To the Island Tour of Aotearoa New Zealand, 25 March 2021, Palmerston North

The night before travelling from Wellington to Palmerston North for Crowded House’s rescheduled concert on Thursday, 25 March, I considered cancelling the trip altogether. The past few months have been a blur between weekday work, finishing my most recent book, and planning future projects. I was also completely exhausted from a recent challenge. Taking a trip almost seemed too much.

I glanced at my looming pile of work as I quickly packed that evening. However, regret has taught me that if I stayed home, I would soon forget what I had done that evening, but I would never forget the concert.

Palmerston North’s Regent on Broadway: An Art Deco Palace           

The Crowded House concert location at Palmerston North’s Regent on Broadway is wrapped into the show’s story. As I drove to Palmerston North from Wellington on the morning of the concert, I looked forward to seeing the performance at the small city’s beautifully restored Art Deco theatre. I last visited the Regent on Broadway in 2015 to see a New Zealand production of “The Buddy Holly Story.” Similar to my experience at Auckland’s Civic Theatre, I was stunned by the venue’s beautifully restored artistic detail and atmosphere.

Opened in 1930, the Regent nearly faced the demolition fate of so many old movie palaces worldwide. In 1991, the theatre closed after many years of declining movie-going audiences and competition from new multiplex cinemas. A movie palace’s erasure seems to leave more than an empty space where a building once stood. These demolitions are often highly emotional for local residents as they tear apart local memory and community, too.

After public outcry against the Regent’s demolition in the early 1990s, combined financial contributions from the Palmerston North City Council and New Zealand Lotteries Grants Board raised nearly $12 million. In addition, the local community raised $1.7 million (which equalled more than $25 for every person in Palmerston North) to completely restore the theatre.[1] The Regent had its grand reopening in 1997.

On the day of the Crowded House concert, I arrived early to re-visit the Regent’s ornate design. The theatre is a feast of textures and colours. I strolled through the lobby several times to admire the grand staircase, barrel vaulted ceiling, and carpeting’s floral pattern that matches the original lino underneath. I walked up to the Grand Mezzanine to see the ceiling panels made of kowhaiwhai (a native New Zealand wood). These panels give the auditorium a “wharenui (meeting house) interior effect,” the only theatre in New Zealand to do so.[2]

Once in my seat near the back of the stalls, I studied the auditorium’s exquisite detail. There seemed to be a new artistic landscape everywhere I looked. From my seat I could see hand-painted ceiling panels and friezes, heavy velvet burgundy curtains surrounding the stage, the eight original chandeliers, among other details.

The theatre setting magnified the concert’s beauty. Early in the show, Neil Finn commented on the magnificent space as he looked out from the stage. His reaction wasn’t surprising. The building’s architect, Charles Hollingshead, intended the interior to be reminiscent of a “’fifteenth century Florentine manor house”.[3] The auditorium’s features combined to create a royal-like atmosphere in the yellow- and burgundy-themed room that night.

The Beauty of Being Present

Beauty seemed to thread throughout the concert from beginning to end. The intermission music between the opener and Crowded House’s performance shifted to Neil’s “Harry’s Theme,” which signalled that the show was about to start. The dimmed stage lighting and electric guitar background slowly reached the crescendo as the stage lights flashed with the beginning chords to “Weather With You.”

I took video of the first few songs and early banter. Then, I just shut off the phone. Many talented people have already captured stunning videos and pictures from this tour. I wanted to just be present.

I saw an earlier show on the tour at Wellington’s TSB Arena on 15 March. However, I didn’t realise I had purchased a general admission ticket in a giant mosh pit. I could barely see or hear Crowded House or Reb Fountain in the cavernous space. This time, though, in the Regent that was built for sight and sound so many years ago, I let the band’s performance wash over me. The mixed media of the lighting, projected images and art, and music wrapped around and supported each other.

