In the wee hours of the morning, five days a week, the alarm clock beeps on Nathan Rarere’s phone at 3.10am. He hits the snooze button, and dozes for 10 more precious minutes until the next round of beeps gets him out of bed.
It’s off to work he must go, leaving his wife, their two daughters and four cats snuggled up in the sleepy warmth of their West Auckland home. His mission, as host of Radio New Zealand’s 5am First Up show, is to help listeners enjoy waking up, too.
Over the past two years, Rarere and his team have built First Up into a brisk mix of news and interviews that make you more engaged in what’s going on in the world, even if you’re only half-awake.
It’s also deliciously eccentric.
When Rarere, 51, first moved to RNZ in late 2020, public broadcasting was completely foreign to him. He’d worked on commercial radio for 30-plus years and become a TV star on “youth” shows Ice TV on TV3 and Box Dog on the now-defunct Max TV. His long CV is well documented, full of ups and downs.
Commercial broadcasting is a fickle business. The day I first met Rarere for this story, his phone was abuzz with texts from friends saying Today FM had closed.
He’s gone through the grief of closures and firings himself, most notably from the Channel Z alt-music radio station in 2003, where he partnered with Jon Bridges in the mornings. “When you’re doing stuff attached to money, you’ve got to please the money,” he says. “You end up doing a show for your advertisers, not for anybody else.”
That kind of pressure can batter your confidence, but now Rarere feels he’s grown into his real voice, buoyed by working in a team. “Other people make your ideas better. You’ve got such a range of support here, I don’t feel like I can fail when I go in. It feels like such a secure ship that all I have to do is the links in-between. The idea is to make something interesting and the atmosphere is so nice … You don’t have that sales department pressure.”
Rarere’s affable persona has recently been extended to Morning Report, where he reads the sports news and adds commentary.
“When I started doing the sports results, I was learning how to be a newsreader, otherwise it’s really flat. I’ve got Katrina Batten [the RNZ newsreader and a First Up producer] as my security blanket. She’s been coaching me, and she’s really stern when she needs to be. It’s good to have that. A lot of hosts don’t like that but how do you get better?”
One of First Up’s most distinct points of difference is its use of music – what Rarere calls the “little soundy bits” – to introduce regular guests or define the subject.
His roster of international correspondents includes the straight-talking New Zealand broadcaster Pam Corkery, now based in Brisbane. Her slot is live, at just past 3am Brisbane time, a testament to her stamina.
‘Nathan it up’
When Rarere got the job, he was given the licence to do whatever he wanted, to “Nathan it up”, as one of his former bosses used to describe it.
Predictably, it has driven some listeners nuts. “People never like a new host,” he says. “They will only tell you if they don’t like you. The RNZ audience are rampant correctors, but I don’t mind being corrected.
“And then you get the ones who are waiting to crush you. Developing a thick skin is very necessary. I don’t look at the text line now when I do the show. That goes through Katrina and Jeremy [Parkinson, the show’s primary producer].”
Before First Up, Rarere had been a host at Radio Sport for a year. But when NZME closed the station three days into the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, he found himself jobless, and scared, thinking, “I’ve got nothing.”
A few months later, Parkinson, an old mate, asked him to do some casual sports slots, saying, “Just do it your way. We will call you at 5.20.” Rarere laughs. “I said, ‘I think I’ll be making dinner at that stage.’ He said, ‘No, no, 5.20 in the morning.’
“It was nerve-racking. Doing all the radio I had done before, you always look at RNZ like, ‘That’s like BBC One’, quite stiff, quite proper, everyone talks very properly. I thought, ‘They’re going to hate me.’”
Nevertheless, when then-First Up host Indira Stewart resigned to move to TVNZ, Rarere chucked his hat in the ring. They didn’t hate him; they chose him.
Rarere works both ends of the clock. After his shift, he used to race back home to drive daughters, Rylla, 15, and Darcy, 11, to school.But now the job has extended into Morning Report, the school run is taken care of by his wife Kelly. The couple married in Las Vegas in 2006, because it was “cheap and fun”. Oscar Kightley walked Kelly down the aisle, and their celebrant Eddie Powers, “The Best Elvis in Vegas”, sends a message via Facebook each year: “How’s my favourite couple from Noo Zee-land?”
Rarere’s family always comes first. His routine is shaped around Kelly’s health, which is compromised by Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune condition which can cause periods of crashing fatigue. Consequently, there are some rare occasions when First Up must carry on without him.
“There are days when Kelly can do it and days when she can’t,” he says. “Radio NZ was really understanding about our family situation. They have been awesome ... realising that sometimes I can’t be on call 24/7. You’ve got your family stuff to deal with and it makes me so grateful. I try not to let them down.”
In the afternoons, he has a snooze, picks up the girls and makes an early dinner. From 7pm on, he works, doing pre-records and prepping. As soon as he gets up, he checks the overnight news feed before heading out on the motorway towards RNZ in central Auckland.
Canadian revelation
When he first started working in radio as a teenager, he kept applying for the New Zealand Broadcasting School and he was repeatedly told, “No. Not with your voice.”
Rarere (Ngāti Rongomaiwahine) grew up in Hastings, the youngest of four, with three older sisters. His father Sam was a police officer who focused on youth aid work; his mother Ann, now retired, was principal of St Joseph’s Primary School.
