The Spinoff tries to remember what happened at yesterday’s Laneway festival.

A thumbs up

I absolutely love a long, drawn out festival. The more days I can spend in a dusty, stagnant field the better. I like them because there’s no urgency. It’s for this reason that the thought of trying to spread myself across four stages in just one day damn near had me in a sweat come Monday morning.

But once you drop the expectation that you have to watch each of your carefully chosen acts play in their entirety, it couldn’t be simpler. I mean, how good was Albert Park? Moving with the crowd was effortless, and if you were super cool and chill (of a level I aspire to), you probably could’ve survived the day without a timetable, instead just following with the flow of foot traffic and the PAs. Even Young Thug’s absence only hurt when you consciously tortured yourself with the thought.

Above that, I think what I like most about Laneway, aside from the music, is the people. The shaka brahs will keep an eye on you in the mosh, the painfully cool girls aren’t mean or scary, and the groovy dads will make you wish you’d brought yours along. Cheesy as hell, but at no other festival do I see as many smiles as I do at Laneway.  

It’s not often I’m rendered speechless, but Laneway this year got me pretty close. Like any event of its scale there were a couple of glitches and hiccups along the way, but nothing worth dwelling on. I’d like to continue my dreamy Laneway comedown remembering the exact way it felt as I began wandering home last night – as a day rich with good people, good weather, and some goddamn brilliant music. – Kate Robertson

A nitrous rush

By the time Tame Impala took to the stage last night I’d seen maybe 10 bands across three gigs on three consecutive days, seriously flirting with critical fade levels and approaching an early tap-out from Laneway festival. But, as the oscillating synth of opener ‘Nangs’ brought to mind the nitrous rush from which the song takes its name, the fatigue lifted like the clouds of weed smoke emanating from the crowd, and all was well. As expected, frontman Kevin Parker delivered the goods, moving through the various psychedelic bangers of Currents with an expert’s curation, and doing a hell of a job approximating the walls of sound on the studio release. Props too on a dope stage show – it was pretty trippy stuff, eh? Maybe I’m still hysterical from lack of sleep and festival froth, but I’d put Tame Impala in the top three shows I’ve seen, made even better after a solid day of summer tunes in a beautiful location. These are the kind of events that will secure Auckland’s future as a place people actually want to be – bring on 2018! – Don Rowe

An aging human

Because music festivals like Laneway tend, for many reasons, to only exist in the summertime, they can become a ritual in which you measure your ever-increasing age against that of the bulk of the attendees. They seem sprightlier and more energetic than ever (perhaps due to tighter security and therefore fewer teens passed out just before the entrance and less all-out aggressiveness), while your knees feel a little weaker, your back a little sorer and your clothing a little more practical. (It heartens me that festival attendees older than myself tend to drift towards tramping attire – sweat-wicking fabrics, ultra-light sun coverage, shoes made for day walks, many-pocketed backpacks – and I personally aspire to full tech clothing not-give-a-fuckness.)

For an aging human like myself, Albert Park is a festival gift from the gods. The grass is easy on the body, the gentle slopes allows for unobscured views from just beyond the crush, not too far away from the sound desk, and the abundance of space meant the crowd – however big it ended up getting – never felt like the rip tide of humanity I tend not to like getting caught in.

Ultimately, a music festival is a both an event in itself – in which the actual music is secondary to social interaction aided by friends, alcohol and/or drugs – and a buffet of live music that you may not otherwise get to experience. The great thing about the former is that your enjoyment can’t be lessened by acts cancelling, the never-very-good sound, or the self-consciousness that comes with moving your body to music in broad daylight. As you get older though, the former eclipses the latter and all these things matter more and more.

