Following the tracks
After musician Anthonie Tonnon became fascinated with New Zealand’s railways and stations, he found a way to share their magic with his fans. David Herkt previews his Rail Land tour.
Anthonie Tonnon sounded happy – and with complete justification. The wellregarded singer-songwriter had just turned a visionary concept into a sudden reality. Tonnon’s career has covered several countries and albums. Dunedin-born, he has performed in the USA, the UK, and Australia. He has toured with Nadia Reid and supported The Chills. Alongside Lorde and Marlon Williams, Tonnon was a recent contender for a Silver Scroll Award.
Now, he aimed to take people to a series of performances utilising New Zealand’s rail network and he’d set up a tour – Rail Land.
It would take both himself and his audience out of city centres to performances ‘‘via some of the world’s most beautiful and miraculous passenger rail lines’’.
‘‘The show, and the experience of the journey to get there,’’ Tonnon had written, ‘‘will be a poetic and practical exploration of passenger rail, and a meditation on what it means to us in the modern era.’’
The first Rail Land event went from Dunedin via a chartered train to Waitati, 19 kilometres north of the city. Tonnon’s audience travelled with him from Port Chalmers, through the engineering marvel of the Mihiwaka tunnel, then beside the great visual panorama over Purakaunui and Doctor’s Point, to reach the Waitati Hall.
‘‘Because it was an experiment in some ways,’’ Tonnon said, just after his first performance, ‘‘I was pretty nervous about how the whole thing would come off and how people would feel.’’
‘‘From a philosophical point of view, there is no place for recorded music on public transport. It stops you from mediating your own experience in your own way, so I just gave a little introduction over the loudspeaker before the safety announcements.
‘‘But I’ll tell you what, there was something absolutely magical about what happened next on that train – you realise you don’t need music, you only need the rumbling of the track. And the way that people started talking to each other, people they didn’t know, and I was going back and
forth, between the carriages, meeting people all through the trip.’’
Arriving at Waitati, Tonnon’s audience were met by the Waitati Customs Department supported by the Waitati Militia, with drummers.
‘‘It set the gig in such an amazing space from the outset. By the end of the night, we had a standing ovation and I don’t necessarily think it was because I played well. It was just the entire experience.’’
Tonnon’s Rail Land tour had its genesis after shooting a video to go with his justreleased song, Old Images. Dressed in his Barkers’ suit and RM Williams boots, Tonnon wanders moodily amongst the abandoned stations, toetoe and gorse of Dunedin’s almost-forgotten suburban rail network.
‘‘When we finished the video, I didn’t feel as if I was done. It unlocked something in me that was very curious and just compelled me to follow,’’ he continues.
‘‘Then I was driving along State Highway 87 which follows the old Central Otago rail line, and I had this idea to do something that wasn’t nostalgic, that was a practical expression of trying to understand what rail means to me – and for other people to see what rail means to them.’’
It was a concept that united much of Tonnon’s personal biography, his taste, and his preoccupations. A former history student, his first job was as a tour guide, and the tour is accompanied by a travelling display of rail ephemera, timetables, souvenir programmes and photographs.
Tonnon defines himself as an ‘‘urbanist’’, someone who studies how people interact with a human-made environment. It has been a subject for many of his songs, which are frequently in-depth character studies.
‘‘I’m not someone that believes strongly in authenticity. I’ve always been in favour of artifice and building a world – and being someone you cannot be, onstage.
‘‘I came into music late, and never thought I would be a musician,’’ he says.
‘‘I was 16. I had given up piano music lessons because I hated them. But suddenly I picked up a guitar and learnt a bunch of David Bowie songs and music clicked for me.’’
Other inspirations were more local. ‘‘Don McGlashan’s work is definitely a way to observe the world around you and match it with a musical language and story. Hearing
Dominion Road for the first time was like, ‘Wow!’ I wondered, ‘Why isn’t all New Zealand music like this? Why didn’t this song start this big movement?’ And I guess in some ways my job is to follow that song and try to build a unique language that is of where I come from.
‘‘I feel like everything I had done, thinking I had done it in order to become a musician, has come together in Rail Land. I have felt that the whole thing, the planning, the creation, all came together in the one.’’
Find dates and itineraries for Anthonie Tonnon’s Rail Land tour at anthonietonnon.com.