Musician and historian Anthonie Tonnon
Anthonie Tonnon wants to transport concert-goers – into orbit or just down the line.
Anthonie Tonnon is a historian. Yes, he’s a musician, too – a one-man band of electronica, keyboards and a particularly nice 1968 vintage Yamaha guitar – but these days he’s primarily involved in repackaging New Zealand’s past into poignant indie pop performances to make his audience rethink how, why and where we live as Kiwis.
Sounds intense? Well, actually, no – it’s all rather fun and hands-on. For example, when the Listener gets in touch to talk about a few upcoming gigs, Tonnon is deep in preparations for a home-town Whanganui performance of his Rail Land show, which requires the audience the travel to and from St Peter’s Church, Gonville, on a specially chartered bus that traces the old No 6 tram route between Castlecliff Terminus and Whanganui Tramshed at Taupo Quay.
It’s a familiar shtick for Rail Land – the first, last November, involved chartering a train from Dunedin to Waitati; others
have involved the audience catching trains to Palmerston North, Paekākāriki, Masterton and Ellerslie.
The effects of including the transport in the entertainment aspect of the show aren’t just that it creates a collegiate, allin-this-together atmosphere, but also that Tonnon can highlight the network of rail and tramways that once linked smalltown New Zealand and that were scrapped to create what are now essentially – in his words – “zombie towns”.
Old Images, the song released to accompany the original Waitati Hall Rail Land performance, is packed with wistful strings and lyrics about Tonnon touring old Otago stations, lingering over rusted fences and disused tracks. But he’s quick to ditch any notion that he’s wallowing in nostalgia. Yes, he spent hours doing research for his shows at the Otago Settlers Museum, Otago Museum and the Hocken Collections at the University of Otago Library, and, yes, as a history graduate, he revels in talking about primary and secondary sources and explaining the “farebox recovery ratio”, which determines the viability of a particular transport route. But he’s primarily fixated on making his audience concentrate on the “now”.
We are, he insists, “fighting against an incredible loss of memory”.
“The rail system has been so under-valued, by those who run it and with the generational change in the 1990s, that all the information about it hasn’t even been digitised. You need a history degree just to work it out. Rail Land is the ultimate metaphor for talking about the way we
“I struggle with the culture of music that I grew up in of just playing songs and ‘being real, man’.”
think and the way we manage our country and our resources and the way in which we value our cities and our towns.”
So, are the shows a form of protest? Tonnon says that for his generation – it’s telling he defines this by saying he was born just after finance minister Roger Douglas floated the dollar in March 1985 – protest doesn’t work in the way it did for boomers.
“The generation I’m part of is ambivalent about the forms of protest that were more common before the 1980s – I don’t feel as if letters to the editor would work and I don’t focus on writing protest songs in the same way as There is No Depression in New Zealand was a protest song. There’s an unwillingness to be didactic in that way; instead, we use different methods. So, I wouldn’t say that Rail Land is a protest; instead, it is doing something.
“That’s where I see potential for change – if I get 150 people together and [we] have a great experience by running a train, that to me is much more interesting than writing letters to the editor.”
In the same way that the Rail Land show changes from location to location – and, he hopes, will grow with his music year-by-year – Tonnon’s second set of shows this year is also an evolution – this time from an idea conceived to run as part of last year’s New Zealand International Science Festival and first performed at Otago Museum’s planetarium.
A Synthesized Universe relies, like
Rail Land, on a great deal of research condensed into a one-hour show. It
originally involved using a real-time planetarium display for its backdrop, but, Tonnon says, it was unrealistic to have a show that relied on “anyone who has a state-of-the-art, half-amillion-dollar planetarium”. So he’s adapted it to be able to tour smaller venues and arts festivals by incorporating 3D holograms created by projectors and computer mapping, which run behind a constant flow of spoken-word narratives, history-telling, theatricality, a synthesizer score and individual songs.
Although Tonnon started out as a traditional release-an-album, tour-an-album performer and still intends to release albums, he’s adapted quickly to what he says is the far more interesting process of building themed live shows and tours.
“I struggle with the culture of music that I grew up in of just playing songs and ‘being real, man’. I don’t think we were respecting people’s time.
“I’ve come to realise that the only reason a performer deserves to have people turn up and give them an hour of their valuable time is if that performer has spent a lot more time preparing for that hour than the audience has. If you can distil 200 hours of research and preparation into an hour on stage, then you can transcend time, and that’s where the magic of performance comes from.”
He spent hours doing research for his shows at the Otago Settlers Museum and the Hocken Collections at the University of Otago Library.
Rail Land: Gonville, St Peter’s Church, Whanganui, August 17. A Synthesized Universe, Tairāwhiti Arts Festival, Gisborne, October 11; Nelson Arts Festival, October 24; Tauranga Arts Festival, October 26.