FeaturesDecember 23, 2017

The highs and lows of 15 years of Rhythm and Vines

Guest writer

Rhythm and Vines’ co-founder Hamish Pinkham talks about the highs and lows of the first 15 years of his hugely popular New Year’s Eve festival.

In the past 15 years, Rhythm and Vines has gone from a small New Year’s Eve party intended for 400 people, but attended by 1800, in 2003 to a sprawling drunk tank of 30,000 people in 2013 (and a riot at a festival-related campsite in 2014) to a more manageable 18,000-20,000 people over the last couple of years.

Festival co-founder and programmer Hamish Pinkham says the festival had grown too big to be safe and sustainable. “We had a lot of success and it’s hard to maintain momentum with a big event like that. We got too big, but there was demand for it. People kept buying tickets so we kept building more campgrounds. And probably broadening the demographic too far.”

At the time, Pinkham and his company were running Rhythm and Vines, the Gisborne Wine and Food Festival, stadium concerts in Auckland, touring of electronic and indie acts with ten full-time staff. “At our peak, we were looking to do 30 different shows a year and we lost focus on keeping Rhythm and Vines on track,” he says, adding that the safety issues in 2014 (largely confined to the campsite) were the final straw. “It was really tough professionally and personally, and we had to change our whole model, change our team, and change our vision.”

He stopped promoting other events, sold Rhythm and Alps to the company’s South Island partners and scaled the team back to a skeleton crew to get back on their feet. Pinkham wanted to regain the focus that had been lost to relentless growth and ensure that the festival was a safe, secure space where people could lose themselves (in a good way) for a couple of days. The campsites are no longer BYO and the entire festival exists under a liquor licence, with the festival selling cheaper drinks on the day to get people out of their tents.

“Gone are the Scrumpyhands, gone are the chilly bins filled with Double Brown, gone are the beer bongs. What we’ve put in place is a more civilised, almost European model of drinking, which is what the market expects. A culture grew around the festival that was unbecoming to the vision, but I think we’re back on track.”

CHANCE THE RAPPER AT RHYTHM AND VINES 2016 (PHOTO: SUPPLIED)

Musically, as touring acts get more expensive the festival has tried to get away from being overly reliant on headliners. “We’re not trying to sell a Chance The Rapper concert, we’re trying to sell an experience that features Chance. If you become a flagship festival based on talent, it just becomes an arms race each year trying to top it up.”

Rhythm and Vines CEO Kieran Spillane says the festival’s strength is offering a complete experience that one-day festivals in cities can’t. “I think the term ‘festival’ gets thrown around a little bit more than it should. A concert for one day is not a festival.”

“It’s true escapism as well,” Pinkham says. “Especially being in Gisborne – the road trip, getting away for three or four days, you just lose yourself. It’s a real journey of discovery.”

The other big evolution for the festival has been going from an almost exclusively reggae/dub line-up, to a broad-based festival that included indie rock and folk, to a more streamlined line-up of dance, electronica and hip-hop.

“We harnessed that Kiwi sound that was coming through,” says Pinkham. “Salmonella Dub was a big band down in Otago; we booked them our second year and we had 5,000 punters. The next year we booked an up-and-coming band called Fat Freddy’s Drop, who had just released their debut album, and by the end of the year they were the hottest thing in New Zealand and we got 10,000 people. Shapeshifter the next year. We had some great foresight and vision on the booking policy to pick that next big thing.

“I like to think we took a pretty good lead in the early days and that’s why we were successful. We rounded up a lot of that Kiwi sound that was up and coming, and chucked them in a vineyard. It was a great summer recipe. We were the first to headline the Black Seeds and Kora and we were right there when it all happened. But we’ve found on New Years Eve you wanna let your hair down, hands in the air, and I don’t think that reggae music lifts people to those heights. And the trend dropped off.”

