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Otago Daily Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Music festival one of many stops on working holiday
Country music enthusiasts, musicians and other festival-goers have rolled into Gore for its country music festival, and so too have its volunteers. Working holidaymakers Sally Laws and Kevin Jackson are two of those volunteers and have parked their 7m retro house bus at Gore's A&P Showgrounds to help out at the 11-day Tussock Country music festival. Mr Jackson, originally from South Africa, has a background in engineering and is translating those skills into helping festival trustee and sound engineer Jeff Rea with sound. Ms Laws, from the United Kingdom, has been on the doors of events and working at the festival's merchandise stand inside the St James Theatre. The couple both have working-holiday visas and have been travelling the country and working seasonally. Over summer, they ran a small family campsite at Lake Benmore, which was in a beautiful part of the country that they really enjoyed, Ms Laws said. The pair also picked hops in Wai-iti, near Nelson, and after the festival they are going back up to the top of the South Island to Richmond, to work in a tree nursery. The pair had heard good things about that area in the winter and were looking forward to less rain, as that could be a problem for a house bus. The damp was more of a problem in their Nissan Civilian, she said. "Cold is fine, damp is less fine." Ms Laws said they both worked the Country Music Honours event that kicked off the whole festival and the Late Night event on Saturday and were looking forward to the busking competition and Gold Guitar Awards in the coming days. Her favourite of what she had seen was the honours event as they had no idea what they were getting into when they signed up and the show gave some good history and background to the festival. She also really loved seeing Tami Neilson, getting to know volunteers, hearing the different types of songwriting that New Zealand had to offer and trying the St James' ice cream. There were quite a few festival-goers at the showgrounds where they were staying, she said, as well as rugby practices and children doing cross-country, an amusing snapshot of Gore life. They had been well looked after by the grounds caretaker, Dawn Ross, who had given them a nice camping spot and was checking on them, and they had even bumped into each other at the festival.
Otago Daily Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Country music festival offers a week of activities
On the lineup for the Tussock Country Music Festival includes the NZ Highwaymen. PHOTO: SUPPLIED Singing in the street and designing and eating "Southland sushi" — the Tussock Country Music Festival has it all. The festival will start tonight with late-night shopping in Gore, a children's disco and then a glitzy country music honours night at the St James Theatre. From then, it will be all systems go through to the Gold Guitar Awards next weekend, with record entries in what is its 50th year. The awards celebrate all that is good with country music — a genre which has been enjoying a renaissance. Gore Country Music Club president Julie Mitchell previously told the Otago Daily Times the awards had come a long way from the 33 entries when they first started. This year, there were 829 entries, up 100 on last year. She also acknowledged the boom in the genre worldwide as a catalyst for a rapidly increasing appetite for the festival. NZ Gold Guitar Awards committee convener Phillip Geary said gradually over the past 10 years, and particularly in the last three or four, country music had skyrocketed — to the competition's benefit. In particular, he had noticed a "big increase" in the intermediate section, which covers the 13-18 age range. The awards had changed their image over the years, he said. "Originally it was 'country and western', and we deliberately keep the word 'western' out of it now," he said. "Western just goes back to the cowboy image, I think." The top award at tonight's country music honours will be the Apra Best Country Music Song award. The finalists are: 5432 written and performed by Mel Parsons; Blue Dreams written and performed by Holly Arrowsmith; and Borrow My Boots written and performed by Tami Neilson, Ashley McBryde and Shelly Fairchild, featuring Grace Bowers. Parsons won the MLT Songwriting Award last year with Hardest Thing. Neilson will perform tonight. The big show tonight will start 10 days of entertainment. There will be a bit of everything on offer, including a cheese roll workshop, line dancing for beginners and busking for all ages.
