho” and told me she thought I might be a supplier demanding money. Then she spent 10 minutes trying to get the deli’s bluetooth speaker to play Faith No More’s ‘Epic’ and another 20 minutes brewing coffee. Customers kept banging on the window. “Ten minutes!” she yelled at them. As coffee steeped, Wigmore knocked a metal container filled with rocket onto the floor but it landed safely with not a single spilled leaf. “This,” Wigmore declared, “is all part of the show.”

Wigmore has been putting on a show since 2009 when her guest appearance on Smashproof’s hit ‘Brother’ topped the charts for 11 weeks. A year later, her debut album Holy Smoke hit No. 1 too and helped net her four Aotearoa Music Awards. Wigmore has released three more alt-pop-country albums since, all imbued with her distinctive world-weary voice, and won more awards, making her a mainstay of the local music industry until 2018. That’s around the time she released her fourth album Ivory – and the moment she began her career as a hotelier. After selling The Good House, and before she returned to Aotearoa, Wigmore also spent time being a personal assistant, interior decorating Hollywood homes and managing a Santa Monica beachfront hotel complex. “Apparently I was qualified,” she says. “I was like this little kid walking into this place. It was 25 rooms. I’m like, ‘Hey! I’m the new boss.’”

Now back home, things are more settled. Butler has a place just down the road and he and Wigmore share custody between tours. Wigmore has a rehearsal space out the back of her deli, and a flat downstairs. Her kids, aged 8 and 6, are at school. So, eight years after her last album, Wigmore is finally returning to music. Beautiful Mess, her fifth album, is being released on July 17, and as our chat suggests, it lands with one hell of a back story. The first six songs were recorded as part of a project from several years ago, one interrupted, Wigmore says, when someone working on her album declared his undying love for her. Still married and feeling awkward, Wigmore distanced herself and shelved the album. The second half was recorded during a frenzied week-long recording session in the desert. “It was so good having no distractions, being able to be vulnerable and alive and scared and being a naughty little bitch out there with my friends,” she says. “It bought back the joy of doing music.”

Beautiful Mess is, Wigmore says, a story of two halves, an album of songs that wraps up and celebrates this completely hectic period. She’s accepted that this is how life works out for her. “I work really well in chaos. Pressure, chaos. I’m good under pressure. Chaos is just …” Her voice trails off. Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’ is on the stereo. Customers want coffee. Williams is loading sandwiches into a press. Wigmore clearly has things to do. But not before she lets rip with one last piece of wisdom. All of this, a life full of mess and drama and good times and bad ones too, stems from the death of her father at the age of 16. “That was my imprint of, ‘You better die tired and exhausted and ready for the grave,’” says Wigmore. “That’s how I walk through life. You know how they talk about your cup being full? I want it overflowing into more cups like a champagne tower. I don’t have any energy left to give a fuck about what someone else thinks.”

Gin Wigmore’s Beautiful Mess is out on July 17; her new single, ‘Rodeo’ is released on Friday.

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The names were mesmerising, the promise was tantalising. The Arctic Monkeys. Billy Corgan. The Black Eyed Peas. The D4. The names kept coming, the files loading up in alphabetical order. The Deceptikonz. Dinosaur Jr. Dizzee Rascal. Interpol. Katchafire. Kanye West. They sat there on the screen in front of me, taunting me, teasing me.

There was one problem – none of them would open. “Hmm,” said a mate, trying his best to copy all of those .jpg files. A spinning wheel of death dominated his very expensive screen. “I think I’ll have to reboot it.” We sat there, trying to make those images load. They refused, every effort rebuffed by the sound of a struggling CD drive.

It started with that CD-R. “We found a CD full of gig photos,” said Steve Bielby. He’s the owner of the St James Theatre currently undertaking a major renovation of the famed, shuttered venue. One of Bielby’s contractors found the CD in a plastic case in an old manager’s office, sitting in a tray labelled ‘Kelly’ with a pile of invoices.

Bielby’s contractor slid the disc into a computer and called him over. On the screen were 150 photos of historic St James concerts – and they were incredible. “I don’t think I’ve seen any of them before,” Bielby said. “They’re amazing quality. It looks like they were taken by a professional.” Then he offered: “Do you want them?”

A few days later, I met Bielby for a coffee. He told me they’d found that CD-R around 2014 when they were stripping out a manager’s office. That office had been locked up since a fire in 2007. The CD was chucked into a box along with all that paperwork, and that’s where it sat for more than 10 years. “Every six months I’d rifle through that box and remember it was there,” Bielby said.

I took it home. A few scant details were scrawled on the disc. I didn’t recognise the name, the phone number didn’t work and not a single image would reveal itself to me. After several frustrating weeks, I admitted defeat and messaged Bielby in a huff. “I found an old Dropbox folder we got them into,” he replied. The link landed, the images opened, and there they were, all 150 photos, in full glorious colour.

The photos were stunning, a who’s who of Tamaki Makaurau’s early to mid-2000s local and international live music scene. I attended many of those shows: DJ Shadow, Dizzee Rascal, The Arctic Monkeys, The Mars Volta. Other shows have become infamous: a riveting performance by peak The White Stripes in 2003, plaster raining from the ceiling when The Mint Chicks opened for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2006, and Kanye West covering A-Ha’s ‘Take on Me’ that same year.

Seeing those photos bought back so many memories. I desperately wanted to share them, but it felt wrong without the photographer’s permission. I only had a name: Garry Brandon. I searched Google. I checked Instagram. I tried LinkedIn. Nothing. Then I found his name on Facebook. We had one friend in common. I messaged that friend, and she sent me an email address. Soon, Brandon was on the phone. “I’m just getting over the fucking flu,” he coughed. “My nose is running like a river. Can you call me back in a week?”

When I called Brandon again, he told me his life story, how he grew up in Ireland and went to his first show when he was around 10. It was a performance by the blues legend Fats Domino. “I was enthralled by the whole thing,” he said. “He was pushing his grand piano across the stage with his belly.” From there, Brandon began sneaking his camera into concerts to take as many photos as possible. “I was shooting local bands. I got hooked on it.”

Brandon moved to Aotearoa in the 1980s and began working as a news photographer at the North Shore Times-Advertiser – the place that gave me my first job in journalism two decades later. In his spare time, at night and on weekends, Brandon went to concerts and took photos, primarily for Real Groove, the long-running and now defunct music magazine. He’d be there for two or three songs, then get hustled out of the venue. He did this, he says, hundreds of times.

