The year it all blew up (but in a good way)
L.A.B. say Covid-19 lit the fire that took the band to record highs in New Zealand music. Glenn McConnell explains.
The boys behind L.A.B. can say something few others can. For them, 2020 couldn’t have gone much better. They found themselves with a mega hit on their hands, in the name of In The Air. They then released their fourth album at the end of December. Their shows kept selling out, meaning promoters kept moving them to bigger and bigger venues.
On one of the toughest years in living memory, L.A.B. frontman Joel Shadbolt looks back and says: ‘‘It’s been amazing.’’
‘‘There’s been this gradual growth over the last four years, but this year in particular there was a spike with
In The Air taking off and then Covid hitting. That kind of fuelled the fire for us, in terms of being able to put on bigger shows – they wouldn’t have been a thing without Covid. I mean, we would have still had a good year,’’ he says.
Although 2020 has been huge for the band, this is no overnight success story.
The success of L.A.B. in 2020, including selling out gigs, dominating the charts and being named Best Roots Artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards, is down to gradual moves, small steps and of course, a bit of luck.
With New Zealand effectively cut off from the rest of the world, music fans jumped at the chance to go to big festivals and concerts, so much so that Wellington promoters started a new festival in December.
A one-off special music festival attracted a 10,000-strong crowd at the start of the month, and most of them were there to see L.A.B. A few months earlier, in July, the band performed their biggest headline show at Spark Arena in Auckland. There were 6000 in attendance, six times the number originally expected.
‘‘We were the first show, other than the Donald Trump rallies, to be out and about together,’’ Shadbolt recalls.
L.A.B. had initially planned to perform at the Powerstation, a wellloved but smaller Auckland venue. It maxes out at 1000 concertgoers. That sold out in 10 minutes, so they booked the Auckland Town Hall instead – capacity 1500 – but again, that sold out.
Performing at Spark Arena, the go-to venue for international acts such as Kendrick Lamar or P!nk, was a milestone moment for the band.
It was yet another sign that this reggae band were firmly in the mainstream. Perhaps the Town Hall sellout shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise, given In The Air spent the entire year in the NZ Top 40. Just before Christmas, it climbed back to second spot to sit below a new L.A.B. single, Why oh Why.
Is there a reason for the band’s success? Keyboardist Mı¯haro Gregory isn’t willing to put it down to anything tangible. He says he felt a sort of ‘‘magic’’ playing with the band after they got started.
Shadbolt says their music is all ‘‘organic’’. And although they’ve evidently got a few hits on their hands, they don’t sit down and ‘‘write bangers’’.
‘‘I’m sure that works for other bands, but that’s not us,’’ he says.
The L.A.B. recording process is not too dissimilar to what you’d see on stage. They get into studio and play what comes naturally, with the full band there.
This is something Shadbolt sees as integral to the process. Gregory says you’ll never hear L.A.B. play the same thing twice. Each performance, each recording, will be slightly different. They like to leave a bit of ‘‘grit’’ in the music. According to Shadbolt, it makes their releases a bit more authentic.
There’s more of them in it, as opposed to finely edited singles where the bass player has never met the keyboardist in real life.
Their orthodoxy, certainty that their music be recorded in the ‘‘organic’’ process, could be explained by their influences.
They look back at bands such as Fat Freddy’s Drop, Katchafire, and Herbs. At the other end of the spectrum, Shadbolt talks a lot about Dave Grohl of The Foo Fighters and Nirvana.
He first mentions Grohl when the conversation turns to Kora.
Kora started 30 years ago as a reggae band with brothers Brad, Stuart, Laughton and Francis Kora. It expanded with new instruments and musicians whose names don’t include Kora, but this funk-reggae brotherhood became worldrenowned.
It was also the founding of L.A.B. About 25 years after Kora started, a few of the brothers – Brad and Stuart – started a new project together. They brought on the new players, Gregory on keys and Shadbolt as lead singer. And they got Ara Adams-Tamatea, of Katchafire, too.
The band takes musicians from across the country, with the Kora brothers from Whakata¯ ne, Shadbolt and Adams-Tamatea from the Bay of Plenty and Gregory from Wellington.
Excuse the pun, but L.A.B has deep roots in Aotearoa reggae.
In 2016, L.A.B. toured Australia with Katchafire.
It was a big mission. They had 22 shows across 30 days, and not much of a repertoire to fill the shows with. Shadbolt recalls, ‘‘We didn’t have an album out, that dropped the year after. So we had this whole summer tour where the posters said, in small ‘L.A.B.’, and in big letters about that, ‘The Kora Brothers’. That’s what got L.A.B. started.’’
Shadbolt likens the development of L.A.B. as their own band to the move Grohl made to set up Foo Fighters after Nirvana.
This relatively new chart-dominating reggae group owe their start to two stalwarts of New Zealand reggae. They idolise dub players such as Fat Freddy’s Drop, and Gregory says he sometimes seeks advice from them. They got touring thanks to Katchafire. They came about thanks to the Kora wha¯ nau.
But they want to be known as L.A.B. in their own right.
This story of how L.A.B. managed to dominate the airwaves to have a stellar 2020 starts on the Ka¯ piti Coast in 2016.
Gregory remembers it as a sweltering day. They were at the Boundary Tavern, a few steps away from Raumati Beach. ‘‘It was our release tour and I will never forget it,’’ Shadbolt says.
‘‘It was a really special moment to hear the crowd singing our lyrics back to us the first time. It was like, we’ve done it. We’ve put a post in the ground.’’
Until that night, they remember being asked to play Politician, being asked about Kora or to play other bands’ music. But in Ka¯ piti, in a packed bar, the crowd sang their songs.
‘‘I will never forget that. The ceiling was sweating,’’ Shadbolt says.
‘‘It was just powerful, like you were a part of something you knew was going to be special. It was four years ago now, but I knew at that moment that there was something about this music and the chemistry of this band that was completely unstoppable.’’
With 2020 done and dusted, the band have huge ambitions for 2021. Mt Smart Stadium is booked for a headline show on March 27, supported by Ladi6, Ria Hall and Mako Road.
It’s similar to Six60, who have made touring New Zealand – visiting the biggest venues at every stop – something of an annual tradition.
‘‘Our trajectory at the moment is about what Six60 was two or three years ago. Our goal is to get where Six60 is – and further, of course – because Six60 paved the way as a live act in New Zealand. What they’ve achieved as a live band has been incredible,’’ Shadbolt says.
Consider that in 2020 their expectations were exceeded when they sold out 1000 at the Powerstation. The jump is huge.
‘‘It was a really special moment to hear the crowd singing our lyrics back to us the first time.’’