Rockin’ and rollin’ with the punches
After a few years in the doldrums, guitars are suddenly cool again. Chris Schulz charts rock’s big comeback.
When Villainy were planning a recent tour, the Auckland-based rock band got into a fight. It happens often with the four-piece, which records their hard rock anthems under clouds of tension.
In the past, they’ve compared the creation of their albums to ‘‘a battleground . . . a place of magic and danger and anger’’.
Sometimes, things come to blows.
This time, the argument was over an upcoming tour in support of their third album, Raised in the
Dark. They’d booked opening slots for major international acts, including Incubus and AC/DC, but it had been three years since Villainy had headlined their own New Zealand tour.
They were wary of booking large venues they weren’t capable of filling.
‘‘We’ve done tours that haven’t made any money,’’ admits the band’s singer, Neill Fraser. ‘‘The shows are always great but it’s not that much fun to walk out of it going, ‘We owe people cash, how did that happen’?’’
Of particular concern was Auckland’s Powerstation, which had been dismissed on previous tours for being too big.
‘‘We’d never sold 1000 tickets to a show,’’ says Thom Watts, the band’s lead guitarist.
‘‘I actively argued against playing the Powerstation. I’ve been there when it hasn’t been full. You go, ‘Oh, it’s missing 200 people, they overinflated their expectations’.’’
But the rest of the band, including bassist James Dylan and drummer Dave Johnston, argued against Watts. When Villainy announced their seven-date tour for July, they took a punt and included the Powerstation alongside shows in Wellington, Dunedin, Palmerston North, Tauranga, and Christchurch.
It was their biggest tour yet, and they hoped to break even.
They’re still shocked by what happened next. Their shows started selling out. Not only did Villainy fill the Powerstation, they sold every ticket available for the rest of their tour.
‘‘I spent 20 minutes backstage in Wellington trying to work out how we could lower our guest list because the venue wouldn’t let any more people in,’’ says Fraser. ‘‘This stuff hasn’t happened to us before.’’
It’s just one of many signs that, after years in the doldrums, guitar-fired music is making a major comeback.
Rock venues are being booked for months in advance, and Rockquest reports schoolkids are picking up guitars and competing in droves.
That’s not all. International rock acts are back on the road for mega tours, and they’re selling so many albums they’re beating pop stars such as Taylor Swift to the top of the charts.
Villainy put their sellout run down to years of hard graft, late nights and studio fights.
‘‘It validates that all of the work was worth it,’’ says Fraser.
To celebrate, they hired cannons to spray confetti over crowds and bought blow-up peacocks from The Warehouse so the frontman could surf over front row mosh pits.
It didn’t always go right: the first time Fraser tried it, he fell off and lost his microphone. He’s not upset about it, because screwing up was exactly the point.
‘‘When you’ve got a band on stage and guitars flying around, things can and will go wrong,’’ he says. ‘‘It was a disaster, but it was hilarious, and great.’’
That kind of unpredictability is exactly why Fraser fell in love with rock in the first place. ‘‘That’s what’s exciting about rock music and that’s why people want to go see it.’’
Roger Farrelly has been the voice of Auckland radio station The Rock for 27 years, and he’s lived through the highs and the lows.
‘‘I was there when Nirvana and Pearl Jam were new bands,’’ the veteran host remembers. ‘‘In the early 90s, rock was absolutely phenomenal.’’
He’s the first to admit that his favourite genre has been through a rough patch.
‘‘It’s definitely gone through a pretty horrible time,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t know that it ever died, it just needed to be taken out the back and resuscitated.’’
But even he was surprised by what happened during a recent radio station promotion. Every year, The Rock asks the station’s fans to vote for their favourite songs, tallies the votes, then spends three weeks counting down the top 1500.
This year saw record numbers, with 70,000 people contributing more than one million votes.
The poll’s top 10, which placed Pearl Jam’s 1991 anthem Black ahead of songs by Tool, Rage Against the Machine, and Villainy, was unveiled at a free Powerstation event.
‘‘We put it through a massive speaker system and 1000 people turned up to head-bang to the radio,’’ says Farrelly. After the winners were announced, fans were treated to surprise sets by Devilskin and Shihad.
So many fans wanted tickets, people were being turned away at the door.
Farrelly was stunned when a bus-load of people turned up from Hamilton.
‘‘They didn’t have tickets, and it was packed,’’ says Farrelly. They didn’t get in.
But those sad fans standing outside the Powerstation proves The Rock’s poll isn’t taken lightly.
‘‘It’s become a real movement for us. Rock certainly isn’t dead when you look at it from that point of view.’’
He’s right. Everywhere you look, there’s renewed appetites for destruction.
In America, Tool’s new album recently pipped Taylor Swift’s to score the No 1 spot on the
Billboard album charts.