Brandon was hooked on the thrill of trying to get a perfect photo. “You’re just trying to get a shot,” he said. “You come away with a lot of crap. There’s often nothing in it. You’re totally at the mercy of the lighting. You’ve got to work around that, it can be pretty hectic. Sometimes you’ll catch a facial expression. To come away from a concert wiht two or three really good shots, it’s great. It gives you a thrill. You go through all your photos and find one that makes you go, ‘Fuck, that’s really cool.’”

When I asked Brandon about any memories he had of the shows on his CD-R, he said: “I photographed hundreds and hundreds of gigs, you know?” Then he laughed and said: “I can’t remember last week, let alone 20 years ago.” He believes those photos would have all been published in Real Groove magazine, but because it was a time before Facebook and Instagram, none of them are online. Perhaps the CD-R was loaded up with photos to showcase his work.

His career continued long past then. Brandon went on to become the official photographer at Spark Arena, a position he held for 15 years. He lamented how cellphones have taken over concerts, how photographers often need sign off from the artists they’re shooting, and how copyright is taken away from photographers. “Everyone ends up getting the same photos,” he said. “My enjoyment went out of it.”

Brandon is semi-retired now. He left Auckland a few years ago and now lives in Thames. He still takes photos for a community newspaper. When I called him, he was surrounded by a lifetime of concert photography. “I’m sitting here in my office now, surrounded by thousands and thousands of images on discs,” he said. He’s considering a book, or perhaps an exhibition.

I had one more question. I told Brandon I loved his photos and tentatively asked if I could share them with my readers. He immediately said yes. “You can go ahead and use them,” he said. “Just make sure my name’s on them.”

View Garry Brandon’s St James concert photo archive.

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Jack and Meg White. Fergie with The Black Eyed Peas. Eddie Vedder alongside Tim Finn at the Seven Worlds Collide show. The night plaster fell from the roof and onto the head of a punter when The Mint Chicks opened for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Kanye West playing the first of two epic shows. A legendary Sigur Rós performance. The Arctic Monkeys. Karen O. Peter Urlich. George Clinton. Lemmy. Ben Harper. Don McGlashan. Dizzee Rascal.

It’s all here, all captured by the same photographer during an absolutely mad run of live music from the early to mid-2000s in Tāmaki Makaurau. It’s from a time when music journalism thrived and live concert coverage was in demand by the many music magazines available on news stands. A large selection of those photos were loaded onto a CD-R then tossed into an unused office at the St James Theatre, waiting for someone to find them 20 years later.

So, have a stroll down memory lane, and let me know what you remember about any of these shows. I’d love to hear from you…

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Garry Brandon’s photographs have been republished here with permission. You can find him on X and on Instagram.

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I watched Backrooms in a building that gives visitors that exact experience. Queen Street’s Sky World opened in 1999, a building created entirely on the promise that interior spaces can alter your mind state. Architect Ashley Allen told me he wanted to make visitors forget about the outside world by forcing them to get lost in an inside one. He crafted a Labyrinth-ine structure full of odd angles and strange spaces. As Sky World has decayed over the past decade, the impact of Allen’s design has intensified. Eateries are boarded up, floors are closed off, lights flicker on and off and entire sections of the building are shuttered. Anyone entering the building is forced to navigate dead ends, U-turns and an endless spiral staircase.

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By 7pm, the vibe outside the Auckland Town Hall for last night’s Home Brew show was already wild. Car stereos blurted past with Tom Scott’s voice blaring from the speakers. Two men crowded around a ghetto blaster and rapped entire Home Brew songs, taking turns at being the group’s MCs, Scott and Lui Gumaka. A group of fans walked past them, arguing over the order the group had released their many EPs. As I sat waiting by a door, a man approached me and asked if I was a fan. Absolutely, I replied. “Then rap some bars,” he said. “If you’re a fan, you should be able to rap some bars.” When I protested, he looked like he might be keen to do me harm. I shuffled closer to a security guard.

But it was at the merch table inside the Town Hall where Home Brew mania was truly underway. By 7.30pm word had clearly spread. Something special was available for sale and the queues stretching through the foyer showed fans were desperate to buy it. Last Week, the hip-hop crew’s seven-track debut that details a week in the life of scuzzy unemployed dirtbags, was released in 2008. Only 200 copies were ever pressed and, over time, it became one of the country’s rarest and most collectible hip-hop records. For The Spinoff, I traced its sales history, finding copies that originally cost $23.95 going for up to $1500. “People froth it,” the group’s producer, Harry ‘Haz Beats’ Huavi, told me. He’d sold one of his own copies for $400 after falling on hard times during Covid lockdowns.

Yet here it was, stacked at the merch desk, with no prior warning that 1300 new copies had been repressed, only available to those who’d bought a ticket to last night’s show. Those merch queues ballooned through the night as smiling fans finally found what one record collector recently told me was a “unicorn”. “Lesshgo!” bellowed one punter. I met another who purchased five copies as gifts for friends. John Baker, the industry veteran who helped press the record’s first run, was there getting his own copy. He told me he remembered being immediately struck by the EP’s exquisite detail of being broke in a big city. “It’s what the best artists do,” he said. Just before show time, I joined the merch queue myself and asked the sales assistant how his night had been. “Insane,” he replied. He looked stressed.

Last Week hits a sweet spot for those who spent the late 2000s trawling local hip-hop blogs to download mp3s for their iPods. Last night’s performance was sold out, making it Home Brew’s biggest local headlining show by some distance. Despite Scott’s various side projects, and last week’s Best Soul/R&B Tui at the Aotearoa Music Awards for his debut solo album Anitya, Home Brew is bigger than it has ever been. Clearly, nostalgia is a factor here. It’s also a sign that, when demand is there, when the timing is right, when Guy Brock’s album cover “mer-man” has been turned into a photo booth, and when something is treated as the taonga it is, a secret merch drop doesn’t feel like a cash grab – it feels like a gift. I didn’t hear a single complaint about vinyl prices ($60 for black, $80 for Porsche pink). Instead, the Home Brew merch table felt like the happiest place you could be in Tāmaki Makaurau last night.

