‘Show goes on:’ Early start to beat Sir Rod’s rainy night in Napier

The Mission Estate stage looking moody as of yesterday afternoon. Photo / Paul Taylor

Sir Rod Stewart’s Easter Saturday Mission Estate Concert in Napier has been brought forward by more than half an hour in an attempt to avoid the last encore being drowned in rain.

The 78-year-old’s two-hour act was to have started about 8pm, but Mission Estate Winery chief executive Peter Holley said that after a Friday meeting with long-time Mission Concert promoter Gary Craft and using information from specialist forecasters it had been decided Sir Rod will now take the stage just after 7pm.

Gates open at 2pm with local acts Ella Pollett and Stretch up before veteran international Kiwi performer Jon Stevens takes the stage at 4.15pm, and Cyndi Lauper makes her entrance at 5.35pm.

Holley said the winery subscribes to a private, specialised climate service for its grape-growing operation.

Amid national agency MetService’s heavy rain warnings, the subscriber service is predicting rain from about 10pm, the time the concert would have finished.

“We thought if we could bring the programme forward we could get everyone out and home safely by the time the rain comes,” he said, as fans waited fingers-crossed as to whether the 30th anniversary Mission Estate Concert will go ahead.

Holley assures them it will, saying: “I think the show goes on.”

The micro-forecast was showing heavy showers from about 10pm to the early hours of the morning,” he said. “It made sense to bring it forward.”

MetService forecaster Gerard Bellam said the heavy rain warning for north of Napier remained in place, with falls totalling up to 200mm in Northern Hawke’s Bay possible, by 6am on Sunday, while the forecast from Napier-south was for periods of heavy rain, mainly about the ranges.

Weatherwise, the ground-breaking Mission Concerts, dating back to Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s appearance in 1993, has escaped rainy nights in Napier for most of the time – the precipitation sometimes lingering threateningly but ultimately having caused just one cancellation – the 6.30pm announcement to a drenched Lionel Richie concert crowd on the night of February 28, 2009.

If Sir Rod follows form for other concerts on his final Australasian tour, he’d get through about 22 songs, almost half from his selection of covers.

But recent set lists have no sign of Creedence Clearwater Revival covers such as Who Stop the Rain, or Have You Ever Seen the Rain, nor, for that matter, Brook Benton’s Rainy night in Georgia.