NZ on Screen: Classic NZ music festivals

The crowd at the 2015 Laneway Festival at Silo Park, Auckland. Photo / Jason Dorday

Didn’t get to go to Laneway? Missing the Big Day Out? NZ On Screen Content Director Irene Gardiner re-visits some of the legendary Kiwi music festivals of the past.

It was the summer of 1970, three years after Woodstock, and local media had hyped the two-day Redwood music festival as New Zealand's version. In the end it was rather more low key than Woodstock, with 1500 music fans travelling out to the Swanson holiday park in West Auckland for the event. MC Peter Sinclair introduced Redwood as "36 hours of non stop top pops of New Zealand's top bands." The international headliner was Bee Gee Robin Gibb, and the festival made the news when Gibb's show was rushed by fans and fruit was thrown at Gibb and his band members. This half-hour NZBC documentary chronicles the event.

You can view Redwood 70 here:

In 1979, the three-day Nambassa festival was held on a Waihi farm, and attended by 60,000 people. It represented a high tide mark in NZ for the Woodstock vision of a music festival as a counter-culture celebration of music, crafts, alternative lifestyles and all things hippy. Performers included Split Enz, The Plague (wearing paint), Limbs dancers, a yodelling John Hore-Grenell and prog rockers Schtung.

You can see the Nambassa Festival documentary here:

The first of the popular Sweetwaters music festivals was held in 1980, at Ngaruawahia. Music reporter Dylan Taite covered the festival for this Radio with Pictures special. Headliner Elvis Costello proved media-shy for Taite and his crew, but local bands including The Swingers, Mi-Sex and Citizen Band were happy to be featured.

Watch Radio with Pictures - Sweetwaters here:

The 1999 Sweetwaters revival ended up mired in controversy, when many of the artists weren't paid. It also provided the setting for this Shirley Horrocks documentary Sweet As, which follows the experiences of two groups at the festival - six teenagers (including actor Kate Elliott, then 17), and a group of 30-somethings (many of them veterans of the 80s Sweetwaters). Elvis Costello was in the international line-up again, and dropped the on-stage bombshell that the artists hadn't been paid.

You can see Costello in this excerpt from Sweet As:

Also in 1999, Mikey Havoc and Jeremy "Newsboy" Wells made this special on that year's Big Day Out music festival. The irreverent pair survey the "punters, munters, sights and sounds" at Mt Smart Stadium. They meet musical acts of the era, including Korn, Marilyn Manson and Fatboy Slim, and local heroes Shihad. Newsboy interviews "Nelson College old girl, grunge super bride and Big Day Out recidivist" Courtney Love, who (apparently) gives him the glad eye.

Watch Havoc at the Big Day Out here: