One heck of a New Zealand music hooley

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

ST JAMES COMPLEX, Auckland - This extraordinary three-night event - a series of concerts capping off New Zealand Music Month - started in a pre-rock'n'roll past.

Its second night ended with a blast of our rock'n'roll future.

In between was a vibrant over-indulgence of rock and pop and rap before big audiences that crowded the St James, and on Saturday night's all-ages extravaganza spread into the venue's smaller Westend and Regent rooms.

On Friday night it was Bill Sevesi and his Islanders who kicked off the Finn Brothers' Hooley (which encored last night as well) with a bracket of their Hawaiian steel guitar-led numbers, including that lovely old paua-pop ditty Haere Mai (everything is ka pai).

It was a swinging start and a nice touch, especially for its generational compression - here we had the Finns' audience, many of whom now know the going rates for babysitters, hearing the music of their parents' generation live, possibly for the first time.

It served a brief reminder that NZ music didn't start with Split Enz's debut Mental Notes. But echoes of that era figured heavily in Tim and Neil Finn's show, which the latter said midway was dedicated to "songs we don't play very much".

If this was to be a B-sides evening, it started off cosily enough with the brothers and just their acoustic guitars and national-treasure harmonies doing Weather With You. Things continued in that vein for much of the first half, the set including diversions into early Enz (Sweet Dreams), the Finn brothers' self-titled album (Angels Heap, Only Talking Sense), one Australian song applying for local citizenship (Hunters and Collectors' Throw Your Arms Around Me) and much fraternal banter about those humble Te Awamutu beginnings.

The second half began in a higher gear, care of the addition of Dave Dobbyn leading the congregation in Loyal, complete with dramatic curtain-up entrance of a rhythm section. Dobbyn's guitar added some heat to proceedings on his own Blind Man's Bend and Neil Finn's Something So Strong.

But the second half sagged a little in the middle. Giving a guest spot to Auckland up-and-comers Goldenhorse, some of whose members figured in the Finns' backing band, was generous but bewildering.

And while the string section helped give Four Seasons in One Day the lovely lilt of its recorded version, and heightened the dramatics of early Enz ballad Time for A Change, the chamber music/hip-hop hybrid version of Dirty Creature was amusingly awful.

Oh well, the Finns brought it back towards the end. The Yoda-like Sevesi and his band came on stage for the encore, with Dobbyn leading an all-in version of Slice of Heaven, which was silly fun.

With a spontaneous blast through Chuck Berry-by-way-of-the-Beatles Rock and Roll Music it helped end what even Neil Finn admitted had been a strange sort of hooley, one where someone's boyfriend goes off with someone else's girlfriend in full party mode.

As a night, it was eccentric and enjoyable. If the Finns' efforts to stop it being predictable weren't always successful, you had to admire the ambition to do just that.

If Friday was a hooley, Saturday was a hui - a gathering of more than 20 contemporary acts across nearly eight hours and three stages, headlined by the band formerly known as Shihad in the first performance since coming back from America under the new name Pacifier.

That was a lot to see and a lot of stairs to climb. And if it seemed immaculately organised - the bands running to time, friendly security folk guiding the traffic flow between rooms of the 2000-plus, all-ages, non-drinking crowd - some things still came unstuck.

The previous night's special guests Goldenhorse were a no-show (too busy making a video apparently) for their early slot; the sound in the hip-hop room was positively gruesome and some sets turned into bass-bludgeon shouting matches (save for the cut-above Nesian Mystik); and nu-metal rising stars Blindspott had to cut their set short in the Westend because their young testosterone-powered crowd was murdering the dance floor. The band got a second chance in the St James, being hastily slotted in after Pacifier (sorry, couldn't stay, last bus and all that).

Hours earlier, the St James stage got a colourful start from Deja Voodoo and their flaming head-gear (had they a flaming guitar tuner instead, our attention might not have wandered so fast).

Savant and Elemeno P weren't in the same rooms and shouldn't really be in the same sentence, musically speaking. But their respective sets showed them to be at the generic end of the local band spectrum.

Savant's earnest post-grunge approach, Elemeno P's Weezer-ish geekpop (which includes an especially annoying cover of Toni Basil's cheerleader chant Mickey) both might come with energy and ability to burn, but with no ideas to call their own.

By contrast, SJD, who has grown from a one-man electro-boffin into a four-piece band with himself on bass, showed an abundance of lateral thinking during what was witnessed at the start of his quietly mesmerising set.

But, unfortunately, it was off to see Pluto next door, with frontman Milan Borich's kilt winning him the night's best-dressed award, and the band's set a blast of wiry, weird, artful rock'n'roll.

It was a similar coin-toss involving a young-face-of-Flying-Nun clash between betchadupa and Pan-Am, both of whom delivered sets big on dirty great riffs and sweet harmonies, the former's Supa Day being one of the night's best rock moments.

One of the night's greater pop moments was, of course, Goodshirt's recent No 1 Sophie, which got the full singalong treatment, but that was just one pretty firework among a bunch of pop-rock firecrackers.

Once again, they begged the question: how did they get to be so good, so early?

And then it was Pacifier (altogether now, blokes down the front: "Shihad, Shihad, Shihad"). While it started off feeling like a repeat of past performances from the time of previous album The General Electric, the new offerings from its forthcoming follow-up made it something else altogether.

Songs like Comfort Me, Semi-Normal and the encore Walls, an acoustic ballad - "Meet the new Bic Runga," joked frontman Jon Toogood - became a glimpse of what sounds like the band's very big next stage.

Some of the gruntier new numbers recalled the band of a few albums ago, and bolshie renderings of some of those old songs, like I Hope I Never , seemed to confirm something: Pacifier are indeed the new Shihad.

And so far as New Zealand music goes, yes, everything is ka pai.