Kiwi funksters Supergroove are playing Wairarapa for the first time since the early 90s and their now annual resurrection was a lifesaver for band frontman Karl Steven after a bitter decade of discontent abroad.
Steven, speaking from the Auckland home he shares with wife Laura and young daughter Maja, said he
quit the platinum and gold-selling band in 1996, 12 months before Supergroove scattered to the wind.
There was no single reason for the then seven-piece to disband, he said, other than a slow-burning divergence of interests and ambitions after playing and recording together since their formation seven years earlier.
Steven said he packed up his Auckland home and moved with his family to Cambridge in Britain, where he "turned off the music and spent years in libraries" studying ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.
"I'd had a gutsful of the music industry. Music had become just a job and stuff that was not much fun - more like business and messed-up friendships.
The band had released two albums prior to their break-up - Traction in 1994 and Backspacer in 1996 that captured a run of New Zealand Music Awards - and had scored chart status and video awards with singles Can't Get Enough, You Gotta Know, Scorpio Girls and Sitting Inside My Head.
Steven was a songwriting cornerstone of the band but his study was a "practically silent and academically dry" affair, infrequently peppered with brief musical interludes to help other performers on stage and in the studio.
"But then things got very hard over there. My wife became very sick, my daughter was diagnosed as autistic and Cambridge morphed into a smalltown for a pair of Aucklanders used to bigger city life - it became very dry and academic.
"And all of that came at once in an endless chain of bleak English winters, until I realised that music - which I had not been listening to or buying - was the only way that could get me through."
Steven said that after returning to New Zealand, he leapt at the opportunity to resurrect Supergroove in 1997.
"I'd been hoping a reformation would happen since the music turned back on for me in England - because I knew the only other way the Supergroove boys would ever get to hang out together again was if we got back together.
"Otherwise it would have been as a shrinking group of old people at the Supergroove funerals."
Supergroove are playing at Alana Estate Vineyard on Saturday as part of the A Day on the Green tour alongside Crowded House and Wanganui singer Seth Haapu.
Gates open at 4pm and admission is $98.20. Alcohol and food are provided on site and although concert-goers may bring a picnic meal there is strictly no BYO.
For tickets and transport call Tranzit Coachlines on 06 377 1227 or go to
www.tranzit.co.nz or email tours@tranzit.co.nz.
Kiwi funksters Supergroove are playing Wairarapa for the first time since the early 90s and their now annual resurrection was a lifesaver for band frontman Karl Steven after a bitter decade of discontent abroad.
Steven, speaking from the Auckland home he shares with wife Laura and young daughter Maja, said he
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