On stage, Scott, Haz, Gumaka and the rest of Home Brew ripped through a delightfully upbeat set. Friends and family sat on couches beside them. A beaten up fridge offered cold drinks, and Scott shared them with the front rows. It was a representation of the dicey Sandringham flat Last Week was recorded in. “I’ve got my best friends on stage,” said Scott. “I’ve got some of the best people in the country right here,” he said next, pointing at the crowd. I held my copy of Last Week under one arm for the entire show, worrying about whether it might get scuffed or bent or lost in the crowd. Then I looked behind me. A sea of grinning fans were all holding the same thing, preparing to take it home, put it on a shelf and play it on their turntables, something they thought they might never be able to do.

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It’s here in his flatmate’s Tesla that Mower put the finishing touches on his third album. Released yesterday, Nothing Grows Here escalates Mower’s downbeat moods and serene sonics into something grander and more epic. “There’s more tension in it and more movement, but it’s still upbeat and danceable,” is how he describes it. His previous albums have hit Spotify’s chillwave and indie-folk playlist sweet spots and pushed Serebii into high rotation. He has more than 400,000 monthly Spotify listeners and songs with millions of streams – rare achievements for a solo musician from Aotearoa.

Despite that success, Mower says he’s earned little from his music – just a pittance, he estimates – over the past seven years. That’s why his clothes are covered in paint. By day, Mower paints rooftops. When we meet, he’s just come from a day spent painting one in Parnell. He starts at 7am and works until 3pm, listening to podcasts to pass the time. It’s not ideal, but he has bills to pay. “There’s this strange disconnect where your music can reach people all over the world, but you’re still painting roofs during the day and coming home worrying about rent,” he says. “I’m not super passionate about cleaning the Pak’NSave gutters, but it allows me bit of head room.”

When he’s done, Mower heads down to the garage underneath his Mt Eden flat. It’s here in a home studio that Mower made the bulk of Nothing Grows Here, spending hours tweaking the many instruments, samples and vocals that give his music that cinematic quality. He pushes all the elements in different ways until they hum with pinpoint precision. “I can fixate on stuff for hours,” he says. “Time goes quick.” Once a song is nearly finished, he hops in his flatmate’s Tesla, hoping it pops in just the right way. If it works, if it sounds like he imagined it would in his head, his music can make him cry. “When it clicks, that moment can be quite profound,” he says.

Mower is now an independent artist. But his financial issues ripple through the 12 songs on Nothing Grows Here. “They’ve got a little more attitude and energy,” he says. He’s not wrong. “I don't understand why they're breaking all my plans,” he sings on ‘Ophia’. “I'm not trynna dance with the boys who took my cash.” Songs throb with trap bass and synths, glitchy and twitchy fragments merging into serene electronica. Later he sings that he “bled through the glass while they harvested my voice.” Mower describes his record as being shaped by the idea that “nothing will grow until you leave everything”.

Now a free man, Mower is doing exactly that. Recently, he quit his painting job. After a quick Aotearoa tour he’s packing up his flat and his studio and moving to London. The dream, he says, is to establish himself there and become a full-time musician, to be able to do the thing he loves and get paid appropriately for it. It’s not a big dream, but it’s one he finally feels able to chase. His music, Mower says, is finally coming first. “Maybe it sounds a little silly, but I’m just really just trying to do stuff that I really love,” he says. “I’m quite often just being playful and trying to get something back out of the speakers that feels like … me.”

Listen to Nothing Grows Here; Serebii plays Double Whammy tonight, Vogelmorn Hall on June 5 and Space Academy on June 6.

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Then Dame Lynda steadied herself. She got her first laugh by admitting that across 40 years of performing in the country’s bars and clubs as The Topp Twins, she and Jools never rehearsed. The applause seemed to steady her, remind her why she was there and give her the resolve for what was to come. Because what followed was surely the most searing, damning indictment on a sitting government’s music, culture and arts policies that has been delivered from an awards stage in this country.

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Fifteen years later, Larkin’s resurrected his dream. His first country album, Rattlesnake Boy, tells the story of a down-on-his-luck wrestler struggling with the emotions of his chosen career. With a raft of life changes, Larkin found this the perfect character for addressing many of the emotions he’s been having lately. “He knows that he has to step away from wrestling in order to get healthy again, and have a relationship, and have an easier life, and maybe a life that he actually craves,” he says. “But then the other side of him is so in love with wrestling. How does he choose?” For WWF fans, there are Easter eggs. First single ‘Lost My Smile’ is named after Shawn Michaels’ tearful 1997 exit.

If Larkin feels like a familiar face, that’s because he is. He performed as the rapper Randa for a decade, releasing a string of popular singles and EPs through the 2010s. He won two New Zealand Music Awards and performed a fondly-remembered opening slot on the lakeside stage at the final Big Day Out in 2014. We last saw him in the infamous Air NZ safety rap video alongside fellow local musicians Kings and Theia, with the actor Julian Dennison posing as a DJ. It was wrestling that led Larkin to hip-hop. “John Cena would rap on TV, and that inspired me to rap,” he says. He chose the name Randa because it was the nickname his brother gave him as a kid.

But, in 2022, inspiration began coming from a different place. Larkin had been through a break-up and turned to poetry to cope. “I feel like I became far more earnest,” he says. “My whole worldview changed after this break-up. I was approaching 30. I was going, ‘Who do I want to be in the world?’ I just started asking myself all these questions.” Through Covid-19 lockdowns, Larkin turned to country music, falling for artists like Orville Peck. When he tried making that style of music, it didn’t quite fit. “I tried to make a Brad Paisley cover on my computer,” Larkin says. “I was like, ‘I can’t. I’ve never really properly sang before.’”

Like a wrestler letting go of their chosen sport, Larkin needed to let go of Randa to find his new direction. “Like a lot of trans people, it is my dead name,” he says. “It represents an era … that’s me, before.” Confidence came from his producer, Shannon Fowler, who performs under his own guise, Tom Lark. He and Larkin began exploring a new direction in the studio and eventually emerged with the mournful song ‘Gossip’. It was unlike anything Larkin had made. “It was sludgy and really fun,” he says. That led to more recording sessions with Fowler. Larkin had no intention to release them, to bundle them into an album. “It was never, ‘Let’s make a song to release, or let’s make a project,’” he says. “It was just fun.”