Local record store Real Groovy sold out of its allocation of Fear Inoculum within a day, and says it can’t keep up with demand for second-hand rock vinyl.
Tickets for a now-postponed tour by international giants Metallica and Slipknot sold so well they were forced to add a second show at Auckland’s Mt Smart Stadium, while U2 play two shows here in November, and Queen + Adam Lambert will play three shows in February.
Stadiums are filling up, but so are smaller venues.
On Auckland’s Karangahape Rd, Lucy Macrae runs Whammy Bar, a small rock venue with a big reputation. It hosts live music several times a week, but lately there’s been a surge in requests by bands wanting to play shows.
‘‘We’ve been flat out,’’ says Macrae. ‘‘Our bookings have definitely picked up. It’s busy.’’
It’s true: if you want to play a show at Whammy before the end of the year, you’ll struggle. It’s booked until Christmas.
‘‘I try not to turn bands away,’’ says Macrae, but her inbox keeps filling up with requests.
Recently, rising Auckland band, the Echo Ohs, and Hamilton’s Contenders both sold out shows there.
Macrae has been running Whammy for six years, and says she loves finding new bands and watching them grow, often booking her favourites for the venue’s annual festival, Whammyfest, held later this month.
‘‘I’m totally biased towards guitar music, and I always have been,’’ she says.
‘‘It’s the energy, and I can see that bands have put in hours and hours to hone their craft.’’
Many of those hours start in school, when kids pick up their first guitars. Winning Rockquest, an annual competition to kickstart young bands’ careers, can give them a major boost.
‘‘Kids still want to play rock and roll music,’’ says Matt Ealand, chairman of the Rockquest Charitable Trust.
‘‘We’re not seeing a decline [in that] – there’s been massive growth.’’
He points out the Rockquest’s recent finals, held at Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre, as proof. A record number of kids had attempted to win their way to the final.
The top title was taken out by Arlo Mac, a group of Havelock North High School alt-rockers who take off their shoes before playing shows.
Previous winners include Waipu¯ ’s Ma¯ ori metallers Alien Weaponry, who released their debut album Tu last year, and perform regularly to huge crowds overseas. Ealand says Arlo Mac have plenty of potential, too.
‘‘There’s something about the presence of the lead singer,’’ he says. ‘‘Good things are possible for them.’’
But Ealand says the underground growth of wannabe rockstars goes deeper than Rockquest.
A recent covers competition, started for kids who aren’t yet confident enough to play their own music in front of crowds, drew ‘‘hundreds and hundreds’’ of entries.
‘‘You can’t tell me that rock is dead,’’ he says.
Gussie Larkin got her first guitar young, unwrapping a red replica Stratocaster and tiny amp on her 13th birthday.
‘‘That was the best present ever,’’ she says. ‘‘That was the start of wanting to be in a rock band.’’
A few years later, she did exactly that, forming the band, Mermaidens, with high school friends Lily West and Abe Hollingsworth in 2013.
It was a time when few new rock bands were headlining festivals or releasing major albums, so they went looking for inspiration from a generation of rockers before them.
‘‘As a young teenager, I started getting into bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Nirvana. When I got introduced to P J Harvey and
Patti Smith, that was just like, ‘Oh yes’. I loved the music so much. I knew I really wanted to play guitar, and that would be my instrument.’’
Now, the Mermaidens are part of the Kiwi rock resurgence, having released their acclaimed third album on iconic label Flying Nun. They’re namechecked alongside bands such as Daffodils, The Beths, Miss June, Wax Chattels and Soaked Oats, Kiwi rock acts blazing their own path.
In fact, when Stuff calls, Larkin is in Margate, a coastal city in the United Kingdom. She’s smack bang in the middle of Mermaidens’ biggest European tour yet. They’ve already performed in Switzerland and France, and face a four-hour drive before performing in Oxford that night.
They’re touring the same DIY way rock acts did before them, hiring a van and driving, sometimes overnight, between venues.
‘‘There’s a lot of driving, a lot of travelling,’’ says Larkin. ‘‘But it’s the only way to get where you’re going to go.’’
To survive, they’ve set up a sandwich station in the back of their van, with knives and a chopping board. In France, they smeared baguettes in goat’s cheese and jam; in the UK, they’re experimenting with mustards and artichoke pastes.
‘‘We’ve got a whole system down,’’ she says. ‘‘We’ve had a good food time.’’
It sounds fun, but ask Larkin if rock music’s dead, and she sighs. It’s something she only ever hears from journalists.
To her, her friends, and her band, they’re immersed in rock music. It’s all they listen to, and all they play. The thought hasn’t even crossed their minds.
‘‘I don’t think it’s dead at all,’’ she replies, sternly. ‘‘It’s alive and kicking.’’