“We’re back to focusing on what we are. We’re a party for a certain demographic. It’s a New Year’s Eve event where people are there for a fun time and to let loose, so we’re just focusing on that party aspect. In the past we were trying to be everything to everyone, focusing on bands and heavily reliant on Kiwi music, where now it’s dance music and bass music – drum and bass, trap, dubstep. That’s what works for our audience, what they expect and what the festival’s been known for. But jangly guitars, not so much. Reggae, now, not so much. Tropical house and things, not so much.”

Now, the festival sells 80% of its tickets before the line-up is announced, with the audience trusting there’ll be acts they will love, whether or not they’re already fans of them. “That gives us the freedom, from the local perspective definitely, to push some of these acts through, giving them decent stage time, acts like SWIDT and Saachi and LAB, helping promote that next wave of talent coming through,” says Pinkham. “It also gives us that flexibility to take risks on acts that are playing big stages but aren’t as familiar to a wider audience. It’s a good position to be in, to be a bit more creative than sticking with the tried and tested, say the Six60s and Shapeshifters that other promoters rely on.”

“We’re lucky that we really believe in our recipe – it’s a sense of occasion, it’s New Year’s Eve, people want to party, they want to travel to the beach – we’ve been able to harness that,” says Pinkham, when asked about the festival’s future. “As long as we keep on trend, keep the edge, keep it safe and secure, then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t survive. We’d maybe taken our eye off the ball there, a few things were off-trend, we were not looking after our punters as well as we could. And maybe that led to a bit of a stall, but things feel like they’re back on track.”

This New Year’s Rhythm and Vines features Schoolboy Q, Mura Masa, Big Shaq, SWIDT, JessB and more, 29-31 December 2017 in Gisborne.

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FAZERDAZE (PHOTO: DAVID FARRIER)

FeaturesDecember 21, 2017

Fazerdaze, from Morningside to the world

David Farrier

Contributing writer

FAZERDAZE (PHOTO: DAVID FARRIER)

Fazerdaze, the current incarnation of 24-year-old Amelia Murray, released her debut album Morningside back in May. Since we wrote about the build-up to that record, Murray has had a whirlwind year, finally catching her breath back in New Zealand for Christmas.

“I do it for selfish reasons,” laughs Amelia. I’ve asked her why she insists on staying after every show, sometimes for hours, to meet fans and sign the various items they’ve carted to her show. “It means a lot to me to do it, to meet the people who are listening to my music. Because often, in New Zealand, I am so cut off from them – they are like a stat on my YouTube channel or Spotify. But when I meet them, I can see what they’re like.”

I saw her do this recently after playing a show at the Echo in Los Angeles. The venue reminds me a little of Auckland’s Powerstation: big enough to feel like a visceral, exciting show, but small enough to remain intimate and special. The Echo boasts a long list of famous headliners – from LCD Soundsystem and Beck to the Pixies and The Rolling Stones – but on 12 November, the venue belonged to Fazerdaze.

Amelia and her current live lineup of Ben, Ollie and Guy played a superbly tight set – as they tend to do – and everyone watching seemed transfixed. It could have been a show anywhere, I suppose. But then I glanced by my right and there was Edgar Wright, the man behind movies like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and this year’s Baby Driver, and I’m reminded that I must be in LA.

Enjoyed @fazerdaze’s first ever LA show at The Echo.

A post shared by Edgar Wright (@edgarwright) on Nov 13, 2017 at 12:20pm PST

That show marked the end of an intense year of touring that saw Fazerdaze play throughout Australasia, the UK, Southeast Asia and America. One can only imagine they were all exhausted up there on stage and yet after that show, like all her shows, Amelia stayed on afterwards to meet anyone who wanted to say hello. Which ended up being most of the crowd.

“It’s been really surreal to go all over the world and see that people know the songs at the shows,” she says, back in her home neighbourhood of Morningside. As usual, she’s still humble, adding that “the shows are still small at this stage”.

I ask what her fans are like, considering she’s spent a great deal of this year meeting them in person. “They are more introspective people. Lots of quite shy people, like me. I remember when I was in London a whole group of girls came up to me and hugged me and said, ‘We feel like we know you!’ and that meant so much to me. And that was the first time I had met them, and it felt like instant friends.”

