Golden Lights Festival ushers in the New Year and the brave New World (Order) for Auckland. Featuring Becky Hill, Peggy Gou, Foals, Sub Focus and Wilkinson.
Four seasons in one hour let alone one day. Rain mostly at bay although we got a good drenching just after Becky Hill started on the end of Friday afternoon.
She came to general attention when appearing on the first series of The Voice in the UK. Over the last decade she has amassed several dance hits, including the first number one record to come from a Voice artist, Gecko (Overdrive).
I’m sure this is performed as the pellets of rain become heavy. A hot dance party song which does extends out into overdrive.
The opener is just as hot and racy, Crazy What Love Can Do. Wrap me up in diamonds/ Cover me in gold.
Then it was… the day that the rains came down/ Mother Earth smiled again.
People are huddling rather than dancing until it abates in half an hour.
Everyone can get up for My Heart Goes (La Di Da). Backing singers Natalie and Stefan are introduced.
A new single is previewed, and it sounds great. Never Be Alone is Techno Dance Beat driven and has a similar joyous energy to the Byrd’s Change is Now. On Notorious Byrd Brothers from 1968.
Hill mentions her gigs on Ibiza with Pete Tong and the Heritage Orchestra. And then launches into You Got the Love. Popcorn synth beats. Sounds like classic late Seventies R’n’B embracing hard edged Disco.
Closes with Remember and her set is memorable for the bounce and Pop in the rhythms.
Foals are an arty, Indie Pop band from Oxford, England.
Of course, they have many descriptions of their sound. All manners and variations of Indie Pop including the obligatory post-Punk. Arty and a little elitist so there is some Prog in there as well.
Yannis Philippakis of Greek lineage leads the ensemble with guitar and main vocals. Jack Bevan drums, Jimmy Smith guitar and keyboards and Walter Gervers bass are the core. Touring members Keith Montieth percussion and Joe Price keyboards round it out to a three-up three-down travelling road show.
It doesn’t take long for the Funk to appear with 2001. High tenor to falsetto vocals which lead out a song of complex time signatures and popping rhythms. Those Bush of Ghosts polyrhythms stand out, aided by extended keyboard noodling.
This is all good dance Funk with an appropriate lightness of touch. There is room for psychedelic melodic Pop as well as the brash sound of meshed guitars.
2am is the closest to recognisable R’n’B with some melodic jazz guitar breaks.
Spanish Sahara. They can do slow and dreamy. Guitar riffs shimmer with glass tones. The singer wails in the background as they extend the vamp before the final fade.
After doing that for a few tunes, they can get heavy and Rock out. Inhaler is fine but the stand-out is What Went Down which closes the set. Vocal approach is like the Beastie Boys from Licensed to Ill. Guitars can pierce like lasers. Builds up a head of steam and it’s all held together by the metronome drummer’s diktat.
Golden Lights Festival is two days of electronic dance and rave music presided over by DJs’ who set the pace with a seamless blend of beats both primal and complex.
Looking over the audience from above, it looks like a mass of writing bodies which react with pulse waves to shifts in rhythm.
Alcohol was free flowing. Drunkenness never spilled over into violence. There was a firm but not overbearing security presence, with a half dozen police officers wandering through without much notice.
Young women are dressed to reveal and inflame the senses. They celebrate their own freedom from restrictions.
Most young guys were Kiwis at the beach and getting happy quickly. Scattered amongst them are a few with a fairy wings trying to make it A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The tension and release of music is subsumed into an energy which contains it simultaneously. Like ritual dancing it has an orgasmic quality signalled by a count-in of one tow three four as the music shifts seamlessly.
Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough.
Mark Wilkinson is a DJ and producer from Hammersmith, London.
Drone music and the heavy, heavy monster sound.
Dancin’ ‘til it’s daytime carries neo-Soul merging with Pop.
Some vocoder treated singing, and toasting.
Peggy Gou is the artist’s name for Kim Min-ji who comes from South Korea and is currently based in Berlin.
She was schooled in London and has worked as a fashion designer. Her musical career has seen her playing at iconic large festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury.
Body rhythm shots are balanced by the high kriiiiishhhh of electronic cymbals. Music spins in a centrifuge out of which eerie space carnival sounds emanate.
This is ambient groove music.
Sub Focus is Nicolaas Douwma from Guildford, England, and he is playing with a Rap singer out front.
Douwma says he got into music primarily when he was able to make it from a computer rather than an instrument.
Techno Dance and trance music with medium pace Rap and It’s gonna be a fine night tonight/ Any friggin’ day/ Any friggin’ night.
He goes back… Back to the Old Skool/ Back to your roots.
Beck Hill takes a guest shot on a great Indie Pop tune.
A-Trak is Alain Macklovitch from Montreal, Canada and he is a producer and DJ who is as old as Sub Focus in the music industry.
He is putting out a mantra style of Hip-Hop tonight. He has some claim to fame as being highly proficient on turntable scratching.
European Disco is there with a club sound reminding me of the Black Arabs playing disco versions of Sex Pistols classics, from the Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle album.
That’s 1979 so it’s going back a bit, beyond when everyone here tonight was born.
Half Queen is Fijian-European Shaki Wasasala and she makes memorable appearances at clubs and festivals around New Zealand for a few years now.
I have seen her backing Jess-B on several occasions.
Early on Thursday afternoon when it’s hot and humid and heavy black clouds are rolling in, hers is a Techno Dance attack.
Continuous beat drones and a peak is reached with take it higher/ Get higher/ Just a little more.
She asks, do you wanna go feral? As a plane flies low overhead.
PARK RD are five local lads from West Auckland, so they are playing home territory at this festival.
They were friends at the Steiner school just up the ridge in Titirangi. Tom Chamberlain lead vocals, Angus Hampton-Carr lead guitar, Leo Crawshaw-Bond guitar, Carlos Martin bass and Te Kapua Pene drums.
Like You. They can do ringing guitar intros like the early Doobie Brothers classics. The lead guitar extends this one with a solo like Ernie Isley’s one off Summer Breeze.
Golden coincides with the sun appearing in a blast of heat. Ride is all chiming guitars.
Mostly bright and up-beat, Lie is an early one which starts as a drone and fires off into Power Pop after the bridge.
Golden Lights Festival was a glorious bacchanal with a generally mellow relaxed atmosphere to usher in what will be a tumultuous year.
Rev. Orange Peel
Photography by Isabella Rose Young