Last Friday, that changed. Released through Lil’ Chief Records, Larkin’s no-raps alt-country album Rattlesnake Boy has received acclaim. “Clever and catchy … plays out as smart, understated pop,” writes Graham Reid on Elsewhere. Aside from pesky interviewers like me, no one’s asked Larkin about Randa. “I feel like people are pretty open, pretty cool about it. No one’s been like, ‘What the fuck?’” he says. Randa’s over, and Larkin’s at peace with that. Right now, country feels like the right fit for the songs he wants to sing. “I want to show up in the world a bit differently,” Larkin says. “I don’t want to be afraid or jaded. I want to spread very honest messages in music, and even if it’s lame, that’s OK.”

Listen to Rattlesnake Boy on Bandcamp; order vinyl through Flying Out.

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As funny as it is to see the words “BIG ASS” used alongside quotes from a sitting National MP, we’re getting used to this. Upston helped announce this tour like she does every tour that receives money from her $70 million Major Events and Tourism fund. By now, there’s been a few of them, including Linkin Park, Ultra Fest, Robbie Williams, Lōemis Festival and Six60 & Synthony’s Te Kaha stadium debut. Upston seems to love promoting these shows. She chimes in every time. I spent too much time on Google yesterday and couldn’t find another government anywhere in the world with an MP who announces concerts as regularly as Upston.

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Lume launched with huge fanfare yesterday. You couldn’t escape the headlines if you tried. Perhaps that’s what happens when you get big name investors and your team of seven includes The Spinoff founder Duncan Greive and ex-Universal Music honcho Justin Warren. But I’d wager the $1.3 million moon shot aspect of Lume – perhaps the only way to describe it when you’re going up against streaming juggernauts like Spotify and Apple Music – also has something to do with it. “Scared shitless” is how Greive puts it.

I spent time in Lume’s Morningside office for The Listener ($$) and their hearts are absolutely in the right place. A turntable was set up on one wall with albums by Sublime and the Beastie Boys stacked on a shelf. “Music first, always” was scrawled on a whiteboard. Lume is a much better deal for artists: each package costs $25, with profits split 80-20 in the artists’ favour. That is so much better than Spotify’s pittance payments. “Buying a Lume is the same financially as around 3000 streams,” is how COO Sacha Judd describes it. “You know the money you’re spending is going where the artist wants it.”

The question, then, is whether or not Lume can succeed. Despite a wonky couple of years for Spotify, people still seem pretty happy with the all-you-can-eat streaming formula. Vinyl is there for people who want the full album experience, and its popularity is booming. Artist merch is readily available. Yet there are megafans who want everything their favourite artist puts out. Lume gives those artists a chance to showcase new albums in interesting ways, and honour old ones too. It’s launching on June 12 with an all-Aotearoa line-up of around 25 acts, including Fur Patrol, Geneva AM, Bic Runga, Tiki Taane and Fazerdaze.

So, today, I’m interested to hear what you think. Can this work? Would you buy a Lume? Which artists would you buy a Lume for? And what would need to be inside that Lume to make it worth your while? Or are you happy with the streaming model as it stands? I’m sure the answers will be different depending on whether you’re an artist or a fan, but I’m super interested in where you land on this. Let me know your thoughts! I’d love to hear from you…

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UPDATE: I spoke to Jack Tame about Lume: that’s here.

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Bonus beat.

Dramatic? Sure, but look at the names that have disappeared. Listen In, cancelled citing economic conditions. Eden Fest, disappeared with liquidators called in. Splore, called off after failing to score major events funding. Juicy Fest, in liquidation. Same with Timeless Summer Tour. Morningside Live Bloc Party is gone. The Big Day Out, Auckland City Limits and Wondergarden are just faded memories of the past, a time when Tāmaki Makaurau was filled with a splendid array of music festivals.

Then, incredibly, things got worse. Last week, two more festivals got taken to the morgue. The organiser of Junk Fest, the small one-nighter that takes over Double Whammy and Public Bar, is taking 2026 off to focus on other things. That event boasted the kinds of acts that would go on to populate an event like the awesome K’ Road indie festival The Others Way. In 2025, that festival had sold out its biggest fixture yet and closed the street it’s hosted on for the first time. It wasn’t enough. The Others Way is no more. “We’ll be bankrupt if this goes wrong,” organisers said.

Aotearoa can do festivals. Hamilton has Homegrown. New Plymouth has Womad. Christchurch has Electric Avenue. Gisborne has Rhythm & Vines. Wellington has Great Sounds Great, High Tide, Cupa Dupa and Ultra Festival. But right now, just one music festival is left standing in Tāmaki Makaurau, and that’s Laneway, an entirely Australian import. It has become the place music festivals go to die.

What’s going on? I asked Chlöe Swarbrick, the MP for Auckland who The Spinoff reported was working on resurrecting The Others Way as soon as its demise was announced. She didn’t reply, so I went to Rueben Bonner, festival director for The Others Way. “Old news,” is what he called the Swarbrick report. “She was trying the last few days but met brick walls.” Bonner told me he was busy working on leads he couldn’t talk about just yet, so he passed on the chance to contribute to this piece.

So I found someone who had all the time in the world to talk. “I’m at my first café of the day,” said John Minty. The clock had just struck 8am, yet Minty sounded perkier than at any other time I’ve talked to him. “It’s lovely weather. I’ve got some grandkids living with me,” he said about his breezy vibes. Once he finished talking to me, Minty had big plans for the rest of his day: visiting a second café for another coffee, then surfing. “I’m enjoying my retirement,” he said. His carefree laugh said it all.

Minty’s like this because, last year, he was in the same position as Bonner and everyone else who has called off a music festival. In December, he pulled the plug on Splore, his long-running Tāpapakanga three-dayer, citing a rejected $240,000 application to Louise Upston’s Major Events Fund. “That $240,000 would have allowed me to carry on,” Minty said. He’s no fan of Upston’s fund. “I’ve heard how much they’re giving other promoters and it’s staggering. My mouth dropped … they’re giving millions to international acts.”

That, though, doesn’t explain why smaller, boutique, niche, independent music festivals can no longer survive or thrive. Minty cites changing music trends and the cost-of-living crisis, saying fickle audiences are looking for the “sugar rush” of a big headliner. He pointed to Laneway and Electric Avenue, festivals that have “gone for a big name and sucked all the oxygen out of the room”. “That’s wiped the floor for smaller events that can’t afford a big name headliner,” Minty said. “People are going, ‘Shall I go to Splore? Or should I go to Christchurch to see Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy?”