She’s made a lot of new friends this year. Hip Tanaka, the legendary Nintendo composer behind games like Metroid, Kid Icarus, Super Mario Land and Tetris, proudly tweeted his Fazerdaze record straight after he’d bought it. Then Tanaka-san showed up at her gig in Japan, waiting patiently in line for an hour afterwards so say hello. It’s amazing to think that Amelia wasn’t even born when Super Mario Land came out in 1989. “I didn’t get to grow up with his games, which is sad,” she says.

FAZERDAZE and Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka (Photo: Nick Dwyer)

She’s also found fans closer to home this year, with Neil Finn asking her to be a part of his latest solo record, Out of Silence, back in July. “I didn’t even know he’d listened to my album until he wrote to me,” Amelia says, sounding like she still doesn’t quite believe it. “And then he wrote me a letter for my US Visa application! Just little things like that. It’s all so surreal.”

Now back home in New Zealand, she’s been able to take a breath. Sort of. She’s had her wisdom teeth out, which lead to a painkiller fuelled trip to watch Sir Paul McCartney. I ask if she saw Neil Finn and Peter Jackson in the crowd. “It was so funny seeing them on the big screen! The camera was on the those guys quite a lot. Peter Jackson was like filming it all, and singing really loudly!”

Then she’s been reading books and, fans will be glad to know, writing new music. She says the last few months have felt like a dream. “There were so many moments in Southeast Asia where I couldn’t hear myself singing. The most obscure songs, even – old songs that weren’t singles – I couldn’t hear myself singing. I don’t know that it even happened.”

She says the most special gig for her was in Indonesia. Being half-Indonesian, it held special significance. I imagine her fans felt the same way. “I have got some crazy following over there, and they are not shy to let me know. They show their appreciation. Like they’re cheering really loudly, and crowd surfing!*

“We had two days there – which for being on tour, was long. My family came to the show and saw me off at the airport. Being half-Indonesian, the culture was really familiar to me. It felt like a homecoming show.”

I ask her if her family was aware of her following there – or anywhere, for that matter. “When I saw my cousin get married in Bali last year, he asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was mostly working on music… and that was the end of the conversation,” she laughs. “And so to go back and show it was really a real thing I was working on was… good”.

I suppose “good” is a pretty decent summary of Amelia Murray’s year. Her debut album has been well reviewed – MOJO calling it “a fuzzed-up Pixies-worthy melodic high” and Pitchfork saying it’s full of “effortless pop songs that are far less effortless than people think”.

That record saw her nominated in four categories (including Album of the Year) at the New Zealand Music Awards and in the longlist for the Silver Scrolls thanks to ‘Lucky Girl’. Edgar Wright also put that song in his Top 50 Songs of the year playlist.

As someone who’s grown up with Wright’s music-driven films, from Spaced to Scott Pilgrim vs The World, that felt quite special to me – that you can release a record and have it travel so effortlessly through the world. How absolutely wonderful. So I emailed Wright, to ask what he thought of Morningside.

“I loved it. My admiration for her insanely catchy melodies went up even more when I caught her first LA show at the Echo. The tunes sounded even better with a full live band. I can’t wait to hear what she has up her sleeve next.”

As to what she does have up her sleeve next – in the immediate future, she’s opening for The xx on January 11 at Trusts Arena. For the rest of next year, well, Fazerdaze has some pretty exciting stuff lined up, but she’s keeping mum on a lot of it.

But I think it’s fair to say 2018 will be a good year to be Fazerdaze. And to be a Fazerdaze fan.

*I had to follow-up on that crowd-surfing thing, not quite believing it. In New Zealand it’s a rare sight, even if you’re watching a ridiculous metal band like The Dillinger Escape Plan or Meshuggah. Amelia responded: “There was crowd-surfing in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and umm strangely Bournemouth in the UK”.