Simon Sweetman, a New Zealand music journalist and blogger, wrote an excellent review of Crowded House’s last show of the New Zealand tour at Church Road in Napier. Sweetman details the band’s tight, yet dynamic performance that I felt, but struggled to articulate: “This is a lean, exquisite band—muscular and so musical. There’s not an ounce of fat on these songs. And so it’s the same in the band that makes them for these shows, rebuilding them is easy when there’s such perfect architecture.”

Sweetman beautifully describes the show’s larger significance after so many months without live shows, and in a COVID-19 world where few artists can tour. “This was a mood, this gig,” he writes. “The whole thing joyous and celebratory. Live music is the big gift for so many of us after a year of tumult. And you could not experience better than this.”

Sweetman also partially captured my sensory gut reaction to the show. He briefly mentions “the pacing” between the hits and deeper cuts. I also noted the timing that seemed to reflect the show’s thoughtful soulfulness. In fact, the lighting and projected backdrop both alone and together reflected the music’s themes, imagery, and mood as they lifted the show into something more: the show was performance art.

Courage to Dream

There is another reason why I wanted to fully focus on the Palmerston North show: I never thought I would see Crowded House perform live. I only recently discovered the band. Certainly, I remember Split Enz and Crowded House music being played on our local Cleveland station, WGCL, when I was growing up in rural northeastern Ohio in the 1970s and ‘80s. I enjoyed the music, but I wasn’t ready for it.

In late 2017, I decided on a whim one evening to explore music from my high school years. I remembered Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” music video, so I watched it online. I then found a Pinkpop Festival performance of “Weather With You” from 1994. I kept searching and clicking. After watching the music video for “Into Temptation,” I quietly sat for a few moments in my office chair. Where have I been for the past 30 years, I wondered.

Being the curious journalist by trade that I am, I wanted to understand the band’s background. Over the next few weeks, I read old interviews and Something So Strong, a band biography by Chris Bourke, a Wellington-based music journalist and historian.

I was immediately struck by Bourke’s descriptions of Neil and his older siblings’ rural upbringing in the Waikato in the 1950s–‘70s. I grew up in a northeastern Ohio farming town that I was eager to leave by age 18. However, I treasure aspects of my childhood’s freedom as I biked down empty country lanes, breathed in the humid and sweet summer nights’ air, made homemade ice cream by pounding a big plastic sack filled with ice, cream, sugar, and vanilla. I can hear similar echoes of Neil’s rural upbringing in the lyrics that can be at once so complex in their everydayness: the love for a beloved pet, sun filtering through clouds, the crunch of frost beneath his feet, a gentle touch, rocking a child to sleep.

Even more, Neil’s strength to dream resonates deeply with me. I grew up in a working-class family with a single father who raised my older sister and me. My family had no resources for higher education, and although my father did his best to be a father and mother, our family life was unstable at times.

However, I never gave up on my dreams to get an education and someday teach and write overseas. I used to look at world maps as a girl, dreaming of the places I wanted to someday see. It’s almost fantastical that I ended up in New Zealand. Neil had a much more stable family life than I did, but I understand the great courage and personal strength that it takes to just go after big dreams because I have those qualities, too.

During the Palmerston North concert in that exquisite Art Deco theatre, I thought about the courage and personal strength that had brought me to this place. The show’s thoughtful beauty seemed to reinforce these qualities. For a few moments before the band played “Four Seasons in One Day,” the stage lights dimmed as the backdrop screen featured stop-motion scenes of budding flowers. A projected swirling kaleidoscope of rainbow colours appeared on the walls on both sides of the stage.

My eyes suddenly filled with tears at the tender and hopeful wonder of colour and new flowers. I had recently been struggling to make a decision that required me to be brave. At that moment, I knew that art is life, and that all would be well.

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[1] http://www.regent.co.nz/history-of-the-regent.html

[2] http://www.regent.co.nz/history-of-the-regent.html

[3] http://www.regent.co.nz/history-of-the-regent.html