Lecrae Announces Three Date New Zealand Tour This DecemberAs Part Of His Reconstruction World Tour
Part of a 42-date run, Lecrae will return to New Zealand for the first time in a decade bringing his Reconstruction World Tour to Aotearoa for three headline shows this December. Kicking off at the Auckland Town Hall on Friday 5 December, he will then play Wellington's Opera House on Saturday 6 December followed by James Hay Theatre in Christchurch on Sunday 7 December.
Tickets will be available starting with an artist pre-sale beginning Wedesday, July 30 at 10am local time. Additional pre-sales will run throughout the week ahead of the general on sale beginning Friday, August 1 at 10am local at ticketmaster.co.nz.
Making his anticipated return to the stage, the tour will mark one-year since Lecrae's last outing in 2024 for 'The Final Church Clothes Tour!' The fan favorite is slated to perform songs from his decorated catalog, as well as music from his upcoming album Reconstruction.
Beyond the music, Lecrae has fostered a direct relationship with his local community. Last Monday (July 21), the Grammy-winner held a back-to-school drive in the heart of Atlanta alongside nonprofit City Takers. With over 100+ people in attendance, both fans and residents alike joined Lecrae in assembling backpacks filled with essential school supplies for students across the city.
As a special treat to fans, Lecrae revealed the features on Reconstruction with a one-of-a-kind mailer that went out to 1,000 of his most active supporters. Each mailer included a handwritten note from the Reach Records founder, and a QR code linking to The Workshop – an online community where fans can access early music, content, and engage to earn points for incentives.
Continuing his mission of bringing Christ to the culture, he now gears up to make international headlines with his renewed stage presence, ultimately setting the tone for an unstoppable and intentional run. The announcement also heralds the arrival of Lecrae's forthcoming album Reconstruction – his first solo project since 2022's Church Clothes 4 LP.
Tickets on sale Friday 1 August 10am NZST
FRI 5 DEC
Town Hall | Auckland
ticketmaster.co.nz
SAT 6 DEC
Opera House | Wellington
ticketmaster.co.nz
SUN 7 DEC
James Hay Theatre | Christchurch
ticketmaster.co.nz
ABOUT LECRAE
Multi Grammy-Award winning rap artist Lecrae has left an indelible mark in the world of music and entertainment. His music explores universal topics that bind, challenging industry norms with his faith-based rhyming style. He emerged in 2004 with the release of his debut album, Real Talk, and launched his own label, Reach Records. The perennial superstar has proved to not only be a gospel success, but he's also crossed over into hip-hop and used his platform to foster a global fanbase. He's remained consistent and staunch relevant throughout the 2000s, proven repeatedly with groundbreaking albums such as Rebel (2008), which made history as the first Christian hip-hop album to reach #1 on Billboard's Top Gospel Albums chart; Gravity (2012), netting his first career Grammy; and Anomaly (2017), the first Christian rap album to go gold. The last song on Anomaly, titled 'Messengers' with for KING & COUNTRY, earned Lecrae his second Grammy win (for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song) at the 57th Grammy Awards. The LP also earned him his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. 2022 was highlighted by the arrival of Church Clothes 4, and the deluxe version, Church Clothes 4: Dry Clean Only, arrived in 2023 – thus symbolizing the end of Lecrae's popular mixtape series. In 2024, Lecrae started off the year by adding two more Grammys under his belt – one for his Church Clothes 4 project (Best Contemporary Christian Music Album) and the other for his 'Your Power' collaboration with Tasha Cobbs (Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song). Over the years, Lecrae has garnered many awards and accolades, including four Grammy wins, two chart-topping gospel albums, a gold and platinum certification, and countless honors. Beyond the music, Lecrae's prestige has grown considerably. He's a New York Times bestselling author, using writing and activism to inspire local communities. The latter is exemplified in his philanthropic work to help instill hope in incarcerated individuals and bring attention to mass incarceration. This has proven to be a recurring theme in Lecrae's previous partnerships with several nonprofit organizations such as Love Beyond Walls, Prison Fellowship and Send Musicians To Prison on similar initiatives. As a record executive, Lecrae has provided a pathway for artists who share his ethos such as Tedashii, Trip Lee, Andy Mineo, 1K Phew, WHATUPRG, Wande, Hulvey, and Limoblaze – all of whom are signed to his Reach Records imprint. Simultaneously, he remains a pillar of the culture at large, infiltrating the podcasting community with his show 'The Deep End With Lecrae.' Throughout his career, Lecrae continues to be a voice for positive change, and his work amplifies his impact.
