
Havelock North High's 50th anniversary celebrations headlined by opera singer Geoff Sewell
Opened in 1975, the school has had many well-known alumni in its 50 years of schooling, including motorsport legend Greg Murphy, renowned artist Freeman White and multi-platinum opera singer Geoff Sewell, who headlined Saturday's 50th Jubilee Concert.
He was joined by the school's alumni choir for a rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone in honour of his 'incredible first music teacher and friend' Roger Stevenson, the school's founding head of music who died last year.
Head boy in 1989, Sewell said being back at the school was special.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


NZ Herald
19-06-2025
- NZ Herald
Big Sing: Hundreds of youth voices take to Hastings' Toitoi stage
From Havelock North High School, Thea Holm (left), was awarded the best student conductor, pictured with Colla Voce – winners of the Open Choice award – and conductor Joe Christensen (second from right). More than 500 students and supporters from across Hawke's Bay gathered at Toitoi in Hastings for the 2025 East Coast Big Sing, an annual choral competition that celebrates youth voices. Choirs from secondary schools performed pieces in various languages and styles throughout the day, returning in the evening for a


NZ Herald
12-06-2025
- NZ Herald
Smokefreerockquest: Hawke's Bay teens in the running for national music title
Hawke's Bay's top young musicians could well get the chance to make noise on the national stage. Five local acts have now moved into the next phase of New Zealand's only national secondary school music competition – Smokefreerockquest 2025. The Bers, a six-piece band from Havelock North High School, won


Scoop
29-05-2025
- Scoop
Phoebe Rings Joins Japanese Breakfast As Support For The Auckland Winter Series
Press Release – Live Nation Entertainment TĀMAKI MAKAURAU AUCKLAND (MAY 29, 2025) – Live Nation is proud to announce local act Phoebe Rings will join Japanese Breakfast at the Auckland Winter Series line up at the Auckland Town Hall this June. Tickets to their June 7 show are on sale now. Well known for their signature blend of Jazz-inspired dream-pop sounds Phoebe Rings formed in 2019. Having created a loyal fanbase since opening for The Beths, and releasing their self-titled EP last October, Phoebe Rings will be debuting their forthcoming LP Aseurai, out June 6. Made up of lead singer/synthesist Crystal Choi, drummer Alex Freer, guitar/synthesist Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent, and bassist Benjamin Locke, they join U.S. band Japanese Breakfast who will perform for the first time ever in Aotearoa next month as part of the Auckland Winter Series. After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast 's fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), marks the band's first proper studio release out on March 21st. Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills — an innovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regarded as many a legacy artist's favorite guitar player — and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles — birthplace of After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac and Nevermind among other classics — the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel. For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner's life during which her 2x GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom. ' I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,' she says. ' I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.' The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album's characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On the album's lead single ' Orlando in Love ' — a riff on John Cheever's riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren's call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo). Sadness is the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life's essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record's many episodes. Japanese Breakfast performs The Melancholy Tour for one night only at Auckland Town Hall in June 2025 as part of Live Nation's Auckland Winter Series.