As for the lack of festivals in the country’s biggest city, Minty believes music events here are forced to compete with all kinds of other activities – including Auckland FC games, rugby matches and an easily accessible three-hour weekend flight to Sydney. We are, he believes, spoiled for choice. “An Aucklander can look ahead six weeks and there are six things they can spend their money on. We get the Spark Arena shows, we get the Auckland Domain shows, and we get the Western Springs shows. A lot more internationals come through Auckland and that undermines a festival like The Others Way.”

What’s the fix? Minty lowers his voice. “Sorry to be negative about it [but] I think it could get worse,” he said. “It’s quite dim.” He pointed to Live Nation’s domination, along with a couple of other major players. The only hope for smaller independent events is major backing from Auckland Council or the government. Failing that, it’s a moonshot. “We need a philantropist who has heaps of money and loves arts and culture and underwrites something really cool.” Seems unlikely. Does Minty know anyone? There’s a pause. The only person he can think of is himself, but he’s already tried that. “I’d love to do it ... but I don’t have the pingers.”

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On high rotate.

Bonus beat.

Fat Freddy’s Drop were enjoying themselves too. At the first of three sold out Tāmaki Makaurau shows, they turned up to party at the wake. Mark Williams, aka MC Slave, kicked things off with a dub-infused DJ set, a hand-knitted octopus sitting on his decks. Tamaira shuffled and shimmied across the stage throughout the night, poking fun at a man called Axl in the front rows and frequently reminding the crowd why we were all there. No one was having a better time than Joe Lindsay, part of the band’s horn team who started the night blowing a tuba in a bright blue suit, and ending it playing that same instrument standing on the mixing desk in his boxer shorts.

This tour is billed as a 21st anniversary celebration of Fat Freddy’s’ 2005 classic Based on a True Story, the album that launched them skyward and bended the entire Wellington dub scene around them. I had just moved to Te Whanganui-a-Tara when that album was released and can attest to just how quickly it took over the capital. You couldn’t enter a café, restaurant, shop, taxi or flat party without those familiar horns and bass stabs vibrating around the room. From the moment ‘Ernie’s’ familiar piano notes rang through the Town Hall, waves of excitement rippled through the crowd over every song. The setlist was True Story played out of order, with a few other classics – ‘Shiverman’ and ‘Midnight Marauders’ – thrown into the mix.

But the stage backdrop showed why we were all really there. A large cartoon figure hovering over the band depicted the image of Fat Freddy’s’ founder, leader and creative figurehead. Chris Faiumu, DJ Fitchie, or, to most, just “Mu,” passed away suddenly last year, leaving a huge gaping hole in the band and the Aotearoa music industry. We don’t know how the remaining members of Fat Freddy’s are doing because they haven’t really talked about it. Instead, they announced this tour, with more than 40 shows taking them throughout Europe for the rest of 2026. It is, by my count, the biggest Fat Freddy’s have done and many dates are already sold out. It’s a wake on the biggest possible road trip, a chance for fans to check in, to see how they’re holding up, to make sure they’re OK.

I’ve seen about a dozen Fat Freddy’s shows over the years, some sleepy, others more lively, and this felt more upbeat and energised than most. Every member seemed eager to step up the antics and, perhaps, fill the space left by such a tragic loss. It was Tamaira who finally addressed what was on everyone’s minds. Deep into the show, he did something I’ve never seen him do before, and that’s spend several minutes just talking to the crowd. He thanked Mu for “all of his amazing skills, his vibrations”. He told the story of how True Story was made for next to nothing in a small Lyall Bay bach. And he told the crowd Fat Freddy’s were “pushing forward … we’ve been digging deep … things have changed”. Finally, he touched his chest and pointed to the sky. “My man,” he said. “He’s smiling down.”

I spoke to Jack Tame about the Fat Freddy’s Drop show; listen here.

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On a loop.

Bonus beat.

Before I could buy it, another show arrived in my feed. This one came recommended by Under the Radar, a hip-hop showcase from a New York rapper I completely and utterly adore. It’s Billy Woods announcing his debut solo shows here in July, first at Wellington’s San Fran and again at Auckland’s Neck of the Woods. Last year’s Golliwog (“A masterpiece,” declared Pitchfork) was incredible. I couldn’t click the link for a ticket fast enough. I have to be there. The date for that Auckland show is July 18. The tickets are a very reasonable $59.90. I popped one into a basket. But then …

I have a problem. I do not have a doppelganger. I cannot be in two places at one time. These shows clash. They are both happening in Tāmaki Makaurau on the same night. Thanks to a looming couple of months rammed with shows and festivals, this is not the only timetable trouble music lovers face. On May 22 in Tāmaki Makaurau, celebrated Aussies Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers are at The Tuning Fork while MIKE & Earl Sweatshirt hammer The Studio. On June 18 in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Lōemis festival has Troy Kingi playing Night Lords with that album’s entire guest roster of guests at Meow Nui, while the grimy UK producer Kavari is in Meow.

Usually, Aotearoa shuts down and shivers over winter. There’s nothing to do, nothing to see, except movies and football. This year, that is not the case at all. May has all kinds of great locals and international acts playing, including Fat Freddy’s Drop’s biggest ever tour, Georgia Knight’s rescheduled shows (go!) and Te Kaha’s opening spectacle. Flying Lotus, Wednesday and Home Brew are all coming. June is just as rammed thanks to Lōemis and Strange Universe Winters, mid-winter events that include visits by Dry Cleaning, Chanel Beads, Cate Le Bon, The Veils and Stereolab. Balu Brigada are coming. Saul Williams is here. Even July is shaping up nicely thanks to shows by Deafheaven, Vera Allen and Silversun Pickups.

There’s no need to book tickets overseas now. You don’t need to look at Hobart’s Dark Mofo, Sydney’s Vivid and Melbourne’s Rising with jealous envy. It’s all happening here. It’s a mid-winter miracle. This is worth celebrating! The clashes, however, are not. What do I do? What would you do? Is it possible to sprint between The Tuning Fork and Neck of the Woods? Could I persuade the promoters of Billy Woods and YWHW Nailgun to stagger the timings? Do one at 8.30pm, and the other at 10pm? Does anyone have a helicopter I can borrow? Help!

