On Touring New Zealand

Tour is salt and vinegar chips, spilled under the driver’s seat. Tour is launching ourselves into every possible body of water. Tour is a 4 am bed-time, followed by an 8 am lobby call.

We spent the week travelling up the guts of New Zealand’s South Island, ensconced within an eight-seater Kia Carnival I nicknamed Carmen in tribute to an ex-girlfriend. The car is a capsule, a bubble, a closed ecosystem with developed routines, rituals, ways of being.

Sam and I inhabit the front seats. We alternate driving, marvelling over this car’s inexplicable features. The car beeps at us, non-stop from the moment we roll out of the rental carpark. It beeps to tell you when you’re speeding (sixty in a thirty zone), then it beeps any time you cross a line on the road, it beeps when you get within two metres of the car in front of you, and it beeps incessantly while you reverse. It beeps when we place a bag on the backseat, assuming it is a small child.

The beeps all have slightly different cadences and wildly different pitches. One is Eno’s Music For Airports, another is Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name. We scroll through the car settings to try and disable them but eventually give up and accept the discordant symphony of beeps interrupting our conversation.

Sam gets the Bluetooth working and we crank the stereo. Everyone gets to pick one song and we quickly realise how disparate our listening tastes are. We start at nu-metal, wander through Berlin drum and bass, a little bit of K-pop and end on a medley of pop punk anthems. Igorrr features heavily. Clairo’s album Charm gets a spin.

The car has a ‘self-steering’ feature that you can’t turn off. It pulls the steering wheel in the direction that it thinks the road is going. It has a camera on the front that keeps you aligned with the car in front of you, so the cruise control slows and speeds up based on the other drivers on the road. Sam demonstrates that you can completely let go of the steering wheel and take your feet off the pedals and the car will merrily navigate itself towards our destination. The rest of the band is unimpressed.

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The shows, as always, are an incredibly mixed bag. Festival slots, pub gigs, a folk club, a warm-up set for an acrobatic show. This is a band that brings the energy with us to any stage, so we’re having fun but I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to have the consistency of an established fanbase, to play sold out shows in similar sized rooms every night.

We play Waitati Music Festival, dancing on a delightful stage that backs up against gorgeous mountains. Halfway through the show a parade of a hundred children carrying marching drums wander in front of the stage. I invite them on to the stage. The sound engineer vehemently shakes his head no and I apologetically uninvite them. A tiny child steals one of our bubble guns and wanders through the horn section. They spend the rest of the set dodging around her as she totters back and forth, blowing bubbles.

We play the Dunedin Folk Club, a lovely bowls club in the middle of the Botanic Gardens. At soundcheck we decide that nothing on stage really needs to be mic’d up, and I tell the audience that we’re going to play ‘quietly but with energy’. It’s the best sounding gig we’ve played in years. I can hear everything on stage in stereo, direct from the source to my ears. The crowd love it and ask us to turn up for the second set. We finish the night with Sam doing a backbend in the middle of stage and the crowd yelling gleefully.

We drive on to Christchurch, speeding past signs for all the natural wonders of New Zealand. We miss Roaring Meg because I tell the band we’ve got to get a wriggle on. When we finally stop for a ‘ten minute’ break, the band enacts their revenge and order everything on the menu. While we wait for the food to come out I inspect the Moeraki Marbles, a set of round monoliths scattered across a beach, and I wonder if I’m the one losing my marbles.

We make soundcheck by the skin of our teeth – scrambling through the grounds of the Christchurch Arts Center, a Gothic building built in 1878 that survived the 2011 earthquake. Sections of the building are still held together by giant scaffolding. There is a circular stage set-up for the World Busker’s Festival but my communication about our requirements has been a little lacklustre. We manage to get everyone sounding good but there is no foldback for the drums. I liken it to playing a gig wearing both ear plugs AND ear muffs. It sounds like the band is under the sea. Or in another room. Possibly in another room under the sea. The only sounds I can hear are the drums slapping back from the giant stone walls of the building in front of us.

I play twice as loud as normal and hope that everyone else follows me. After the show the sound guy Jonno says we’re really tight and I tell him I bloody hope so, this is our fourth show in four days. We watch an acrobatic show where a girl in a cheerleader costume gets three men from the audience to put on spandex undies and carry her around the stage. The bar tender takes a liking to us and gives us an open bar tab.

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That night we stay in a luxurious hotel paid for by the festival. I’ve made the ridiculous request that we have separate rooms and hilariously they’ve provided, six rooms spread across the six floors of the hotel. I get in bed and realise that everything is so so quiet. I realise this might be the last time I’m alone for the rest of the week, but I feel a little lonely.