The first edition felt like a breath of fresh, local music-filled air. This year, with many of the same headliners as 2008 (and every year since), the long-running Wellington festival has grown stale.
It’s finally time to admit that on a cold night in Palmy 20 years ago, I felt Shihad frontman Jon Toogood’s sweaty black locks slip between my fingers. The location; Massey University. The year; 2001. I was wearing a toga and drinking a Vodka Cruiser. He was dressed like the night and holding a guitar. My friend and I, crushed right up the front, yelled out to him as he finished the set and he came straight over to my friend, enveloping her in a hug. Not to be outdone, I reached over and gave his hair a friendly tousle. He strode away, and my friend looked at me in disbelief.
“Did you just pat Jon Toogood on the head?” she asked.
Yes, yes I had. For two long decades I’ve been keeping this secret, that I once patted the head of a New Zealand rock legend. I thought about telling him once about 10 years ago when I interviewed him for a story. His hair looked good that day too.
On Saturday night, I began Shihad’s set at Homegrown standing at the back of the crowd. By the last song, I was being elbowed in the side of the face one row back from the stage, arm around the shoulder of the stranger next to me as we jumped in the air in perfect unison. “So you ruuuuuuun,” we yell-sung. “What you holding on, holding on to ruuuuuuuun.” This was living. It was electric.
Homegrown is New Zealand’s most mainstream music festival. Homegrown is your bogan cousin, but it’s also your drunk aunty and your teenage self. It doesn’t have an average punter because the music mixes genres and eras across five stages laid out across Wellington’s Waterfront, which should make for a lovely atmosphere but instead resembles Courtenay Place at 3am on steroids. It’s not as bad as sunstroke central, aka concrete wasteland, aka hope you don’t need to go toilet, sucker, Laneway (circa the Britomart/Aotea Square/Silo Park years), but neither does it come close to the lush environs of Splore.
The lineup feels like it’s barely changed in 16 years. I look up a 2013 schedule, one of the last times I went, just to check. Kora, Shihad, Shapeshifter, The Black Seeds, The Feelers – the big names are there, plus or minus a few who have broken up, moved overseas, become more famous, or would rather smash their own guitar over their head than headline the same stage for another decade.
Katchafire is playing when I arrive at 4pm, which is how I know I’m there. That and the daytime zombies. It throws me back to the year I pre-loaded on too many tequila shots and ended up stuck in a kind of mezcal trance in the electronic tent listening to Dick Johnson for an hour, limbs cycling like a wind-up monkey. House music is no joke.
There are many great reasons to go to Homegrown, including the fact there will always be someone playing that you know and love. The sound quality will be excellent. When it’s sunny, which it was on the weekend, it’s a summertime dream. If you’re a one-genre kind of guy, you could do all your day’s partying within a 20-metre radius of the same stage. Despite there being an estimated 24,000 people, I never wait in line for a drink or a toilet for longer than five minutes. Security is tight but not overbearing. If it all gets too much, you can easily duck out to Maccas for a burger or take a stroll down Oriental Parade.
Each crowd I’m in has a different vibe, and aside from being sconed on the head with a flying cup full of Red Bull during EMWA, it’s drama-free. (If you’ve ever considered an eye-bath full of energy drink, I can recommend against it.) The other musicians I manage to catch, including pop singer-songwriter Mitch James and industry heavyweights Kora, have polished, energetic sets.
But, and I say this as a concerned friend to New Zealand music, something has to change. The formula is stale. I don’t understand why the stages continue to be grouped by genre, making it more difficult to stumble upon a new musician you didn’t know you liked. I don’t understand why more isn’t made of the opportunity to sandwich hot new acts between long-established musos, drawing crowds who might enjoy both. I’d like to see more varied entertainment, or any perceptible effort to establish a festival atmosphere. It is truly the paved parking lot to Womad’s paradise, on in New Plymouth the same weekend.
My first Homegrown was in 2008, the year it started, and that year it felt like a fresh wave, like it was the beginning of something new and hopeful in the Aotearoa music scene. It felt hearty. On Saturday, it feels like they are phoning it in. But, hey. Maybe that’s what you get when you try and reflect an entire country with one music festival; eventually, just a very vanilla time.
