Latest news with #Lyttelton
RNZ News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Berlin-based metal duo Earth Tongue to complete NZ tour
This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions. Earth Tongue are Pōneke-based metal duo Gussie Larkin and Ezra Simons. Their debut album, Floating Being , came out in 2019, so their follow-up, 2024's Great Haunting (In the Red Records), comes long-awaited. It's an apt name for the record; Larkin's hypnotic melodies and close harmonies are haunting. A gritty guitar tone on opening track 'Out of This Hell' sets the precedent for the next eight. It's a turbulent, exciting journey, and the listener can fully expect to be swept up in the infectious, riff-driven sound. Psych-fuzz duo Earth Tongue are going on tour this June Photo: Oscar Keyes The duo is now based in Berlin, with a suite of European shows lined up for May. They're set to tour Aotearoa in winter, with dates lined up for Lyttleton, Wellington and Auckland. They're also on the bill for Tasmania's renowned music festival Dark Mofo, taking place in June. Either member shares themselves with other projects: Larkin fronts and plays guitar in psych-rock band Mermaidens, and Simons plays guitar for Troy Kingi, plus bass for Tāmaki Makaurau-based indie-rock band Soft Bait. The duo joined Maggie Tweedie on Music 101 to kōrero about the album and their upcoming tour. Catch Earth Tongue on tour in NZ: June 12th - The Loons, Lyttelton June 13th - Meow Nui, Wellington June 14th - Double Whammy, Auckland
RNZ News
12-05-2025
- RNZ News
Veteran activist John Minto unlawfully pepper-sprayed and arrested at protest
John Minto was charged with obstructing and resisting police during a protest in Lyttelton on Waitangi Day 2024. Photo: RNZ / Pretoria Gordon Police unlawfully pepper-sprayed and arrested veteran activist John Minto at a pro-Palestinian protest in Christchurch in February 2024, the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) has found. The 70-year-old was charged with obstructing and resisting police during a Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa protest in Lyttelton on Waitangi Day, though charges were later dropped. A police investigation concluded their actions were lawful, but that the officer had failed in his duty "to provide aftercare" after pepper-spraying Minto. But the IPCA has found both the pepper-spraying and the arrest itself were unlawful. In a letter from IPCA chair Judge Kenneth Johnston KC, he stated the authority found "a number of inconsistencies" between the account of the officer and video footage of the incident, which "led us to doubt the genuineness" of the officer's version of why he had used the pepper-spray. The IPCA did "not accept" the police version that Minto had moved from where he was standing, or that the officer could have perceived Minto presented a real threat. Johnston said the IPCA considered whether there was sufficient evidence for police to charge the officer with assault, but could not rule out the officer pleading self defence. Instead, it asked police to "consider an employment process" for the officer involved. The IPCA report said Minto was arrested for obstructing the arrest of another protester behind the officer who pepper-sprayed him, half an hour after that arrest and by a different officer. But Johnston said there was "no case for obstruction", and no grounds to suspect Minto had hindered the arrest of the other protester, "or indeed showed any intention of doing so". "Our view is that you were standing lawfully on the footpath both prior and during the other protester's arrest. The evidence does not show you advancing past where you were originally standing after being pushed by the officer who pepper sprayed you, and that you were not paying any attention to the arrest." Police were approached for comment, but said they had only just been made aware of the ruling and would need more time to respond. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Here We Are review — Sondheim's last musical is utterly absorbing
Let me be absolutely honest and say that this star rating should come with a health warning. Why? Because the valedictory offering from the late Stephen Sondheim is such a curate's egg. The musical fantasy that unfolds on the National's Lyttelton stage is, for long stretches, utterly absorbing. Yet it's undeniably flawed, too. Let's start with the many positives in a show which opened in New York in 2023. The first part of the evening is quite simply extraordinary, the typically angular melodies delivered with panache by a first-rate ensemble in which Jane Krakowski is always the centre of attention. Her character, Marianne, forever floating around in a negligee, is a maddeningly shallow socialite — a younger version of one of the ladies who lunch
The Spinoff
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Inside Port Noise, the FOMO-inducing festival ‘by musicians, for musicians'
Rachel Ashby from In the Pits meets the organisers behind Lyttelton's Port Noise, one of the most thrilling new events in the music festival calendar. It's already a hive of activity when we arrive at the Lyttelton Coffee Company, the temporary headquarters for the Port Noise music festival, to meet the organisers. Rose Smyth is on the phone to a scaffolding crew, coordinating the construction of two towering structures for Rowan Pierce's installation BEACONS. Ben Woods is busy checking flight times on his laptop, shortly bound for the airport to collect Melbourne-based musicians Sarah Mary Chadwick and Simon J Karis. Outside, the Lyttelton Coffee Company owner Stephen Mateer is plumbing a huge sink especially for the festival's use. Volunteers and contractors buzz in and out of the room getting ready to transform a large carpark into two outdoor stages. In less than 24 hours, Ōhinehou-Lyttelton will again become enveloped by Port Noise, a 'made by musicians, for