End of the Luna eclipse

TimeOut

10 Sep, 2015 06:00 PM3 mins to read

The band Luna.

Founder member Dean Wareham brings the band to NZ on a reunion tour.

Dean Wareham laughs that he's finally bringing a proper band home with him.

The Wellington-born, longtime New York-resident singer-guitarist never brought his 90s group Luna to the country of his birth.

They split up a decade ago after a run of charming, chiming unhurried indie-rock albums which sound timeless a decade or two on. But now they're on a reunion tour which brings them to Auckland next week.

Wareham has been here to play before. Performing as Dean and Britta, he and wife Britta Phillips performed 13 Most Beautiful: Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests at the New Zealand Arts Festival in 2010 and a year later they were here playing the songs of Galaxie 500, the dreamy folk-rock band Wareham formed while at Harvard in the late 80s.

But this time he's bringing a reformed Luna, with Phillips on bass, guitarist Sean Eden and drummer Lee Wall.

The Auckland show also brings a chance for Luna's other NZ-born foundation member - former Chills bassist Justin Harwood, who left in the late 90s - to join the band on stage.

The live reformation comes after Wareham's 2014 solo album, and his collaboration with Phillip on the soundtrack to Noah Baumbach's new movie Mistress America. A get-together last year had the Luna foursome trying to remember why they decided to call it a day in 2005.

"Nothing terrible happened but it's funny getting back together 10 years later. I don't know what I was so angry about. If you are in a band fulltime and you spend year after year making records together you spend too much time together. It's not natural and I think, naturally, people who are good friends start to drift apart. You forget about why you liked each other in the first place."

Another benefit of the break is relearning the songs from the records which meant taking them back a notch from the speedier numbers they had evolved into live.

"We do have a few fast songs too but there are certain songs like Tiger Lily or 23 minutes in Brussels where if you add a few bpms they don't work right. They don't groove properly and you ruin them. This is one thing we've learned - tempo is important."

Likewise, Luna are in no rush to make the band a fulltime going concern again. "We need to have a band meeting about this I think. We are all in agreement that we don't want it take over our lives full time again.

That said I think I we would happy to play shows now and then. So that seems to be what I'm getting from everyone."