Anthonie Tonnon: The musician making railway journeys meaningful again

Anthonie Tonnon. Photo / Belinda Merrie

Anthonie Tonnon's 2015 song Railway Lines takes the character of an old campaigner. Its nameless central character is a man "born before the motorway system" who has spent his life trying to reclaim the city from the cars that rule it, standing quixotically for council, being humiliated in the press. Now, older, wiser and "all the way grey", he sees the city he fought for beginning to emerge – and he's not sure what to make of it, whether or when to declare victory.

Several years ago, I asked him whether the song was about anyone in particular.

"It might be about me," he answered.

In 2021, 34-year-old Tonnon, touring performer, recording artist, Silver Scrolls-nominated songwriter, is the Whanganui City Council's appointed representative on the Horizons Regional Council's transport committee, which runs the city's public transport.

His audition was a performance last year of Rail Land, the themed show he created to make rail journeys meaningful again, at St Peter's Church in the Whanganui suburb of Gonville, where Tonnon and his partner Karlya settled in 2017, attracted by the hint of urbanism and the chance to buy a house.

The audience, which had been able to arrive on a chartered bus recreating the city's long-lost No. 6 tram route, included Hamish McDouall, music fan (he won Mastermind in 1990 with the works of David Bowie as his specialist subject) and Mayor of Whanganui.

McDouall says the idea of asking the singer to take up the role, which is usually filled by a city councillor, came to him during the show's finale, in which Tonnon engages the audience to sing the refrain "0800 Arrival" – the contact phone number for bookings on New Zealand's only intercity commuter train, the Capital Connection between Wellington and Palmerston North.

"He struck me during the concert as a great advocate – as well as being an incredible artist and the best-dressed man this side of the Great Divide," the mayor explains. "And I thought, I can't waste someone of his talent, passion and knowledge."

It's hard to imagine this story being told about any other working musician. But Tonnon, who brings Rail Land back to Auckland for three nights at Motat as part of the Auckland Arts Festival, isn't like most other musicians.

"I think audiences want to believe that musicians are talented by nature and that they were just born with it," he ventures. "Some musicians believe that. And there are some who really do seem to be born like that, like Marlon Williams. For me, I'm from that lonelier troupe of musicians that has to be bad before they get any good. I think. David Bowie was like that. The 60s are full of David Bowie clangers."

It was in fact Bowie who drew Tonnon into writing and performing. He'd finally quit piano lessons at the age of 16, after reaching Grade 6 in the Trinity system. Then he picked up his sister's guitar, borrowed a book about chords from the nearby Mosgiel Public Library and set about learning songs from the Best of Bowie compilation. He'd grown to hate the piano and being "the world's worst CD player" but this seemed different.

"I suddenly got it. I was like, 'Oh, this is all songwriting is, you pick one of six chords from a key, fiddle around until they sound right, and sing over the top of them, and you've got songwriting.' And it was songwriting that got me. Suddenly, from having no interest in music, at that moment that was all I wanted to do."

He was sufficiently enthused to take Dr Graeme Downes' rock music course at the University of Otago, alongside a history major. He was a star at the latter, earning a scholarship in his first year – and less than stellar at the former.

Downes, who is intensely proud of his former student, recalls a young man with "songwriter smarts I guess, which is more diligence than talent" but also a profound willingness to work at what he was doing. Tonnon concurs and praises his mentor's patience.

"I remember one time, Graeme implying that I maybe wasn't quite ready to like, to go out and do things right away, because actually a lot of my songs were terrible. Absolutely terrible. And I've been thinking about this lately as a theory of, like, where does a musician come from?"

Tonnon thinks about everything. An interview with a musician can be a struggle to extract a coherent thought but with Tonnon it's two-and-a-half hours of a thoroughly examined life, in whole sentences.

"He is constantly thinking, rethinking. I've never known a more thoughtful artist when it comes to their own craft and what it means," says Auckland music identity Matthew Crawley, who met Tonnon when he first ventured north from Dunedin in 2009. "He's someone who doesn't so much predict the future as decide what the future's going be – and doesn't accept anything else. He's not scouring the rules, he's busily creating his own path. I really respect that."

Photo / Karlya Smith

When Tonnon wanted out of his "gruelling" first job in Auckland, as a tour guide, it was Crawley who offered him a job at the bar he ran, Ponsonby's Golden Dawn.

"He wanted to be the best drinks maker. So he just studied and studied and became a really great drinks maker. He's someone who clearly does not like making things that he doesn't like. He works really hard to become who he wants to be. Most people don't do that."