I’d by lying then if I didn’t say that, yes, Laneway needed someone like Young Thug, someone new and exciting but also huge; that, yes, the outdoor sound (and atmosphere) raises the level of difficulty to the extent that the possibility of a mind-blowing, life-changing experience at a festival is so far below that of an indoor venue that it’s not even fair to compare the two; and, yes I find it hard to even sway my shoulders when I’m sober, in the sun, and can feel people looking at me, even though they’re not. Still, it was a good festival, as festivals (and my aching back) go. – Henry Oliver

A gross guy

For everyone who shat an enormous brick about Laneway introducing a women-only safe space, sitteth down and let me tell you a tale. Yesterday, in the space of about five minutes, both my friend and I were touched without consent by some living, breathing rat men. One of them ran his fingers through my friend’s hair when she walked past, the other touched my legs repeatedly when we were sitting on grass, waiting to watch Aurora.

I get that it’s funny to see someone who is as pale as one of those translucent axolotls sitting there with violently sunburned legs, but that doesn’t mean you get to reach out and stroke my calf and upper thigh whilst muttering “sunburn” like a shaman. Further to that, when I tell you to “fuck off”, do not sit there stroppily and say “well this is awkward”. You made it awkward when you extended your Nosferatu talons my way mate. Stop touching us. – Alex Casey

A really good cheeseburger

Albert Park is a good venue for watching music, and a great venue for not watching music. I can confidently say I have never been to a festival where it’s been so easy to not watch bands and so pleasant to instead wander around trying to find your friends (“to the right of the rotunda!”) or queue in one of the many good-spirited queues. Other non-music highlights included eating a nice cheeseburger from the gross-sounding Bearded Clam and drinking a frosty cup of Boundary Road lager.  – Calum Henderson

A heavy and greasy and salty cheeseburger

The best part of Laneway was the Bearded Clam burger. Actually that’s a lie because I loved the Glass Animals set, but definitely the second best part was the Bearded Clam burger. It was so heavy and greasy and salty and exactly what’s needed after too many hours of drinking in the sun. I’d never had a Bearded Clam burger before and I’m hesitant to have it again because something tells me it won’t be as good when eaten sober and lucid. But at Laneway, hunched over a bench, very drunk and very sweaty, it was everything. – Madeleine Chapman

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Graham Reid takes The Chills on a tour of Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa exhibition at the Auckland Museum.

A little more than 24 hours before they take the stage at Laneway under a blazing blue sky, five very weary Chills arrive at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. They’ve been up since 5am and are at the tail end of a lengthy tour which has taken in Europe and the US last year, and the South Island these past few days, in promotion of their 2015 album Silver Bullets.

The album has garnered highly favourable reviews at home and abroad. Chills’ frontman Martin Phillipps, who launched the first Chills line-up some thirtysomething years ago, has every reason to feel pleased. The band has been stable for many years now, the relationship with Britain’s Fire Records is assured, the new songs are strong… but has the album sold as much as the critical reception might suggest?

“I don’t think anything sells as you want it to,” he laughs. “But, critically, in terms of establishing this band now, it couldn’t have done better. It has been perfect. We are facing a dilemma that in Europe with the fast turnover of things it’s history already, whereas in America we are looking to get back in about October and we’ll still be able to tour Silver Bullets. So it’s done everything we’ve hoped, and now we are working towards a next album.”

Before then, however, will be a single for Record Store Day: a new song ‘Rocket Science’ and, on the B-side, ‘Lost in Space’: “a song I wrote in ’81 but we never recorded”.

So plenty in the present and future, but while in Auckland they’ve come to the museum to catch something of the past: the exhibition Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa – a six-decade overview of photos, artifacts, artwork, equipment, films and hands-on activities. The exhibits include the iconic leather jacket which Phillipps immortalised in song and and generously loaned to the exhibition.

“I didn’t realise it would be competing with another leather jacket,” he jokes, referring to one that Peter Urlich wore in Th’Dudes.

While inside looking at that jacket, bequeathed to Phillipps by the band’s former drummer Martyn Bull, who died in 1983, bassist James Dickson overhears a man telling his wife about it. “I wondered whether I should tell them that Martin was standing right behind them.”