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Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Aloud and in full colour
It might sound like Carol Hirschfeld but it's Shayne Carter's story, film-maker Margaret Gordon tells Tom McKinlay. In the opening frames of a new documentary, Shayne Carter walks along the Aramoana mole as if it were a runway. He's coming in to land, returning to Ōtepoti, back from the world. There he immediately meets the rough acclaim of the mole's resident seagulls - and curses right back. But it's an uneven contest, even for as practised a crowd wrangler as the Dunedin musician. No problem though, because the film jumps straight to Carter unleashed, wringing rawk high in feedback's most seaside registers from his leftie six string. Take that, you gulls. It's emblematic. As Life in One Chord chronicles, Carter seems to have had an answer always, to circumstance, to distance, to tragedy, to success. Life in One Chord is the work of journalist and documentary-maker Margaret Gordon - formerly of Christchurch, now of Melbourne - its title taken from the first vinyl release of Carter's very nearly all-conquering band Straitjacket Fits, a squalling '80s four-track EP that carried the propulsive She Speeds. This past week Gordon was applying the final touches to her film - crucially, making sure the sound mix does the material justice - ahead of its New Zealand International Film Festival release. The film's a musical biography, tracing Carter's trajectory from the hard-knock playgrounds of 1970s Brockville to the world stage and back again. It charts a course of approximate parallel to Carter's Ockham-winning memoir Dead People I Have Known, but welcomes in the perspectives of others involved in the various milieu that set him on his way or who travelled with him. And indeed, the book was part of her motivation for the film, Gordon says. "It really spoke to me, and I was like, it really needs to be painted in with all the bright colours, so when he talks about the bands or the people or the places that you can hear it and you can see it." So, alongside weaving in essential servings of Carter's rich songwriting catalogue - including some rare live footage - the film makes room for voices from his early life, home and school, and an extended cast of Dunedin Sound musicians. "The key people there would be John Collie, the drummer from Straitjacket Fits ... and also Natasha, Shayne's sister, which is important, because, you know, Shayne talks a lot about family," Gordon says. The film-maker's rule was that the people included had to be directly related to the story. The film follows Gordon's well received 2014 documentary Into the Void as another entry in the musical history of Te Waipounamu - the earlier documentary focused on the Christchurch band of the title. Music, bands, people interest her. "I think being in a band, it's a really ephemeral thing, isn't it?" she muses. "Like, it's very hard to exactly pinpoint what it is that makes it so special, but there is a certain kind of magic there that happens within that group of people and it's really the transmission of that through to the audience ... just that spark, in that moment, when that happens, where this group of people is doing something and this other group of people is there and they witness it and they feel it and they get engaged." So, not a straightforward phenomenon to distill, to capture, away from a gig's pulsing cacophony, but in her film, Gordon has a great ally. "Shayne's such a good talker," she says. "That was one of the things that I was really drawn to about him in terms of a documentary subject, you know, he has really great reflections on everything, really, and he has a lot of really great things to say, so that's really important. "He's a performer, too, and so that's really good. Like, it's not necessary, but it helps when you're making a documentary to be working with someone who's not afraid of a camera, someone who's OK to gather themselves together and put on a little bit of a show, which is most certainly what he did." Carter's on foot, in his own footsteps, through much of the film, from the mole to Brockville Rd, from his old high school to tracking down Straitjacket Fits' original broom cupboard George St practice room. It's a story of making your own fun. And Carter's created a lot of it. Still is in new and reinventing ways - he's now composing for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. Gordon wasn't familiar with all of it when she started into the doco. She'd joined the Carter fandom from about the Straitjacket Fits, following it on to Dimmer, but was learning about his earlier output with Bored Games and Double Happys. The formative story of the former plays out at what was Kaikorai