Back to the future with The Datsuns

When the lineup was announced for a two-day musical festival in Hamilton recently I had to laugh at the irony. ‘‘Future City Festival 2018’’ will be spread over two nights at three separate venues. Nivara Lounge will play host on both the 9th and the 10th of March. Creative Waikato on Alexandra St will also serve as a performance space on the first night, The Meteor theatre on the second. A total of 21 acts will perform, with bands playing at staggered intervals across venues, allowing punters to walk from one to the other and back again, as taste and state of inebriation dictates.

The irony, possibly intended and certainly acknowledged by organisers, is that headliners The Datsuns are more part of Hamilton’s musical history. Given the band’s constituent members are resident in three different countries, any future appearances in The Tron are likely confined to such cameos as the festival affords. Cambridge-bred and educated, The Datsuns are a Waikato – and New Zealand – success story writ large, one that predates Kimbra and Lorde by a decade or more.

For any old enough to have witnessed the band’s rise from relative obscurity to the cover of the New Musical Express, The Datsuns’ return is an especial pleasure. You don’t even have to agree with that venerable publication, that the Cambridge lads were – or somehow are – ‘‘the future of rock n’ roll’’ – to enjoy a vicarious thrill at friends or acquaintances who ‘‘made it’’. If you were part of the vibrant Hamilton live music scene in the mid-90s to the early 2000s, even only as a spectator and an

For any old enough to have witnessed the band’s rise from relative obscurity to the cover of the New Musical Express, The Datsuns’ return is an especial pleasure.