Over lockdown, a small team of music industry professionals have become emergency response workers. Josie Adams visited Spark Arena to meet them.

Behind Spark Arena is a line of shipping containers filled with food and hygiene products. “Only a few months ago this was filled with Tool’s stuff,” said Tom Anderson, a coordinator of Auckland Council’s emergency response food parcel service. He slapped the sturdy metal doors. “Now, it’s full of nappies.” He grinned and opened up another container, full of baby formula and shampoo.

The arena has been transformed from a 12,000-seat music venue into an emergency food delivery response hub. Five weeks ago, a team of music industry workers returned to their old haunt to box supplies for families in need. Since then, they’ve sent out over 50,000 individual boxes of food and essential home items around the Auckland region.

Anderson is co-owner and manager of Whammy Bar, a dark and delightful home for Auckland live music. He’s also the production manager of Live Nation NZ, an engineer, a musician, and tour and stage manager. He’s spent plenty of time at Spark Arena in the past, but this is the first time he’s been there working office hours. “It’s definitely different,” he said. “I’m used to working here, but it’s usually at night, with heaps of people.” The early afternoon sunlight reflected off the white of his face mask, and the corners of his eyes wrinkled enough to show he was smiling. “It’s weird, yeah.”

“We went from zero to absolute 100,” said Anderson. “We started out with just these boxes,” he said, pointing to a massive wall of flat-pack boxes that lined one side of the arena floor. “Within days the supplies came in.” Countdown is the main supplier of these emergency goods, which include tinned foods as well as fresh vegetables and hygiene supplies.

Thankfully, he’s surrounded by friendly faces. Everyone working at the arena is from the music industry. Anderson wouldn’t have it any other way. The workers are sound techs, drivers, runners and managers; even the regular Spark event barista is still there.

Lisa Fahrenberger, an audio technician, has spent the past month taping the boxes together. Next to her on the day The Spinoff visited was Heath Barlow, another audio tech – one Fahrenberger knows well. “Heath and I work together quite often, so we’re a good team,” she said. He looked over and raised a box in cheers.

The last gig she worked was WOMAD. “Everything got cancelled after that,” she said. “So I was at home from mid-March, and when this came around five weeks ago I’d been sitting at home for almost a month, so I was lucky to be asked.” Many in the music industry were hit hard by Covid-19, and might end up on the receiving end of one of these boxes. Fahrenberger knows the music industry is going to take a long time to heal, but she’d prefer to work here than sign on to something more permanent in another field. 

“I’d rather do this, where I can work and be social, in a kind of familiar environment, and know it’s temporary, than have a career change,” she said. “I love my job.”

Lines are taped onto the ground at two-metre intervals, keeping workers like Fahrenberger and Barlow a safe distance apart. Each box has a list of what needs to go in it, and slowly moves around the circuit two metres at a time. “It’s basically a chain gang,” said Anderson.

The boxes are packed with essential goods. “We do a gluten-free box, we do a vegetarian box – people can pick what they need,” said Anderson. “They can select what kind of pet they have, or how old their kid is.” The childcare section separates nappies and baby formula by age, as does the cat and dog food.

Alongside Spark management, Anderson is coordinating the response with Daniel Turner from Rhythm and Vines and Shane Marsh from Homegrown. Keeping a music festival from descending into chaos is a skill few people possess. They’re putting those skills to good use here. “We’re used to adapting,” said Anderson. “It’s what we do.”

On a busy day, over a hundred people could swing by Spark Arena: workers, couriers, and supply truck drivers. Some are part-timers, and others are here every day. Staff levels have gone up and down in relation to demand; and demand has changed as quickly as the pandemic does. In its first week of operation, the team fielded 3,000 requests for food parcels. Last week, in just one day, it sent out the same number.

The network these music professionals share has helped build this emergency response. A trucking contractor donated three containers for storage that usually ship lights and sound equipment. Production company Tone Deaf donated its container, which usually has crowd barrier in it; now it’s home to shampoo. Viking, a staging company, donated concrete blocks to hold up a donated marquee in the carpark. “We’ve called it the Covid merch tent,” said Anderson. Underneath the marquee are crates of supplies that haven’t found a home in a box nor a shipping container.

All these spaces are filled with supplies, and people moving them. It’s a stark contrast with the venues these people normally fill; places like Whammy Bar, Wine Cellar, Galatos, Neck of the Woods, and a nocturnal Spark Arena. In every city in New Zealand, thousands of people are out of work in an industry that has become their way of life.

Anderson checked on Whammy Bar the other day, looking for signs of rats or leaks. The bar is underneath St Kevin’s Arcade, which is all but deserted right now. “All these empty spaces can be pretty traumatic, really.”

He isn’t sure how long this emergency response plan will keep him busy. “They said eight weeks, but it’s hard to say when demand keeps changing,” he said. He hopes everyone who needs it is accessing it. 

Auckland Council itself isn’t sure when the need for emergency response food parcels will end. “At this stage it is hard to predict how long the service will continue to operate in its current format,” said Kate Crawford, group controller of Auckland Council’s emergency management. “However, Auckland emergency management will continue to work with the arena and our partners across levels three and two to ensure the needs of our communities are met.”

“We are also really grateful for the work the staff at Spark Arena have done, turning the site from an international event venue to a major food distribution centre in a matter of days. The commitment they have shown to their fellow Aucklanders is inspiring.”

