The sound of silence at Town Hall
With the city in rebuild mode, Vicki Anderson goes on a tour of the Christchurch CBD to record a moment in time at key locations. Part two visits the Christchurch Town Hall.
"But February made me shiver, with every paper I’d deliver/Bad news on the doorstep, I couldn’t take one more step./Singing bye bye Miss American Pie..."
It’s around 2pm on a recent Saturday afternoon and I’m loitering by the wire netting fence that surrounds the Christchurch Town Hall. There is no sign of life anywhere on Kilmore St. Nearby Victoria Square is a wasteland of fencing but a workman confides that the fountain has just been put in place but that it’s ‘‘got no water in it’’. Behind the wire fence, heavy machinery lies dormant as does the Christchurch Town Hall, even if flapping tarpaulins swim like stingrays in the wind.
The venue dubbed our city’s ‘‘living room’’ is undergoing earthquake repairs. In a few short weeks we will mark the seventh anniversary of the February 22, 2011 earthquake.
As I stare through the wire netting at the Christchurch Town Hall memories flood back.
On February 21, 2011, I reviewed the last concert there, held the night before the earthquake.
American musician Don McLean performed. He sang his classic hits Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) and ended his set with
American Pie. Thus, some of the last words sung on its stage were:
‘‘But not a word was spoken / The church bells all were broken’’; ‘‘the day the music died’’ and,
repetitively, ‘‘this will be the day that I die’’.
I enjoyed the concert having grown up listening to those songs and full of nostalgia, I went to work the next day, the day of the earthquake, humming those lyrics.
McLean spent the morning of February 22 horseriding and visiting with country singer John ‘‘Welcome to My World’’ Grenell. But I had FOMO at missing the Melvins gig being held the same night across town at AL’s Bar. A long-time Melvins fan, I’d interviewed lead singer and guitarist, Buzz Osborne, aka King Buzzo. When Dave Grohl’s band, Scream, disbanded, he approached Buzz for advice. Buzz, as the story goes, then introduced Grohl to Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. It’s not hard to see the influence of the Melvins, the ‘‘godfathers of grunge’’, on Nirvana’s music.
When I interviewed both Buzz and McLean again a year after the Christchurch earthquake, both were still badly affected.
The Melvins were at Christchurch Airport when the 6.3 earthquake slammed the city.
Exactly a year to the day after the Christchurch earthquake, speaking from Los Angeles, Buzz told me that he still jumped at loud noises. When the Melvins had left Christchurch they travelled to Japan where they were caught up in the horrific 9.0 earthquake there.
‘‘Hopefully my natural disaster ticket has been well and truly punched,’’ Buzz said.
The Christchurch Town Hall opened on September 30, 1972, and was designed primarily with classical and theatre performances in mind, but has nevertheless hosted many of the world’s biggest international rock acts.
February, 1982. Two songs into their set at the Christchurch Town Hall Clash frontman Joe Strummer stops playing mid-song. He’s been covered in a dripping shower of spit, flowing from the mouths of a group of bootboys at the front of the stage, perhaps a saliva-filled attempt to impress their punk credentials upon the British band?
Strummer retaliated with an angry tirade along the lines of his displeasure at the thought of catching hepatitis from a well aimed gob to the mouth. Something resembling order returned and The Clash played the rest of their set.
In 2012 Carlos Santana, who played at Woodstock, told me that the best gig he has ever performed in his life was in Christchurch in 1973 at the Christchurch Town Hall.
‘‘I am telling you from the centre of my core, it’s the best concert I’ve ever done in my life,’’ said Santana. ‘‘Oh my god, it was like the sky opened up and I could see into the great beyond. There was something about that concert in Christchurch in 1973. Once in a while everything just happens with a divine flow, you don’t have to try, it just happens.’’
I’d wager that the average Cantabrian would be more likely to pop to the town hall for a Crowded House concert than a violin concerto but this has not been reflected in the rebuild approach.
Naturally, consideration should be given to long-running local classical entities but it does irritate me that the monied, privileged voices of the arts elite are afforded dedicated multimillion dollar venues and rehearsal spaces while other equally important aspects of our cultural identity are often left out of the rebuild process.
Many notable bands strutted the town hall’s stage from The Cure to Talking Heads, XTC, Devo, Ultravox, The Fall, The Ramones, REM, Bjork, Portishead, Supergrass, The Smashing Pumpkins, Norah Jones, Stevie Wonder, and countless others, all events with stories to tell.
The Christchurch Town Hall had inner beauty. Harold Marshall, a New Zealand acoustics expert, used the space to successfully develop an acoustic theory of lateral reflections for auditoria. Over a decade spent regularly interviewing internationally acclaimed musicians, it became predictable to hear them gush about the venue’s acoustics.
It was where many New Zealand music stars, from Shihad to Shapeshifter, had a chance to shine, too.
This weekend, in what might be called the gig of the year, Christchurch sons Salmonella Dub mark their 25th anniversary with a massive concert in North Hagley Park on Saturday featuring the return of Tiki Taane, alongside Fat Freddy’s Drop and Ladi6, many of whom spent time during their formative years treading the town hall stage.
The Christchurch City Council voted to repair the venue in 2013. Repair work started in June 2015 with the original budget of
$127.5m. The Town Hall was originally scheduled to reopen in June 2018 but now the completion date has been pushed back to late
2018. The addition of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra rehearsal facility in the old Cambridge Room, has delayed total completion until April 2019.
Six months ago the budget was increased to $133.1m with ‘‘inflation’’ given as a reason. This caused the average Christchurch resident, who has to budget with considerably less just to exist from week to week, to wonder ‘‘why on Earth wasn’t inflation factored into the original budget?’’
As I have done periodically over the last seven years, I stare in at the Christchurch Town Hall through wire netting. Apparently it could open sometime this year or maybe early next year. For now, the sound of silence remains..