Musicians ready to set churches on fire

Delaney Davidson, Tami Neilson, Barry Saunders and Marlon Williams will play together on the 2015 Church Tour.

Individually Delaney Davidson, Tami Neilson, Barry Saunders and Marlon Williams are among New Zealand's finest music makers. Put them together on the same bill - as they are for the 2015 Church Tour - and you've got the best touring line-up in recent memory.

And it's not just fans who think so. Travelling troubadour, Delaney Davidson, is also pretty excited. "The fact that the promoters said, 'Hey do you guys want to tour together?' is like a gift because I don't know when we'd otherwise find the time to all work together. They all have their own lives and their own schedules, so just to be invited to be part of something like this is fantastic."

Those who have closely followed the solo works and collaborations of Davidson, Williams and Neilson will know what a tight-knit trio they are. It is, however, the first time Davidson has worked with The Warratahs frontman, Barry Saunders.

"He's definitely the odd one out on this tour and you couldn't have had a better odd one out," he says. "And obviously what he brings as a performer and a songwriter will be great. It'll be really nice to work with him and watch him close up and see how he does things."

The tour kicks off in Napier on October 1, ending in Dunedin on October 10, and promises to deliver the best blend of country, alt-country, spaghetti noir, rockabilly, folk and honky tonk you'll hear anywhere.

Genres aside, it'll simply be a night of cracking music. "People come up to me and say 'Oh man I didn't know I liked country music'," says Davidson, laughing at the perceptions some still have of so-called country music.

"And I think, 'Well, it probably wasn't country I was playing, but who cares, you saw some music you liked and that's awesome'."

Davidson, who has won countless APRA NZ Country Music awards, is one of the most prolific artists around.

He and Williams are two of the brains behind the Sad But True album series and he's got several solo works to his name. His next, Lucky Guy, will be out in early September.

"It's an album I recorded in the Lab in Auckland with Olly Harmer. It came out of working a lot with [local artists] Ben Woolley and Joe McCallum. We were like this core team for so many bands, and I was like 'Man, we're really cooking together. Let's just do an album with us three'," he says.

So with a repertoire as long, and as varied as Davidson's, you can be assured his involvement in the 2015 Church Tour will be more than just a "new album" set. In the same way, you know for certain this is a tour not to be missed.

The 2015 Church Tour runs from October 1-10. For dates visit churchtour.co.nz. Tickets from ticketmaster.co.nz