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Some of you have been in touch to ask my thoughts about the demise of The Others Way. Obviously, it’s a tragedy. I bloody love that festival, and it is incredibly sad for all those local musicians who got exposure, all the venues on K’ Road, and Auckland in general. It’s Friday night and I didn’t want to kick the weekend off with a downer, so we’ll get to that soon. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk again soon…

Bonus beat.

At last night’s coiled spring of a Deftones show, everyone had a moment. Part of the fun of the Sacramento act’s sledgehammer performance was seeing which pulverising riff, which pained Chino Moreno yelp, which complex Abe Cunningham fill and which deliciously down tuned grind would force you to leap out of your seat and lose any sense of self-awareness. For me, I became a nightmare neighbour to those around me inside Spark Arena for the overwhelming thrill of ‘Genesis,’ the nightmare churn of ‘Around the Fur’ and the slow-build of ‘Rosemary,’ a song lifted by the searing twin guitar attack of Lance Jackman and Shaun Lopez.

This, obviously, was a good night to be angry. Deftones have provided an outlet for letting rip and letting go since their mid-90s origins, back when they added moody atmospherics and art-metal mystique to the frat-boy rap-rock surging in popularity at the time. They’ve stuck around and feel more relevant than most on the booming nostalgia circuit thanks to a series of consistently great albums, last year’s private music included. But their Aotearoa visits have been infrequent. I can only recall seeing them at the 2003 Big Day Out when they suffered crippling audio issues, and at that same festival’s final event in 2014 that had a low turnout because fellow 90s friends Pearl Jam were playing at the same time. (A 2020 show, which I had a ticket for, never happened, and you already know why.)

But last night felt different, a surge of pulsating testosterone and riveting rage that was everything Linkin Park’s recent show in the same venue was not. It was heavy in just the right places and fierce in others, a proper rib-rattling pummelling from a band wielding tension like a weapon. I found myself flicking my head to the side frequently, like a dog trying to shake off the vibes. But then that tension would build and return, released by another spine-tingling Moreno scream or another apocalyptic scorcher of a riff. That’s part of a great Deftones show too – not just enjoying the moment you’re in but anticipating what it’s building towards and preparing yourself for what’s coming next.

Interpol, it’s worth mentioning, were an inspired choice for this Deftones tour, their precision mid-2000s indie-gloom opening proceedings nicely. But Deftones stole the night, a Mack truck pushing top speed that always felt like it could shudder into bits but never quite did. It all ended with ‘My Own Summer (Shove It)’ and ‘7 Words,’ a double-punch death blow. The guy with the long hair was back up flinging it around. The guy with the beard was doubled over banging in nails with his forehead again. And the woman in the aisles had lifted her arms up to the heavens, clearly hoping Deftones might help her on her final ascent into the heavy metal heavens.

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Bonus beat.

Wadsworth isn’t keeping that record. Like every album in his collection, it won’t stay with him for long. He’s a vinyl reseller, and his personal rule is that every album he gets he on-sells, hopefully for a small profit. He’s already listed Fall in a Hole for a very reasonable $425. Yet there’s no denying he’s a collector. He has more than 3000 records and is constantly on the hunt for more, scouring TradeMe listings and Facebook Marketplace looking for rarities and bargains. He’s sharp, often the first to reach out to someone who is letting their collection go. Recently, I met a man in a Henderson carpark doing just that. Wadsworth had beaten me to it. “Some guy called Tony was just here,” the seller told me. “He bought about $500 worth of stuff.” The good ones were all gone.

He’s the antithesis of vinyl collectors who can never get enough and always want more, like this guy. Wadsworth says it’s the only way he can do this job. He calls himself an ambulance service for old records. “This is triage. I’m the nurse. I give them some TLC and send them on their way,” he says. Every find is put through the same process. “I listen to it, I clean it and I grade it so I can get an idea of what it’s worth. Then, fingers crossed, I sell it.” He lists his records through TradeMe and his Facebook page as The Vinyl Vault. (His $1 Monday listings are his most popular nights.) He sells about 100 records a week and says that’s enough to pay his bills. “It’s not making me rich but I’m happy hanging out drinking coffee and playing records,” he says.

Wadsworth has been doing this since 2019. Back then, his time running the Time Saver Traffic radio reports was well over and he was operating a cat hotel in Tauranga with his wife and their children. That’s when he decided it was time to live out his high school dream and work in a record store. Wadsworth scored a part-time job but found having a boss frustrating. “I found a bundle of records in Wellington. I kept saying, ‘Buy the records, buy the records, buy the records’. And he kept saying, ‘No money, no money, no money.’” So Wadsworth thought, “Fuck it, I’ll buy them myself.” A few days later, he was driving back from Upper Hutt with several crates of classic rock records loaded in the boot of his car. They cost him $2500 and they’re long gone.

He’s been selling records like this ever since. After a separation, Wadsworth returned to Auckland a year ago. All the records are in the country’s biggest city, he says, and since Covid the second-hand market is booming. That’s because everyone who spent up large on their record collections during lockdowns are offloading them. “They’re back living their regular lives now and they don’t have time to spare, so now they’re selling their vinyl,” he says. It is, he admits, a far cry from his high school years when record stores were “literally putting vinyl records through shredders because they had so little street value that they just threw them away and put CDs up on shelves”. Wadsworth’s stats prove his appeal: he has nearly 16,000 feedback notes on TradeMe.

I met Wadsworth after buying several of his records, which always seem to be priced cheaply and in great condition. Standing outside his inner-city apartment he told me about his rules, that he refused to keep any of the records that found their way to him. Fascinated, we went for coffee, and he told me he once tried curating a bespoke collection, but it didn’t take. “I very rapidly ended up with a whole bunch of records on a shelf that was actually stock that pays for my rent and pays for my food,” he says. Listening to each record once is enough. “Once I’ve listened to it that one time, when am I going to listen to it again?” Wadsworth says. On a recent Sunday morning, he sent me an image of Silverchair’s Frogstomp on his stereo. “It’s a palate cleanser after Lorde and Kacey Musgraves,” he wrote. “Sepultura next.”