Valley High School, Carter trooping back despite some misgivings. But as Gordon tells it, his reception there also pushes out the margins of the story to include a community's pride in the boy who did good. "You know, he said before we went back, he was like, 'oh, I didn't really like high school that much. I don't know how this is going to go'. "We came in and then before we'd even got into the office, you know, the deputy principal, John Downes, came out ... and then a couple of other people came out and everybody came out welcoming Shayne - really loved to see him back there." That sort of slightly revisionist remembering - back in the day the school's then principal stormed out of Bored Games' abrasive punk-inspired school hall performances - is joined in conspiracy by a Dunedin caught at its blue sky best. There's no sense here of the cold, suffocating grey that those Dunedin bands of the 1980s were trying to mitigate. Gordon admits to being a little bit disappointed Dunedin didn't deliver on its meteorological reputation. "I was like, 'oh, OK, this is making it look really good. Is this true? Are we really telling a true story here with all the sunshine?'." There is, though, plenty of shade in the story. Grim reality foreshadowed in the title of Carter's memoir. Gordon had some difficult material to cover, requiring sensitive handling. A striking element in the film is the tight knit nature of the community involved in Carter's shared story. Among the most prominent players is his Double Happys partner in crime, Wayne Elsey - another preternaturally talented friend from school, who was there for the pre-teen hijinks that became teenage kicks and rock and roll. The Carter-Elsey chemistry meant the Double Happys seemed destined for the sort of success Straitjacket Fits later achieved, but Elsey died in a touring accident. Gordon says they thought long and hard about how to handle that tragedy, integrate it into the story arc. "Because his passing was so tragic, it's still felt very strongly, it's still very raw within that Dunedin community. So, whatever we did, we had to be really careful about it and respectful." She knew Carter was not going to talk about it in an interview so that responsibility was picked up by Collie - drummer in both Double Happys and Straitjacket Fits - who grew up a stone's throw from Elsey's childhood home. And if anything more was needed from Carter, he'd addressed that responsibility already in his song Randolph's Going Home, a rawly heartfelt remembering that is afforded generous space in the film. For all Carter's showman inclinations, Gordon says she knew he was not going to be offering unlimited access to his inner workings. "He has a lot of self-protection, and I think that, you know, I always knew that he wasn't going to do a big interview where he would reveal all. "That's really not what he's like, and I did know that going in." That contributed to her decision to use passages from Dead People I Have Known in the film. "It's all there. All of that stuff is very, very real and very raw in Shayne's own words." However, in a genius twist, those words are read into the documentary by Carol Hirschfeld, the broadcaster's honeyed tones mixing equal measures of her straight-faced professionalism with the double-take comedy of delivering the punk rocker protagonist's own words in the first person. There's more pathos to come, beyond Elsey's passing, as of the original four members of Straitjacket Fits there's only two still standing, Carter and Collie. Bassist David Wood died in 2010, followed 10 years later by the band's other songwriter, Andrew Brough. Brough left the band abruptly in the early '90s just as they were about to go stratospheric and, while he found further critical success with his band Bike, had largely retreated from the world by the time he died. As a result, Gordon's interview with him is particularly affecting, as the bitterness previously reported about his departure from the band appeared to have receded. "It was interesting, because he was a lot warmer about his time in the band and a lot more circumspect about the band's demise than I thought he would be," Gordon says. "I feel like he'd come to a point where he still had a bit of grievance, but overall he was pretty much, you know, had accepted that it was what it was. "I wouldn't want to say that he'd moved on, but he wasn't fretting about it any more, that's for sure." As the documentary does at various other points, Brough's story acknowledges the well-observed tensions at the heart of the music industry and the price to be paid. "The music industry is always a strange one because it's got this unhappy marriage between creativity and money," Gordon says. "And those two things just don't really work well