Attack makes show even more special
Broods came home to Nelson to help support those who fought the Pigeon Valley wildfires. But Georgia and Caleb Nott also ended up supporting the outpouring of emotions in the wake of the terror attack in Christchurch last week.
Hundreds of people attended the siblings’ free show at Nelson College on Thursday paying tribute to the emergency and support teams that tackled the massive Pigeon Valley fire.
Georgia said they put on the gig because they didn’t ‘‘really know how to do anything else but play music’’.
‘‘So our way of helping is by coming and putting on a free show.’’
But the duo’s New Zealand tour took on a different meaning with the mass shootings at Christchurch mosques a week ago.
They were at their Los Angeles base rehearsing for the tour when they heard the news, and were saddened to know their home country was no longer a safe haven.
‘‘It was quite hard to get on with it. I think I cried every day since,’’ Georgia said. ‘‘It’s shaken me to the core.’’
Caleb said that even in the United States, ‘‘it’s hit them really hard’’.
‘‘I think the whole world’s like, if it happened there, well, no-one’s really safe from that behaviour.’’
Like many Kiwis, Georgia said the siblings felt helpless, but they were lucky to have a platform from which they could share their solidarity.
‘‘It’s really hard to know what to do to help. It’s more about just making sure that the people that we are and the stage that we’ve been given, we use it to preach love and respect and equality and empathy.’’
At the Nelson College show, the duo performed songs from their new album Don’t Feed the Pop Monster live for the first time.
‘‘It’s so nice to come play these songs for the first time to anybody, and it’s going to be in Nelson . . . to our friends and family and everyone else,’’ Caleb said.
Broods released the album, their third, on February 1 and have been building on their success, living in LA for several years.
Caleb said the band name was chosen because they wanted a onesyllable word.
‘‘I thought it was easy to say, but now that we say it overseas’’ the accent caused confusion with plenty of people, he added. Broods had been misheard as ‘‘prunes’’, ‘‘birds’’, ‘‘fruits’’ and ‘‘boards’’.
Georgia said now she just ‘‘spelt it out’’.
And it’s nothing new for her – she remembered having to spell out their surname while growing up in Nelson.
‘‘Every time we ordered fish and chips, it would come up ‘‘Knot’’. N-O-T-T, please.’’
The duo are living their dream, having worked towards a fulltime music career since they were young.
Caleb said they were each other’s biggest fans. But it was also the fans who supported them who kept them going.
Georgia said Broods’ work wasn’t about how many followers they had on Instagram or being recognised in the street, ‘‘it’s about just playing music and having people hear what you have to say’’.
The best part of making music was as simple as hearing lyrics to your songs sung back to you by strangers, he said.
‘‘Especially when you write music that’s super-personal and you see somebody singing it back to you as if they know exactly what you mean, and it’s just like this weird thing where you feel this deep connection with a total stranger.’’
Broods will be in Wellington today for Homegrown before kicking off a North American tour on March 27. They will return to New Zealand in May to play concerts that were postponed in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks.
‘‘It’s really hard to know what to do to help.’’
Georgia Nott, Broods