Tonnon gets the band back together
Kiwi musician Anthonie Tonnon and his full band are excited to be able to show all their wares on their coming tour of New Zealand.
Tonnon and his Leave Love Out Of This band are starting a New Zealand tour this week, and the first show is at the Globe Theatre in Palmerston North tonight.
The band will also bring their live show, which features electronic and organic instruments and a light show, to Palmerston North, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hamilton, Waiheke Island, Mosgiel and Queenstown.
The tour is the first since Tonnon’s album, Leave Love Out Of This, won the 2022 Taite Music Prize in May.
Tonnon lives in Whanganui, but the other band members are spread around the country. Stuart Harwood is on drums and electric drums; David Flyger on bass; keyboardist Brooke Singer on synthesisers and samples; and electric guitars and percussion by Sam Taylor.
‘‘The full band allows me to get a handle on everything while still retaining some of the interesting features of what we can do,’’
Tonnon said. ‘‘You can put a little filter on what someone else is playing. It’s like Robocop. We’ve been broken down from what we would normally play and rebuilt.’’
Tonnon plays guitar, keyboards and piano, as well as the synthesiser.
‘‘It’s nice to have spinning plates. It’s nice to have enough in the set that is musical and fragile, and things can go wrong. That’s where it comes together.’’
He said the tour was great for developing new material, but they would also be playing older songs that needed the full weight of the entire band to perform, as well as songs they hadn’t played together before.
When he was touring by himself he couldn’t play all the features for some songs. ‘‘The band is the ultimate tool kit.’’ The band did a five-leg tour of the main centres, which had been postponed three times because of Covid-19, before Tonnon won the Taite Music Prize, so now Tonnon and the group were keen to be touring again and going to the regions.
‘‘We just felt like we weren’t finished. It never felt like we were able to tour the album as extensively as we could have.
‘‘The shows we did sold really well, but every show had 20 or 30 people who had to cancel because they got Covid or people who just couldn’t come because they couldn’t risk it. ‘‘In that regard we don’t feel like we got to everybody.’’
Tickets are available at anthonietonnon.com.