together." A lot of Dunedin bands would have been through the same grinder, she says, having been identified by the industry as bankable propositions. "And then, you know, all of that kind of influence starts creeping in and things become very difficult. And I actually think that's an underlying theme of the film." Adversity, character and resilience are foregrounded again in a chapter on Carter's role in supporting Dunedin Sound progenitor Chris Knox, following his debilitating stroke, in which the Enemy and Toy Love frontman delivers his own lesson in gritty defiance. Knox's determination seems to hold up another mirror to Carter's doggedness. Gordon confirms that was the story she found, but it was also the story she chose to tell. "You could have made a documentary and not talked about that, but for me one of the big things about Shayne that's really important and that is potentially unusual is that he really is resilient and that he just keeps getting back up and getting back to work again. And even though he's had to deal with some of the most difficult things that you could possibly imagine, including, being in a band and touring the world and then coming back to Dunedin - I mean, that's going to be tough. "It'd be tough for anyone. Especially because, you know, I don't think New Zealand is very good at having much empathy for people in that situation." The standard antipodean advice to such vicissitudes, absent of much empathy, would be to "get over it". Yep, true, Gordon says. "But, you know, that's exactly actually what he does. And so, yes, that theme of resilience, it really was something that we wanted to tell because I think it's very central to Shayne's story. "He's a resilient guy and amongst all of this difficulty and tragedy, he just continues on. He's an artist. He stays on the path." While Gordon's film will initially screen at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and perhaps beyond that in a conventional cinema format, she has other plans for it. "We're going to regroup and create, like, a different version of the film that has more music in it and that will have live incidental music and that will tour more like a band." Music documentaries aren't always huge box office draws at the cinema, she says, and, in a lot of ways, Life in One Chord is quite niche. It is, to a significant extent, one for New Zealand about New Zealanders. "So, we always wanted to have another plan so the film could have a second life where it could travel to, like, music festivals and arts festivals and things like that." It would be a longer show, incorporating live music. It would be doing things differently, appropriately enough. "One of the things about Shayne, he was, is and remains a punk and likes to do things his own way," Gordon says in summary. "And that was the way we did the film - 'this is how it is and we're going to do it the way that we want to do it, we are going to do it ourselves, we're going to do it our own way'. And that's how it ended up." Life in One Chord screens as part of the NZ International Film Festival at the Regent Theatre, Dunedin on August 16 and 19.
Scoop
5 days ago
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NZ Band Tadpole Announce New Single
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Otago Daily Times
6 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
How a local TV station became a global powerhouse
By Eva Kershaw for Frank Film It's hard to compare Dunedin to Hollywood. However, for four decades, the small, academic city in New Zealand's deep south was home to a powerhouse of global documentary filmmaking. Born in Dunedin's TVNZ studios in the 1970s, Natural History New Zealand – known globally as NHNZ – developed from a government-run unit to an Emmy Award-winning international producer, reflecting not only the growth of an industry, but the evolution of New Zealand's place in global media and the emergence of a strong conservation movement. One of the unit's earliest series followed the critically endangered Chatham Island black robin out of extinction. There were only seven birds left. 'We came in at exactly the right moment to start telling these stories of hope,' says former frontperson Peter Hayden, 'and the audiences around New Zealand loved it.' It was new territory. Dunedin TV was known for children's programme production. TV audiences were not used to seeing their own natural environment on screen; and natural history was virtually unknown. Hayden, now 76, began working for TVNZ's Natural History Unit in 1980. 'Coming down here I thought I'd better go and buy a bloody book about natural history,' he tells Frank Film. 'I went to the Heinemann's Bookshop... and there was no such thing as a natural history section. 