Towards the end of our chat, Wadsworth opened his briefcase and pulled out another record. This, he said, is the only record he would never part with. It came from a 2019 indie-rock cruise between Barcelona and Italy and featured Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub and Belle and Sebastian. Yo La Tengo were also on that cruise, and Wadsworth told me he ran to his room to find his vinyl copy of their soundtrack to the 2009 film Adventureland and asked them to sign it, which they did. Despite their scrawls, he doesn’t think it’s worth much. He’s never had it valued. (On Discogs, the median price is $43.) “I’ve never even played it,” Wadsworth told me as he held it up proudly. In that moment, he sounded just like a collector.

Browse The Vinyl Vault’s listings on TradeMe.

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Bonus beat.

‘Train on the Island’ is the third track on the new album of the same name from Aldous Harding. That album was released today and it is surreal, personal, funny, warm and intense, an unstable world waiting for you to explore, if you dare. As it is with every Aldous Harding album, the experience is like sinking into a bubble bath then getting frequent jolts from a stun gun. You need to be in the right headspace, the correct frame of mind, ready for what she might throw at you. I adore the process of unpacking a new Aldous Harding album because one thing is for sure: she’s going to test you, and then she’s going to reward you.

Rave reviews have already seeped out, warning us of what this is, as critics wrestle with something that is almost impossible to fully understand. “It hums with that same curious, simmering ambiguity, like something half-remembered and still rearranging itself,” reports Stereogum. “Her lyrics are mysteries to be unpicked for deeper meaning, like dreams awaiting analysis,” writes The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis in a four-star review. Mojo puts it like this: “There’s a temptation to sit down with a new Aldous Harding album like you’re a detective trying to crack a case: evidence folders piled up, post-it notes on the whiteboard, a forensic psychologist on speed-dial.”

‘Train on the Island’ is the perfect example of Aldous Harding’s mystique in action. The title is a grand metaphor for travelling listlessly, going nowhere, doing the same old shit, making the same dumb mistakes. I have listened intently, analysed her lyrics obsessively, and it feels like she’s trying to convey a sense of pointlessly circling the same old drain. That realisation made me smug, like I’d finally cracked Aldous Harding’s unique code. But then I realised nothing she does is that direct, that surface level, that on the nose. “I feel the sea, dishonest art in me,” she sings on ‘Venus In The Zinnia’. The more I listened to ‘Train on the Island,’ the more confused I got. And the more confused I got, the more I fell in love with that song.

This is, of course, Aldous Harding’s entire reason for being. I have seen her pull this magic trick live countless times (including the donut incident), and it leaves me baffled and bewildered but cackling with delight every single time. You try your best to reach her, to get to where she is, and by the time you get there she’s already gone. Her train has departed that station, destination unknown. Maybe Aldous Harding really doesn’t want any of us to know what any of her songs truly mean. “People are just so keen to get to the bottom of stuff that’s none of their business,” she said in this cracking 2019 interview. It’s a quote that makes me chuckle every time I read it because it’s so her.

Aldous Harding puts it another way on Train on the Island stand out ‘Riding That Symbol’ when she sings, “No one knows what I’m into”. Five albums in and ain’t that the truth. Guess there’s nothing else to do but shut up and hit play on ‘Train on the Island’ again…

Stream Aldous Harding’s Train on the Island; book tickets for her November tour.

Congratulations on making it to the weekend! I hope you have fun plans that include lots of music (and don’t require industrial-strength spray bottles of bleach). Don’t forget Split Enz play Spark Arena tomorrow and Sunday and you will have an absolute blast if you’re lucky enough to be going along. I’m saving myself for more house cleaning and next week’s Deftones show. Talk again soon :)

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Bonus beat.

• Neil and Sharon Finn have purchased Newton Road’s Edinburgh Castle and plan to turn it into a wellness retreat. A spokesperson told The Spinoff: “It will all start once planning permissions are approved.” The hotel and pub is a notorious hot spot, with this Stuff report claiming it was “plagued by violence” including a kidnapping, a stabbing, an aggravated robbery, a nunchuck attack, 162 police complaints and a death. Finn, it would seem, has his work cut out for him.

• Thirty years ago a strange song by a South Aucklander singer topped the charts around the world. Why did OMC’s ‘How Bizarre’ connect with so many people? “When you stuck it on the radio, it sounded like nothing else,” the song’s label owner Simon Grigg tells Stuff. “[It didn’t] matter what record you put on either side of it, nothing sounded like, ‘How Bizarre.’” And that is still true to this day.

• A couple of concert announcements worth noting: The Bleeders have booked a five-date tour through June to celebrate the 20th anniversary of As Sweet As Sin; and experimental Philadelphia weirdos YHWH Nailgun will play The Tuning Fork on July 18. I will 100% be going to that one.

• A couple of cancellations too: Lara Marie says her one night Tāmaki Makaurau event Junk Fest is taking 2026 off so she can “focus on some different goals”; and The Spin Doctors have cancelled their entire Australasian tour, including a performance at The Powerstation on May 27.

• One recent evening, I trekked down to Sky World for what was supposed to be my very first interview with owner James Kwak. Plot twist: he didn’t show up, instead sending two staff members in his place. What happened next still has me scratching my head. But I did get a decent pastry out of it.

‘It’s a big shift … there’s definitely more at stake.’

He’s been up all night, toiling away into the small hours, making sure everything goes to plan. “I haven’t had much sleep,” admits Andrew Laking. On a recent Zoom call, Laking balanced his laptop on his knees and leaned back in his chair. A year’s worth of work on his Te Whanganui-a-Tara festival Lōemis had all gone live at 5am. Shows had been announced. Tickets went on sale. His line-up had been kept secret for months – and it was finally out. Laking looked tired but happy. “I was the one who had to turn the website on. I had so much work to do, so I just stayed up,” he told me.

Now in its 11th year, Laking is trying to pull off his biggest Lōemis yet. In venues around the capital from June 9-21, his festival is full of one-offs. It’s the only place you can see Shayne Carter play REforms with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. It’s got exclusives from indie act Chanel Beads, Palestinian rapper Saint Levant, bruising UK producer Kavari and punk crew Snapped Ankles. It’s also the only time you can see Troy Kingi play Night Lords with every featured rapper. Cate Le Bon, Lydia Lunch and Kelly Moran are on the bill. “It’s a festival that gets audiences to experience something they haven’t seen before,” says Laking.

