Dear Time’s Waste and Yule Tour Update
Wed 20 May 2009
A Match Made In Heaven
Yule and Dear Time’s Waste have just finished the South Island leg of their nation-wide tour. We managed to get a wee update from them both and it turns out they are having an incredible time touring together. Yule couldn’t contain his excitement, his email was more like a university length essay than a quick update, but it’s very entertaining. Claire (DTW) was equally enthused, but thankfully she kept her email a bit shorter. Here’s what they each had to say…
Claire- “The tour has been really cool so far, appreciative crowds all round and it has been really nice meeting up with people we previously only knew via email. The worst thing that happened was opening my guitar case to find a cockroach sitting on the fretboard. Gross.”
Yule- “Everything went so smoothly and the experiences were so cool, it was way better than what we had imagined. There was 6 of us in the tour party, my band (Rolly, Jono, Bjorn and Myself), Claire and her boyfriend Brent, who recently got back from the states after retiring from Cut Off Your Hands - but you know that story. DTW performed as a 2 piece for the South Island leg of the tour. We flew in to Queenstown on Thursday and spent the day either handing out fliers for the gig in the streets to back packers, or doing touristy stuff like having a snow ball fight on Coronet Peak and checking out the Shotover river. The whole day was heaps of fun.”
“Q-Town was really hard to book due to a lack of sound people and how much they charge for their services, so we had to do sound ourselves. We had more than enough gear to get it right. Dear Times Waste seemed to really enjoy just relaxing and hanging out around town for most of the day. They hung out in front of the fire drinking wine and chatting for most of the evening. The Dux has a really nice atmosphere.”
“DTW played a really nice set. I don’t know if many people are aware of this due to his former role as a prominent drummer in the NZ music scene but Brent is in fact an extremely distinguished guitarist. He doesn’t just bring to life the second guitar parts from the Room for Rent EP by playing it note for note, instead he adds tasteful embellishments like little country licks here and there and surf guitar dives - it really elevates what Claire does. Claire herself captivates the audience with a gentle power and quiet confidence that is mirrored by the sound of DTW i.e. warm, reverby, chiming guitars which envelops the listener. Her voice has this amazing ability to cut through the music in an almost supernatural way. I have probably seen maybe 8-10 DTW performances in the last few months but it doesn’t matter how many times I watch them play I am always as enthralled as I was the first time. Harrowing. I know I’m sounding like a fan boy right now, but I honestly love what Claire does so much, I feel truly honoured to be able to watch DTW play all these great shows. I’ll still be going to her shows after the tour for sure.”
“I studied in Dunedin for 6 years and remember how hardcore awesome the night life was when I was there. You could party any night of the week if you wanted to. But these days Dunedin is dead! Like Dead Dead. There was nothing else going on in Dunedin except for Don McGlashan which is a completely different market from us and about 3 times the price so we weren’t really competing for the same crowd, but there was just no one going out. They reckon that Dunedin was sheltered from the effects of the economic downturn until about March this year and then it really hit hard. The students are getting nailed and just can’t afford to go out. It really sucks. Still we got a few people out to the show, a lot of old friends and some genuine fans which is always cool.”
“The next day was the total Highlight of the trip. We had to endure what is widely regarded as the most tedious drive in NZ - the 5 hours from Dunedin to Christchurch (though it’s really the Timaru to Chch leg that sucks). Mostly hungover and tired we had tried to get out of doing a live to air performance at Volcano Radio in Lyttelton, but the
Station Manager was adamant that we had to perform and that they would do absolutely anything to make it happen. So we rescheduled for a 4:30pm performance and Volcano would find all the back line gear we needed. We rolled in to town just on time and I went up to scope the place out and was blown away. I opened the door to the station and
was greeted by Anita from Ragamuffin Children with her dog - (All the Ragamuffin Children are really really nice). The room took up almost the whole 4th floor of a 60s - 70s apartment building and was fully windowed on 3 sides. It was packed with locals who were drinking and chatting and who had evidently been waiting for us to turn up and play. The atmosphere was awesome and the view was amazing. Carmel and the Volcano crew had gone way above and beyond to get us the back line we needed to perform, going as far as knocking on peoples doors to get a floor tom. So I went back out to the carpark where the rest of the tour party was waiting and said “We Have GOT to play here! This place is amazing!”. We put on one of our best performances and just really loved the vibe of it. DTW still didn’t want to play but were talked around by Carmel - and I’m glad she did cos DTW put on by far their best performance of the tour. It was twilight when they started playing and the sun went down during the period of their 2 song set. One of those performances I’ll never forget.”
“We played the Wunderbar with the Ragamuffin Children. Ben from Ragamuffin Children works at Wunderbar and had helped us out with heaps of back line. I have so much respect for what they do musically. There is a lot of music made in New Zealand - for sure - but very little is really as musical as what the Ragamuffin Children do. It is so intricately composed and delicately delivered. They are all so talented as musicians and yet every single one of them shows the utmost restraint. It was worth going just to watch them play. In the middle of their set Anita decided to have a conversation with me about where in Auckland I was from which turned into a faux argument with Ben about the Waterview tunnel - funny.”
“We played to the largest crowd of the tour in Lyttelton. There were some very enthusiastic locals shouting things out and dancing hard out. We played a blistering set - by which I mean I got blisters. We played a little harder and faster than what we had for the other shows. Heaps of fun. Wunderbar is so cool and we got on so well with the locals that we just hung around and drank until the early hours of the morning. Deborah the owner drank with us for ages - she was so cool. We can’t say enough nice things about the people of Lyttelton.”
“And that was it. We flew home yesterday (Sunday) morning. The South Island leg went so smoothly there was literally no drama. You hear all these nightmares about something going wrong and are constantly expecting the worst but na, everything was perfect.”
Dear Times Waste- Clandestine: MP3
Posted by Nick Fulton under New Zealand