'That reflected the knowledge of New Zealanders at the time. We knew nothing.' On the team with Hayden were producer/director Neil Harraway, film-makers Rod Morris and Max Quinn, and the charismatic and committed Dunedinite, managing director Michael Stedman. '[Michael] was our leader,' says Harraway. 'Quite a stroppy little guy.' Using the hidden camera as a 'silent witness' to the natural world, the team put together personable documentaries of the wildlife of Aotearoa: rare footage of takahē and kākāpō, films on bats, sharks, locusts and a range of birdlife. In looking for a logo, they hit upon the kea, chosen for its intelligence, inquisitiveness, and adaptability – critical traits, says Hayden, for the company's survival. From 1981 until the early '90s, what was then called the Natural History Unit produced Wildtrack – a nature programme for both children and adults that won the Feltex Television Award for the best children's programme, three years running. In 1989, the unit produced Under The Ice, the first nature documentary to be filmed under the Antarctic sea ice. 'I don't know what we were thinking,' says Harraway. Under-water camera housing units were yet to be commercially available, 'so some of the local geeks climbed on in and whipped stuff up like this,' says former NHNZ technician Wayne Poll, gesturing to an early model unit kept in the basement of the company's Dunedin offices. Despite NHNZ's ingenuity, television was changing, and production in New Zealand was migrating largely to Auckland. In 1991, TVNZ closed its Dunedin studios. While the Natural History Unit escaped closure, its future was uncertain. Undeterred, Stedman began looking for new funding relationships overseas. Harraway recalls him picking up business cards from the floor and out of waste baskets at a Cannes event. 'Darwin said, it's not going to be the strongest or the most intelligent animal that survives on the planet, it's going to be the most adaptable,' says Morris. 'Michael sort of understood that intuitively, really, that adaptation was where survival of the unit rested.' And adapt they did. In 1992, in an early co-production with Discovery and Rai3, NHNZ produced the Emperors of Antarctica documentary – a pioneering film on Emperor penguins. 'I think Emperors of Antarctica sold to over 100 different territories around the world,' says Quinn, who devised a hand-made cover to insulate the moving parts of his camera in Antarctica's sub-50 degree temperatures. In 1997, the Natural History Unit was purchased by Fox Television, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch 'brought a bucket of money,' says Morris, and supplied the team with funding for equipment they desperately needed. Stedman forged co-productions in the USA, Europe, Japan, and China. As a fan of science communication, he helped build a post-graduate diploma in natural history film making at the University of Otago. 'We were into science, we were into health, we were into adventure,' says Hayden. As Stedman said in a 2001 TVNZ interview, NHNZ focussed on reading the market in order to make programmes that would appeal to their audiences, 'as opposed to a British system where they would make a programme that they wanted to make and then go and look for a market for it.' At its height, NHNZ had $50 million worth of documentaries in production. It was working on up to 20 films at any one time and employed 200 people. 'When it started, there was about five of us,' recalls Hayden. New Zealand was a hard audience to break into. 'I don't think New Zealanders were seeing a lot of these programmes,' says Hayden. 'I remember Michael saying, you know, you're selling to so many countries, but one of the hardest countries to sell to is your own country.' Internationally, NHNZ's reputation shone. Among numerous other awards, the company's films earned multiple Emmy nominations, and won Emmy awards in 1999 and 2000. In 2011, Stedman's health declined. 'The golden years were over,' says Morris. 'From Fox buying us in 1997, those fantastic years of growth and spreading its wings had sort of got to the end of its road,' says Harraway. 'The market had changed from the good film-making we liked. Reality kind of took hold.' Stedman resigned in 2013, and in the decade following, NHNZ scaled down. In 2022, a much smaller NHNZ was sold to Auckland-based Dame Julie Christie. With the company re-branded to NHNZ Worldwide, just three staff remain in Dunedin. With this month marking three years since Stedman's death in 2022, the original NHNZ team gather around a TV unit, watching a video of Stedman giving a speech. 'It sort of brings the dear old man back to life again,' says Quinn. 'He was an extraordinary person,' says Morris. 'He sponsored us for a period of time so that we could fulfil our dreams.'