Tonnon has made a few things he doesn't like, or at least which needed to be improved on. He no longer sells his first EP, Love and Economics, and while he wrote memorable character songs after that – notably, Barry Smith of Hamilton and Marion Bates Realty – he was in danger of being merely clever. The name he'd been working as, Tono and the Finance Company, didn't help. That all changed with his second album, Successor, the first under his own name, produced with Jonathan Pearce of The Beths.

The first single from the album was Water Underground, which took on the spectacularly unlikely topic of National Government Minister Nick Smith's disabling of Environment Canterbury. At the risk of faint praise, it is the best-ever New Zealand song about local government.

For his part, Tonnon thinks the first song after Successor, Two Free Hands – lyrically, the wistful daydream of a school careers counsellor – was the real turning point. That was the first one built up from a beat. In search of a better way to carry a show than just being a guy with a guitar, he had first constructed a slightly comic system involving an iPad, several guitar pedals and quite a lot of velcro, then became an early adopter of the New Zealand-made sampler and sequencer, the Synthstrom Deluge. It meant he could make any sound he wanted on stage.

On tours through Europe and the US with his friend Nadia Reid, he worked on his patter, his movements, his audience interaction. Perhaps most importantly, he worked on being Anthonie Tonnon.

"I've had an element of that persona for a long time," he says. "When I was in high school I took drama and found I could be someone else on stage. I could speak clearly and with better timing. Even now, when I speak in improvised conversation, my focus meanders, I stutter, I don't maintain a tone.

"And that was initially how I spoke between songs - the classic awkward New Zealand banter. But when I realised that every moment on stage was a performance - not just the songs, the voice came to me. It allows me to speak clearly, with focus, and with words as crafted as the lyrics in the songs.

"Since A Synthesized Universe [the planetarium-based show he brought to the Arts Festival in 2019] lines have blurred further, as narration over music has become part of the writing process of the show. There's an over-the-top, fragile seriousness to it, particularly when it meets the naive dance moves. Being a man in a suit is a performance any time and I try to play with that idea. The voice turns off at the merchandise table, where I can properly take in what people say to me about the show."

The merchandise table at gigs is another key part of sustaining himself an an arts business. Around the time of Successor, he worked out that he sold more merchandise after a show if he was there selling it himself, so he'll jump off the stage to be there at the desk before people leave. He has fulfilled his aim of earning as much as a musician as his father – who was initially aghast at his son's choice of career – did as a glazier.

"Which was incredibly low-bar, naive thing that only somebody living in the suburbs of Dunedin would aspire to. I do wonder if I even knew that people earned more than $30,000 or $40,000. I never knew that with my abilities in history, I could have finished the history degree, moved to Wellington and started above $60,000. If someone had told me that, I might not be here."

Eventually, he says "I reached a stage where I could think, music's my job now and I need a hobby. And it was about that time that my spare time became consumed with thinking about public transport."

The thinking – more thinking! – found its outlet with his role in Whanganui. His appointment by the mayor was unanimously confirmed by city councillors, after he had presented his vision for public transport in Whanganui.

"One of my councillors afterwards asked me where I found him and called him 'a jewel'," says McDouall. "Everybody was impressed with the depth of his knowledge. I couldn't ask for a better person. He's rattled a few cages, but also advocated in an entirely convincing and successful way."

Another musical chapter is pending with the release of his third album, Leave Love Out of This, fully six years after Successor. Some of the songs, including the epic title track, have been brewing almost that long. Tonnon is nothing if not patient. He has plans.

Some singers, Crawley observes, take the stage not knowing what they're going to do – that's why they're getting up there. Tonnon makes a virtue of knowing exactly what he's he's going to do. It could simply wind up feeling like work, but it doesn't. He's funny, engaging and touching. You'll laugh, you'll sing, you'll learn a lot about public transport.

"I believe," says Tonnon, "the only reason I should have an hour of someone else's time is because I've prepared that hour for hundreds of hours. The hour then becomes an experience of distilled time - a stronger, more potent version of life. That's most true in songwriting – and sometimes a great song is enough. But it's also how you move and interact with the audience, the lights and sound, where the tables and seats are. It's everything else."

Anthonie Tonnon presents Rail Land as part of the Auckland Arts Festival on March 9, 10 and 11 at Motat. Audiences will arrive at the concerts by tram. aaf.co.nz/event/rail-land