musicians' festival organised and programmed by locals Smyth and Woods. Now in its third year, Port Noise has built up a reputation among the musically-inclined as the hot new thing happening on the local live music calendar. It's nestled right in the bosom of the town, where the base of craggy hills meets the industrial hum of the working port. Specifically, it happens just off London Street: in venues The Lyttelton Coffee Company, Wünderbar and Loons, plus two outdoor stages in their adjoining carpark. (There's also a plethora of off-site secret show locations, but more on that later). Last year, seething with jealousy and FOMO in Auckland watching Instagram videos of Mykki Blanco (a genre-bending American rapper who has worked with Madonna and Kanye) performing on the back stairs of the Lyttelton FreshChoice, I promised myself I wouldn't miss out on Port Noise again. It didn't take much to convince my friends Callum Devlin and Finn Johannson to join me making the trip down from Auckland. The day before the festival, I picked them up from the Devlin family home, and we all piled into my grandma's Suzuki Ignis (thanks Jandi) to head through the hill to Ōhinehou. As former Christchurch kids, Callum and I treated Wellingtonian Finn to the highlights tour of school bus stops and buildings that no longer exist. By the time we neared the Lyttelton Tunnel, we were both reflecting on the aspirational coolness that Lyttelton held for us as music-obsessed city-side teens. Forever associated with songwriting and art, the town really cemented its reputation as a crucible for interesting sounds after the earthquakes, with artists like The Eastern, Delaney Davidson, Marlon Williams, Nadia Reid and Aldous Harding coming to the fore. It's this deep relationship with music that makes Lyttelton a prime spot for a festival concerned with the underground and avant-garde. This year's Port Noise line-up spanned the breadth of alternative music scenes around Aotearoa – to name just a tiny handful, there's Tāmaki bass-powerhouse Mokotron, jangly guitar wizard Jim Nothing, bona-fide Dunedin legends David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights, Ōtautahi techno thumper Mr Meaty Boy, and southern shredders Pearly from Ōtepōti. On top of this, rave demon Vanessa Worm jumped the ditch from Australia, while Nebraskan songwriter Simon Joyner & The Eucalypts and Puerto Rican dub master Pachyman joined the bill from further afield. It's a truly genreless and expansive lineup. Since its inception in 2023, the festival has already grown and morphed beyond what Woods or Smyth could have ever imagined. 'Every time the festival rolls around, new inspiration strikes and we think, 'we can just add this little extra thing' and that turns into significant changes,' laughed Woods from the bustling HQ. The programming is done primarily by Woods who, as a working musician himself, has spent many years forging networks of music makers across Aotearoa and overseas. Smyth brings her wealth of hospitality and event management experience to Port Noise – she's run cafes, organised festivals and generally been invaluable in bringing a pragmatism and warmth to pulling off something as creatively daring as Port Noise. Because this isn't just a one-day outing, either. In the lead-up to the main event, there was a week of gigs around the town – a sound bath and tāonga pūoro gig at the church, noise music happening in the cafe upstairs, and a family show before the main festival kicked off. Not only that, alongside the main lineup came a whole raft of off-site secret shows, which ticket holders randomly receive a pass to when they enter the festival. This pass contains just a time and location – if you choose to take it up, you might find yourself watching Kāi Tahu witch-hop artist KOMMI in a tiny room at the top of the Lyttelton Club, or Melbourne's Georgia Knight performing with auto-harp in the blackness of the Lyttelton Arts Factory. It certainly seems that the wider Lyttelton township has embraced this sprawling and ambitious festival. On festival day, the queue for wristbands snaking down London Street revealed many local faces, as well as a fair few music nerds shipped in from elsewhere. As the evening progressed, and we traversed around stages that ranged from packed bars, to scenically appointed open-air grandstands, a friendly camaraderie permeated the crowd. Banter between bar staff and security was genuine and relaxed, and punters looked out for each other on the naturally steep rake of the hills. There was a collective excitement about navigating the rabbit warren of the Port Noise layout, and a shared understanding that we weren't just a passive audience, but co-conspirators in making this festival work. Moving from the glow of Pachyman's outdoor twilight set into the thumping fug of DJ Caru in the Wünderbar was a particularly fun vibe shift, the disco ball glinting with reflected light from a wall of CRT televisions. Every space had a different atmosphere, and the artists seemed to embrace this too. Uncle Quentin, crooning into a vocoder through a neon balaclava, came with his own matching green inflatable tube man which flailed surreally alongside him throughout the set. Meanwhile, inside The Loons (formerly the old Working Men's Club) Sarah Mary Chadwick played piano alone to a totally transfixed crowd. Walking back down to the main stage from a secret set at the church, we were hit by a wave of bass rising from the beginnings of Mokotron's set. Melodica, breaks and tāonga pūoro soon reverberated around the natural amphitheater of the Whangaraupō Harbour, drawing focus towards the water. By the time the festival had shifted to kick-ons (at beloved bar Civil and Naval, naturally) Port Noise was starting to feel like being at a very strange and exciting house party hosted by the whole town. And much like a good house party, it required a solid team of friends mucking in on the dishes and decorating to make it all work. Whether it's taking a shift on the bar, hauling PAs up and down stairs, or hosting out-of-town artists on spare mattresses, you could feel the village wrap around Port Noise. 