This is all happening for one reason: Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston’s Major Events Fund. That’s the $70 million package available to promoters to host events and bring international acts to Aotearoa. It made the Linkin Park show happen, got Ultra Fest onto Wellington’s Waterfront and is helping fund Six60 and Synthony’s Te Kaha show. It also denied Splore funding, leading to its demise. Controversy around Upston’s fund is growing, especially over the Robbie Williams tour. Act MP Todd Stephenson recently slammed it as Upston’s “personal slush fund” and accused her of “writing blank cheques behind closed doors”. Upston rejected those accusations, NZ Herald reported.

Laking admits this year’s Lōemis is bigger and better because of that funding. It’s grander, packed with international acts that piggyback off Australian tours. “It’s quite a big shift,” he says. How much it got, along with all those other events, remains a mystery. “This is one of many exciting events the Government is supporting in 2026,” is how Upston puts it. Laking’s application leant heavily on bringing all those international acts here. Doing that would have been much harder without the funding, says Laking. “I don’t think it would have been this ambitious,” he says. “You go out on a limb for a big artist. You’ve got to make sure it works [financially]. I’m slightly risk averse in that sense … there’s definitely more at stake. ”

Perhaps giving Te Whanganui-a-Tara a morale boost was part of Upston’s decision. It’s fair to say the capital has had a rough time of it, with business closures and layoffs affecting the city, as well as Homegrown’s relocation to Kirikiriroa. Even the Wellington Arts Festival has been criticised for losing its mojo. But Ultra Festival sold out the waterfront, and Laking says a series of closed buildings opening their doors again is creating community spirit. “You could feel things lift with the library re-opening. There’s a whole string of them coming: the Town Hall, the City Gallery.”

This, then, seems like the correct use of a fund like Upston’s – a chance to help rejuvenate a struggling city with that rare thing, a mid-winter festival that has room for both locals and international acts with shows you can’t see anywhere else. It is designed to be a festival like Hobart’s Dark Mofo or Sydney’s Vivid, says Laking, a chance to get out, explore the city and see something different during the darker, colder months. He’s nervous about the scale, and says it’s the biggest thing he’s done. But people, he believes, are ready for it. “It’s about leaning into winter. You have to go all in. If you make that effort people will come out.”

See the full line-up and find tickets for Lōemis.

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Bonus beat.

At the Taite Music Prize ceremony on Wednesday night, Carmel Bennett received the Independent Spirit Award for her “say yes, figure it out later” attitude. It’s a smaller award than the night’s big winners, but to some it felt like the main event. “She is calm, reassuring, accommodating, quick and efficient,” said Teresa Patterson as she presented it to Bennett, who has touched many facets of Aotearoa’s music industry, including the MusicHelps charity. Bennett stepped up to the microphone and unfolded a piece of paper containing her devastating speech. “My daughter told me to get my shit together and write something,” she said. “This is really special to me.”

Her mic drop moment came near the end, when Bennett paused, grinned to herself, then warned: “I’m going to break one of my personal rules.” The gloves were off. She couldn’t turn back now. MPs Chlöe Swarbrick and Paul Goldsmith were in front of her. So Bennett launched into it, detailing two of the biggest problems she saw in her industry, things she believed those in power should fix. “For God’s sake, can you sort out the copyright act? Get it passed,” she said. And then: “We have so much talent in New Zealand. Why the hell are we allowing international acts to play here without local openers?” She ended with five words: “No local act, no visa.”

The crowd gathered at the NZICC theatre got to their feet. They clapped, hollered and cheered. I couldn’t make this year’s Taite Prize ceremony because I’ve just moved house, my shit is everywhere and my only clean clothes are a pair of blue board shorts and a single sock. But those that were there told me Bennett’s speech was the night’s clear stand out moment, the cause that seemed to unify everyone. “It was magnificent,” one told me. In the video below, you can skip to the 17.30 mark to see how it played out for yourself – but you should absolutely take the time to watch the whole thing. It’s glorious viewing…

The following day, Bennett was feeling sheepish. “It’s a little bit overwhelming,” she said. I’d called to find out what the reaction to her speech was like, and how she was feeling about it 24 hours later. She tried to play it down, instead pointing to the night’s winners as the real stars. “I don’t want to be the poster girl for the Taites in 2026. It should be about The Mint Chicks, the fabulous Geneva AM, and Marlon (Williams). I just opened my big mouth at perhaps the right time.”

Did she what. We have had an influx of international acts performing here over the past few years, and it’s rare to see them include local acts on their bill. Limp Bizkit bought the Japanese metalcore band Hanabie with them. Travis Scott had his own DJ warm up the crowd. Ed Sheeran had three opening acts – two were from Australia, and the third came from Ireland. Then there’s Coldplay. Maybe don’t mention Chris Martin and co’s three-night stand at Eden Park to Bennett. “That really ripped my ration book,” she says. “I was fucking livid on that one.”

It’s like this because there are no rules requiring local acts to be included at these shows. The Spotlight Aotearoa campaign was launched by the Music Managers Forum last year, and I’ve covered this topic repeatedly, but it doesn’t seem to be getting through to the right people. Australia has rules, and Bennett remembers a time when international acts couldn’t get visas here unless they had a local opener. So they all did it. To her, it’s simple: bring that rule back. “It won’t cost them any money,” she said. “It would be really good to write some legislation that you need a local opener to get a visa.”

The benefits, Bennett believes are endless. Fledgling acts learn how to behave backstage and where to put their gear. They get experience playing on a big stage with a proper PA system. Then there’s the exposure. All those crowds means new fans, more streams, and merch sales. Bennett points to Dick Move opening for the Foo Fighters in 2024, a slot they’ll repeat on the next Foos tour, as an example of how this should work. “That’s Dick Move being exposed to 35,000 people, or more,” she said. “This is a band that deserves to be in front of people. Respectfully, you don’t get that opportunity in Whammy Bar.”

She said what she said and Bennett’s not taking it back. Promoters should consider this a warning. The government may not demand it, there’s no legislation to make it happen, and you may not face a fan backlash over your decision. But if you book an international act to play in Aotearoa and there’s no local artist on the bill, you may have something worse to deal with: Bennett looking over your shoulder, casting you a stern eye, ready to give you a little nudge. “I am suggesting international promoters give good consideration to it,” she warns. And if she ends up with a microphone in her hand again, watch out.

See the full list of Taite Prize winners.

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Bonus beat.