At the Tuning Fork in front of a crowd containing Dean Wareham's relatives, guest ring-in Harwood was back on four-string for the second half of Luna's set.
Given that the band up there on stage had a former resident of Herne Bay and a current one of Piha, you might think this was just another Saturday night Auckland pub gig. You'd be wrong.
For this was the first ever New Zealand performance of Luna, a group which
became standard bearers for a very New York flavour of rock'n'roll through the 90s, here for the first time on a reunion tour a decade after calling it a day in the mid-noughties.
Singer-guitarist Dean Wareham is New Zealand-born. On stage he quipped he'd left Herne Bay - "is it still there?" - as an infant with his globetrotting family. That was about the time the Velvet Underground were creating the template for Luna's simple dreamy rock'n'roll.
Having done time in late 80s Boston-born Galaxie 500, Wareham formed Luna with former Chills bassist Justin Harwood (the Piha connection) who left the band after 1999's fifth album The Days of Our Nights to be replaced by Britta Phillips.
At the Tuning Fork in front of a crowd containing Wareham's relatives, guest ring-in Harwood was back on four-string for the second half of Luna's set as Phillips shifted to keyboards.