'We have to work out how we keep it like this, using the community,' Smyth said the day before. Woods agreed. 'We want it to be sustainable. At this point I start to really miss making music'. Despite their creative aspirations, the organisers said they are not interested in infinite growth for Port Noise. 'I think a huge part of it for me is not trying to go into things with that ever-expanding mindset. I don't want things to explode and it loses itself,' said Woods. What does appear to be important is finding ways to grow the festival's potential as a site for collaboration and connection. 'We don't have the industry here like Auckland does, and we don't always have the events for artists to get together,' said Smyth. 'We're interested in bringing people here, to meet artists here and see what happens from that. Introducing artists to each other is really important. For us it really is about that manaakitanga'. All weekend I was struck by the ways in which the pair facilitated that kind of connection throughout the festival. The day after Port Noise wrapped, I blearily dragged myself out to a barbeque hosted at a friend's house. When I arrived, sausages were already cooking, and artists and organisers alike were debriefing the previous day's events. Despite having a bloody good time, the FOMO crept back in as I heard about all the excellent sets I didn't manage to catch. Maybe the joy of a good music festival is in its choose-your-own-adventureness. You can't see every cool, weird and exciting performance, especially if the festival is as stacked as Port Noise has proven to be. I guess I'll just have to come back next year.
Daily Mail
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE 'Frankly ridiculous' trigger warning for Shakespeare's Hamlet: National Theatre cautions viewers over death, grief and madness
To warn or not to warn. That is the question that faced the National Theatre. Ticket buyers attending its upcoming production of Shakespeare's Hamlet are advised that the play contains themes of death, grief, suicide, madness and coercive behaviour. The play, a cornerstone of English literature and widely taught in schools, ends with a fatal duel that sees most of the principal characters - including the prince himself - dead by the final curtain. The production, which opens in September as part of Indhu Rubasingham's inaugural season as artistic director, stars Olivier Award-winner Hiran Abeysekera as the Danish prince. Alongside casting announcements, the theatre has slapped the production with a trigger warning, stating: 'This production contains themes of grief and death, including suicide and the loss of a parent, depictions of madness, violence, and coercive behaviour.' The warning has prompted raised eyebrows among some theatre-goers and commentators, who questioned whether audiences need advance notice that a four-hundred-year-old tragedy contains tragic elements. Roy Schwartz, a historian and author, told the Mail: 'A trigger warning is meant to alert that something contains potentially distressing material. It's gratuitous to include it in something that's well-known to have mature subject matter, and it's frankly ridiculous to include it in a classic like Hamlet. For that matter, why not have a trigger warning in every history book? Every Bible and Sunday sermon? 'Coddling audiences against reality only serves to infantilise culture. A trigger warning is fair when the audience might not expect something 'triggering,' not in the most famous play in history.' Writer Simon Evans said: 'Trigger warnings are tiresome, infantilising and ultimately counterproductive as myriad research and indeed robust common sense and experience tells us. But to attach one to one of the supreme works of art in the western canon, a play that contains the single most quoted lines in the language, let alone on the subject of 'self-slaughter', is risible in the extreme. 'Let all theatres bookshops and cinemas carry a single 'trigger warning' henceforth. 'Take Heed! - all human life is here. Proceed at your own peril''. The National Theatre's production runs at the Lyttelton from September 25, with a press night on October 2 and a global NT Live broadcast to follow. This comes amid news that Stormzy is set to front a new diversity initiative at the National Theatre, having signed on to lead a 'top secret' project at the iconic South Bank venue. The Croydon-born grime artist, real name Michael Omari Owuo Jr, has been scouted by the new National Theatre boss as she looks to modernise and diversify its creative output. As the South Bank venue's first female and ethnic minority artistic director, Ms Rubasingham has announced plans to stage rap adaptations of classic Greek tragedy As the South Bank venue's first female and ethnic minority artistic director, Ms Rubasingham has announced plans to stage rap adaptations of classic Greek tragedy. The subversive move is part of a wider aim to build an international audience through the National Theatre's online streaming platform, National Theatre At Home. The £9.99 per month platform - originally launched in 2020 - will give subscribers the opportunity to watch theatrical productions from the comfort of home and create what insiders hope will be a 'Netflix for theatre'. Discussing the move towards a more modernist theatre on Tuesday, Kate Varah, the National Theatre's executive director, said plans to expand its streaming service would help attract audiences 'not just in our country, but in 184 countries around the world'. She said: 'It's no longer just about what happens here on the South Bank, the National Theatre is now a global theatre with an audience of 28 million per year.'