The welfare food distribution centre at Spark Arena is a significant partnership between Auckland Council, Auckland emergency management and Countdown, Spark Arena and New Zealand Couriers. It was set up by Auckland Council at Spark Arena at the request of the government to help people needing assistance due to the Covid-19 crisis and lockdown. If you need to access this service, call 0800 22 22 9.

Made by a single family sewing together bits of old shows, Leigh Hart’s Big Isolation Lockdown was the funniest and most oddly comforting television created in level four, writes Duncan Greive.

It takes a special kind of ego to make what is functionally a career retrospective about yourself, with your family as extras and directors, during the seven weeks of lockdown. But Leigh Hart’s career is so vast and strewn with bizarre curios that it screams for such a treatment, and his status as mainstream television’s most DIY outsider, existing as a permanent parody of its values, means that no one else was ever going to do it for him.

Leigh Hart’s Big Isolation Lockdown just finished its run, playing on Duke and TVNZ OnDemand, off-peak locations for a talent seemingly too strange to thrive on the big stage. The setup is simple – it’s Hart and his family holed up in a cabin, with him commandeering his wife, son and daughter (who are all exceptionally funny too) to shoot him doing links between clips from his enormous and very rich back catalogue. The lockdown material is shockingly great, a tribute to his comic ingenuity, with deeply stupid gags, like pretending to hand-crank the footage back to an editor through an old telephone, landing better than they have any right to.

Along with the on-location material, he hauls in guests for Zoom appearances along the way. Their fame shows how devoted his fanbase is – it’s one of the oddities of his career that he seems both beloved by New Zealand’s biggest names and to have a very uneasy relationship with its TV establishment. Over the course of six episodes, he dragged in Kieran Read, Jason Gunn (brutally and hilariously), and, most bizarrely, PM Jacinda Ardern for what must be the strangest interview conducted with a world leader in the Covid-19 era:

She handled it well. The best guests on Hart’s shows don’t try to play along. Ardern treated him as she might any soft media, as it all fell apart, with Hart persistently interrupted by Jason Hoyte demanding his leaf-blower back. 

Hoyte appeared throughout the series, and is Hart’s longest-running collaborator, with clips from Screaming Reels, the Late Night Big Breakfast and Speedo Cops regularly appearing throughout the Lockdown series. The duo have a rambling, digressive rapport, deployed to take apart various archetypes of New Zealand men. On Screaming Reels it’s the gearhead enthusiasts whose poorly disguised secret is that they can’t fish. On LNBB it’s the ill-prepared variety show hosts, forever letting their own hangups become what the interview’s really about. Speedo Cops… actually I don’t really know what Speedo Cops is about. Same with the desolate saga of Colin, the Hamster Man from Amsterdam.

So it goes for a whole thread of Hart’s comedy. The final episode begins with a clip in which a mother starts breastfeeding in a cafe, which feels set up for some kind of comment on public reaction to the act. But then, drama – milk sprays like a waterblaster, destroying the crockery and drenching the patrons. We cut back to Hart at his holiday home. “I’m not really sure what that was, to be honest,” he says. That goes for Speed Cooking, wherein he demolishes a kitchen, yelling about jus and using a chainsaw to make a quiche lorraine. It also goes for him destroying a blind during an Eddie Jones press conference. The line between absurdism-as-commentary and just weird funny shit is intentionally thin throughout.

It’s not without tension. Hoyte’s roaring “cook us some fuckin’ eggs” at a truly shocked Nadia Lim is on one level a savage comment on those who watched One Were Warriors without feeling it, and found it as quotable as The Hangover. But it can be read in other, darker ways, too. Likewise, the frequency with which women are some variety of prop in the various sketches feels tense at times. 

Yet the likes of Jo Seager, Jax Hamilton and even Ardern clearly enjoy the chaos erupting around them, and Hart’s entire career is ultimately a skewering of New Zealand men’s behaviour and character. Done with a lot of affection, admittedly, but with such brutal accuracy that every Uncle Barry in the country has to feel extremely seen by the whole thing

Hart is ultimately one of the most original talents New Zealand has produced, successful here because of his fascination with this country’s peculiarities. As it goes for his comedy, so it goes for his business side. He is essentially alone among our creatives in owning everything he’s made – hence the essentially complete treasure trove of an archive that is Moonflix, a kind of working Netflix parody/nightmare where every show stars Leigh Hart. While so much of New Zealand’s TV archives are locked away in production company vaults, Hart’s are all there, even his just-released lockdown series, in full and ad-free. 

It’s also there in the way Wakachangi ads are baked into his shows, parodies of the (mostly gone) era where a smooth dude impresses a bar by drinking a Heineken. They also advertise his massively successful beer. Is it legal to have undeclared beer advertising in the middle of a show? Who knows. It feels like Hart makes things entirely outside the system, and the system mostly just leaves him to it.

When Covid-19 hit, Hart was back at the Target furniture store on Auckland’s Dominion Road, deep into shooting a return series of Late Night Big Breakfast, the fourth (I think) go round for one of his most successful setups. The show was cut adrift from TVNZ after an utterly perfect season in 2014, a breakup between network and star that felt acrimonious enough as to be final. Time has healed all wounds – New Zealand is too small to maintain all but the most deeply felt of grudges. It’s beautiful and even a bit moving seeing him getting weird while so many of us are locked away, and to soak in nostalgia for all the long-dead cultural reference points of the various clips. Most of all, it’s reassuring, amid all this change, to have big, blundering Leigh Hart back on the state broadcaster, making shows about New Zealand, and the strange ways of a particular species of men who live here. 

Watch the complete Leigh Hart back catalogue on Moonflix