Waipatu, the family marae near Hastings, adjoins a rugby club, which his father belonged to. It’s also connected to an urupā where his father, who died about 10 years ago, is buried along with one of Rarere’s sisters and his grandparents.
“I lived a very lucky life,” Rarere recalls. “Mum and Dad were both working all the time; we never went on holidays but we never wanted for anything. We were never without food or clothes but most of my mates in Camberley, or Flaxmere, or west Hastings, where I grew up, weren’t in that situation. I mean, the Mongrel Mob started there, so a lot of my friends from school were Mongrel Mob guys because that’s the family they were born into.
“But there seemed to be that camaraderie, like, ‘We know we are poorer, we’ve got second-hand stuff, so let’s make a bit of a joke about it.’”
In 1989, when Rarere was 17, he was awarded a Rotary Exchange scholarship to oil-rich Calgary in Canada. “It was the most shaping year of my life,” he recalls.
“Calgary was where Theatresports was invented, with all the ad-libbing. It was awesome. And I got comfortable talking to rich white men in suits; I didn’t find them intimidating.
“I had so many cultural experiences there and one of the people I met had a radio station so I went in and did a couple of bits and I thought, right, when I get back, I will apply for the broadcasting school.”
Rarere returned to Hastings to complete his seventh-form (Year 13) studies and, at the same time, worked the midnight-dawn shift at 93FM – which is now called Magic and plays “oldie” classics. “Oh, come on!” he says. “Well, it certainly wasn’t in my days.”
One of the most memorable aspects of that job was the station’s proximity to the Wattie’s canning factory. “You’d have the window open and when they were doing fruit salad it was like, ‘Aw, it smells amazing’, and the tomato soup was so nice, too.”
It was invaluable training. Rarere progressed to KiwiFM in Hamilton, where he won the Best New Broadcaster Award in 1992. “But,” he says, “one of the finalists told me her boss said, ‘He only won it because he’s Māori.’ That kind of robbed the night for me.”
Playing a character
The racism taken for granted when he was growing up still resonates today, he says. “I was always looked at more than my Pākehā friends. When we’d go into dairies or shops, I’d get followed. My father had a habit of walking down the centre of the supermarket aisles jingling his keys in his hands, which was Dad going, ‘This is where my hands are.’ Because it happens so many times.
“It sinks in and it’s hard to shake out. I have this weird paranoia now where I will not walk close to shelves in a shop. My daughter Darcy, she’ll be walking in a shop in her hoodie and she’ll suddenly put her hands in her pockets and I am like, ‘Don’t do that.’ Even now.”
Rarere’s father had a debilitating stroke shortly after retirement, and died seven years later after a series of mini-strokes. He lived long enough to meet Rylla and Darcy, who was named after Sam’s beloved brother.
In his final moments, Rarere recalls, “He woke up and looked straight at me and said, ‘Hi, Nace, why am I still here?’”
His father’s funeral was a unifying event in the Hastings community.
“Because of Dad’s life, all the police formed a guard of honour. And all these Mongrel Mob guys, because of all the youth aid work he’d done, they stood up and spoke. They called him Uncle Sam. This guy stood up, took off his rig [patch] and said, ‘Uncle Sam kicked my arse. He’s the only adult man I have let do that.’ Dad was also a Freemason so a Freemason stood up. Those were the layers of Dad’s life.”
Before he was ensnared by radio and TV, Rarere had been accepted into Victoria University of Wellington to study psychology but never turned up. His father didn’t forget that. “Dad came up to Auckland to be on Ice TV. We had a show [with co-hosts Petra Bagust and Bridges] where we had all the dads on. Dad was so uncomfortable but he did it for me and it is beautiful when I think about it. About two years later, I remember Dad going, ‘Hmm, are you going to go to university and get a job?’ I do sometimes wonder what I would have done if I had gone ahead with that.
“I never really asked Mum what she thought about me working in radio. I think she was a bit amused, but your kid riding off to work on his bike at 11.30 at night is not really what you want, is it?”
Rarere recalls that when he was starting out in radio, he often played “characters” he’d grown up listening to, comedians like Kenny Everett, Victor Borge and Robin Williams. Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan’s narcissistic radio-host) is also a favourite – but not his real-life equivalents. “You see ‘him’ so many times. You work with him so many times.”
Of those early days, he says, “I wasn’t confident enough to talk on air in my own voice. I was so young, I didn’t understand myself but I could do it as a character. If I had done it in my own voice, I would have been too nervous. But on First Up, it’s Pip [Keane, RNZ multi-media programmes editor] saying, ‘Just do your thing.’
“I used to be quite control-freakish about ideas, like you do before you learn to be comfortable with yourself. That’s a hard stage to get to; your ego is quite hard as a performer. Now, in the morning, I love it when I get contributions from other people.”
Rarere says he finds excitement in seeking out “odd things” on the show – and so do his listeners. “We have Kalafi Moala reporting from Tonga and his neighbour’s rooster crows through a lot of it. So people text in with how many times they have heard the rooster.”
For some reason, the thought of listeners counting crows at that hour of the morning seems terribly sweet. It’s a good first start to the day.
