Musician Anthonie Tonnon dreams of trains: ‘It’s not what my wife signed on for’

Musician and public transport enthusiast Anthonie Tonnon and his Taite Music Prize. Tonnon is touring Aotearoa over the next few months.

The View From My Window: Award-winning Kiwi musician Anthonie Tonnon takes a look out his window and reflects on how his career has evolved

I’ve chosen a funny window. It’s not the most glorious or beautiful window, we found it in a junk shop, but it’s the window of my studio. I reconditioned a tool shed in 2021 and turned it into a soundproof studio in the backyard.

Space had been really difficult for me. We used to live in a one-bedroom granny flat underneath someone’s house in Herne Bay. My wife Karlya and I both prefer to work from home and I write songs, so that was pretty impossible. I had this big set of keys and each day I used to have to get on the bicycle and cycle to a different place. I knew when people who had studios weren’t there and I would pay them a little bit for a couple of hours of studio time.

In 2017 we moved into a three-bedroom house in Whanganui and I built the studio. All my gear for my set is ready to go at all times and there’s a mirror wall so I can practise my moves. The window is the studio’s big weakness though as far as soundproofing and I couldn’t justify spending the money on double glazing, so I had a problem with condensation. But I’m really happy. It’s an extravagant luxury to have a window.

My parents lived the New Zealand 90s dream. They started in a state house, renovated it, sold it and upgraded to a villa in Dunedin. Then they upgraded into a 70s house in the suburbs and then to a lifestyle block. There were things I liked about the lifestyle block, especially when I was young, but by the time I was a teenager, I really reacted badly against it. I wanted to be a city person.

My love of public transport was a huge shock. It happened by accident and quite quickly. I got to make a music video and at the time Dunedin City Council would give you extra help if you filmed there. I’d always seen these old stations around Dunedin but I didn’t know anything about them. I did some research and found out that they used to have a full suburban rail system, the way that Wellington does today and Auckland has sort of rebuilt. It lasted until 1982. That was completely shocking to me because I grew up in the diesel bus era and had accepted that that’s all there ever was.

From then on, it was like a psychedelic wormhole. In every town I looked at or toured I would research what public transport they used to have. Before that, I honestly didn’t think about public transport. My wife quite regularly says that when she married me, trains and buses weren’t part of the deal.

I’d taken piano lessons from a young age. By the time I was 15 I hated it. I would spend the whole year learning three classical pieces to become this machine that could very badly play Mozart. So I quit. But a couple of things happened. One was that my sister was trying guitar lessons and they didn’t work out, so there was a guitar sitting around.

The other was that friends of mine wanted to start a band. I was envious so that summer I picked up my sister’s guitar and got a learn-to-play book from the library. It was the most serendipitous book because it grouped chords in keys. I learned them and, with my piano background, it was like I had two halves of the image. Suddenly, I understood in a rough way how music worked. It was a phenomenal feeling. Pretty quickly I went from having no interest in music at all to deciding that music was what I was going to do with my life.

The only other time I’ve had anything like that was with my discovery of the Dunedin rail system.

I’d been thinking and thinking about public transport so the former mayor here suggested I get involved in the council. In 2020 I started doing advocacy for the Whanganui District Council to try to improve our bus system. A year later, the tender for the Durie Hill Elevator came up, which is essentially a tram. I thought, “Do I want to run it?”

I was worried about taking it on but it’s turned out to be a great thing. I was going to be thinking about public transport all day anyway. I might as well have a little public transport service to run.

I love the documentary movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi. That guy turns up and does the same thing every day, but makes very slight, incremental improvements. That’s how I feel about the elevator. It’s been a magic ingredient. It greases the wheels of my process and my life really. I finally feel like I’ve found what was missing from the whole puzzle.

- As told to Karl Puschmann

* Anthonie Tonnon and the Leave Love Out Of This Band are touring Aotearoa over the next few months. They kicked off in Palmerston North on February 3, play New Plymouth and Hamilton in March, and Waiheke Island, Mosgiel and Queenstown in April. For info and tickets visit anthonietonnon.com