Such is the passage of time and history, that the musical heroes of yesteryear can either go unnoticed or their contributions unheralded.

Ask the various Chills what they were surprised about in Volume and the answers are interesting. Dickson was taken by the artists of the ’50s and ’60s, “especially the Underdogs performing in their underwear, and Peter Posa’s album cover with one with the lady leaning over [White Rabbit, which features Posa and a woman in a Playboy bunny outfit]. That was spectacular. I was impressed. He looks bemused on the cover.”

Drummer Todd Knudson is taken by the fact some of the musicians included were “so young, like Shona Laing. I remember her from the ‘80s and had no idea she had started so early in the ‘70s… and also that there were so many psychedelic bands in the ‘60s.”

Violinist/pianist Erica Scally is impressed by the Split Enz stage costumes made by the band’s Noel Crombie (“He used to surprise the band with them,” notes Phillipps. “A week before a tour he’d show them what he’d made for them.”). Keyboard player Oli Wilson also refers the ‘50s and early-‘60s section, “because it was a bit more otherworldly. The more contemporary stuff was more relatable but that other stuff was more a step back.”

“Those milkbar cowboys in the ‘50s looked quite heavy,” says Phillipps. “I’d expected a tamed-down New Zealand version of that. But no! I’d cross the street.”

But of course the real question is, what does Phillipps think when he sees the exhibits from the ’80s, especially the Flying Nun material, which includes fellow travellers like Chris Knox, the Clean and others?

“I guess it’s getting so long ago now that I’m almost looking at it like other people. The same with New Zealand music from that era, I very seldom listen to it because I can’t separate the music from the stories and the people I know.

“I can’t sit back and enjoy a lot of the early Flying Nun stuff, it’s distracting as opposed to exciting or soothing or whatever. That’s what’s it’s like… looking at all these people who died or stopped making music.

“But it’s also nice to look back and see that it’s all part of a historical legacy and that it’s of interest to people. We didn’t see that coming!”

On the way through, it has been noticeable that as practicing musicians they have stopped to look carefully at guitars, amps (“I had one of those,” says Phillipps) and foot pedals in a way that’s foreign to civilians who don’t make music.

“I’d hoped there’d be more of New Zealand-made instruments and equipment,” Phillipps says, “but it’s good there’s a selection to show people that it did happen, and that they were so in demand, people here started making their own equipment.”

There’s some small irony that the Chills sit and chat unnoticed by people streaming past, many of whom will stop at that leather jacket, the photos of Phillipps, and the album covers in the record store mock-up and let the memories come back. But the Chills are still a here-and-now band, one which has reached a late-career peak that few would have expected only five years ago.

Tours, albums, shows… it just goes on. But, as Phillipps notes, not for everyone. Some gave up or died, and some musical threads haven’t made it into the exhibition. “I hadn’t thought about it before, but there’s a whole underground/King Loser thing going back. It’s not so much post-punk but more going back to rock’n’roll… there were a lot of bands of that ilk, people like Shaft.”

“[Volume] struck me as a museum piece about the recording industry and not really the music industry, says Oli Wilson, who is also an academic with a keen interest in the culture of how music is presented in museums. “It doesn’t really reflect the entire ecosystem of music culture in New Zealand. It’s a recording-focused thing and tells the story about those who had access and participated in the recording part of our industry.

“It has a bit about the live stuff, but my own experience is about seeing the music live. There wasn’t much about venues that were seminal, and venues are where those communities came together to see the bands.

“That’s not criticism, just a comment. There are tangible material objects, but the real story is in the communities that were producing those objects.”

And within 24 hours, Dunedin’s long-distance runners The Chills will be again connecting with their community, this time under a burning blue Auckland sky.   

The Spinoff’s music content is brought to you by our friends at Spark. Visit Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa (also supported by Spark) at Auckland Museum from now until 22 May 2017 and get closer to the music you love.