The sold-out light, laser and music extravaganza will be attended by 40,000 people. Photo / Supplied
Nicky Park of RNZ
How did a concert that started with an orchestra playing dance bangers become the biggest one-day festival in New Zealand?
Geriatric millennials across Auckland have booked babysitters. They’re doing their stretches, prepping the rehydration drinks and gearing up to be taken on the sweaty ride of Synthony this Saturday.
The sold-out light, laser and music extravaganza will be attended by 40,000 people, making it New Zealand’s biggest one-day festival. It hits the spot of the good ol’ days of a certain age – and that is exactly what the brains behind it had in mind when they came up with the concept on their couch back in 2016.
“The fundamentals of the show that we kind of came up with was nostalgia is this undervalued thing in the marketplace,” explains David Elmsly.
“The people that grew up with these tracks, they actually want to hear them, but people don’t play them anymore.
“They’re very powerful because they’re connected to people’s memories from when they were first going out.
“So you come to Synthony … it’s mainly like 35+ people there because that’s who the music’s targeted to, right? It’s targeted to those that are like ‘when I used to go out before I had a wife and kids, this is the music I listen to and I love it’.”
Elmsly, a New Zealand pilot, was chilling at home when his YouTube algorithm spat up a BBC recording of British DJ Pete Tong performing at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Having just hung up his hat after nine years running the New Zealand Beer Festival, Elmsly was thirsty for a new event and inspiration struck. He took his Synthony idea to then-partner Erika Amoore. She was a DJ, music producer and accountant and had bonus knowledge and contacts to pull it off.
“It was like all the best dance music for the last 30 years and I watched it and I was just totally captivated,” says Elmsly of that Pete Tong gig.
“Then, my friend who was living in London at the time, texted me and said: ‘I’ve just been to the best concert of my life’, and I’m like, ‘I just watched that on YouTube‘.”
Elmsly and Amoore gave themselves a year to flesh out the first-ever show. They signed up semi-professional Auckland Symphony Orchestra, a collection of volunteers, with vocalists centre stage. In about a week, they sold all 2500 seats to the 2017 Auckland Town Hall show, mostly to punters aged 35+. Elmsly reckons they could have done a second.
It was a moment in a rehearsal for that inaugural performance when a banger dropped with the sound of the string section – that he got goosebumps. As he sat there filming for social media he remembers thinking: “We’ve cracked it. This is, this is incredible.”
Elmsly and Amoore’s vision for Synthony was to be able to gather about 15,000 people at a winery for “a very big dance music event in New Zealand. That that that’s where I saw it going”.
But they needed bigger bucks to back it. That’s when they stepped into their mate, David Higgins’ office, and his company, Duco Events, purchased the “little event” in 2018.
Higgins’ knew it had legs: “I thought if this works in Auckland, why wouldn’t it work in a hundred other cities around the world? And so the vision was to expand it.”
Under Higgins, the event recruited the Auckland Philharmonia and spread its wings to different city centres, moving on to bigger and bigger venues around NZ, with three shows at Auckland’s Spark Arena before they had to head outdoors to grow numbers three years ago.
While Higgins’ has grand plans, he intends to clutch on to the value of that 35+ market.
“That was part of the thinking to go into a festival in Auckland because there’s … a lot of music festivals in New Zealand, but they’re all multi-day affairs and they’re all out of town and they seem to be a younger crowd,” he explains.
“We were thinking there must be a gap. The market’s there for the affluent busy parents who, you know, would have to go to a music festival in our own backyard.
“It’s captured a market that wasn’t being served.”
While this summer has seen a slate of music festivals hit the skids (four outdoor festivals were cancelled and another four postponed) Synthony has managed to conquer, attracting major headliners like Darude and Basement Jaxx.
Higgins reckons social media has also played a huge part in Synthony’s buzz – “we’re getting a massive following globally” - with an international database in the hundreds of thousands and YouTube videos from the show garnering millions of eyeballs.
“It’s a mix of credibility and budget, frankly,” Higgins explains.
“It’s such a magic experience … nearly everyone who went rates it 10 out of 10 or close to it and tells their friends and family.
“…We’ve obviously got more budget now, so we’re able to make good offers to these international acts to come and participate.”
The budget for that first Town Hall show back in 2017, Higgins’ estimates would have come in under $20,000 for sound, lighting and lasers. This year they’re spending “over $1 million” – that’s to cover 45 tonnes of production gear, 350 lights, 475sq m of LED screens, 14 giant laser lights, five large light sculptures, water, toilets, security and all the rest.
They boast double the amount of fancy pyrotechnics than previous years, which go into creating “five or six wow moments” says Elmsly, who now runs the digital marketing for the festival.
Higgins says the show is “a breathtaking collision of electronic dance music with live orchestra and immersive visuals”. Sarah-Grace Williams is the principal conductor of that creative clash.
The classical musician has a hefty CV. She was a pianist, but also plays clarinet, sax and cello. She started conducting on the side while still studying, then flipped to make it her main gig. Williams studied in Russia before returning to Australia and setting up the Metropolitan Orchestra, where she is artistic director.
She says there’s nothing like the fizz of Synthony, something that hit her for the first time in 2018 when the Auckland Philharmonia performed its version of Darude’s Sandstorm, strings replacing synth and lasers shooting around the historical Town Hall.
“There’s this energy from the beginning. It’s the only show I do or have ever done really that the crowd needs no warming up.”
Based in Australia, she will fly in later this week for just one rehearsal with the whole 58-piece Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra ahead of Saturday’s 29-track, 100-minute set (they are joined by 30 choir members, 16 dancers, eight samba dancers and other entertainers).
Musical director Dick Johnson calls on his 35 years of experience on the DJ decks to craft the popular Synthony setlist.
Johnson describes this year’s as a combo of early 90s classics that “have to be there” (there was uproar when he tried to take Sandstorm out), with at least 20 new tracks to keep it fresh (for the audience and himself).
“… We’re doing kind of more sort of mashups… like last year we did Bohemian Rhapsody mixed with Fisher and people just love that stuff, real kind of unexpected, whatever it is, like a classic rock song mixed in with the current dance track or something like that.
“And doing that with the orchestra as well... just takes it to another level.”
The “everchanging” and highly-curated setlist is given to orchestrator Ryan Youens (who has clocked 180 arrangements since that first ever Synthony and now also doubles as the show director) to create the parts for the orchestra.
“He actually reimagines the music, taps into the tapestry and the capabilities of the orchestra and what the orchestra can do, the colours and the scope and the dynamic that it can create. It’s incredible and he uses it to its absolute full potential,” says Williams.
“The parts he writes, the musicians really want to play cause he, he’s such a good writer, and that is actually the key element.
“….At the end of the rehearsal, I say, ‘right, so now we’ve got all the notes in the right place. We’ve got everything happening. It sounds excellent. Now, tonight, when we get on the stage, I’m going to a dance party and I hope you come too cause we need to now lift that level of energy.”
Synthony has now racked up plenty of shows in Australia. It’s opened a resort in Greece, wowed a public festival of 30,000 Mexico and last year it was the main entertainment on the starting line at the Formula One Grand Prix in Las Vegas.
Both Elmsly and Higgins describe the grand plan for the Kiwi-born concept as being the “Cirque du Soleil of music”.
“We’re gonna be, we want to be the biggest New Zealand music brand ever.”
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