Tomás Ford Accidentally Cultivates A Sex Pit In New Zealand

This tour is ridiculous. I’m in New Zealand, driving around in a motorhome-shaped Vengabus, alternating between Dad-On-Holiday mode during the week and the mega-partystarting idiocy of my Crap Music Rave Party on the weekend.

AUCKLAND

My hotel room is the kind of place you imagine the husband character to move into during a messy sitcom divorce. The shower is stainless steel. The view is of a building site. The air tastes of quiet desperation and the concierge is overly happy to see me each time I walk inside, as though I am a soothing balm for having to deal with his other guests.

It suits me; I’m here alone until I meet my wife and son in Christchurch on Sunday.

It’s cheap.

The night prior to my ridiculously early departure from Perth, I dropped my laptop and it started doing weird things; my first full day in the city is also my first show day. So my time in Auckland is spent alternating between feigning charisma doing radio interviews and running around computer shops to fix the problem.

Auckland itself is kind of pretty and I’m pleased to report it isn’t the “shit version of Sydney” I had been told about. The main street anchors a bunch of laneways and back alleys, and there are pretty spectacular parks all over the place. I’m not going to see much of it on this trip, but it seems like my kind of place.

The show is at a joint called Galatos; it’s one of the biggest dates on the tour. Auckland is a pretty tough nut to crack, so we’re sitting on just over 50% capacity when doors open and I’m gently panicking. But people stream in early and they don’t stop. By 10:30, the dancefloor is rammed, I’ve used up all the cardboard and shit is already starting to get weird.

There’s a guy who looks exactly like me at the age of 23 dancing in a tie-die shirt and making come-hither eyes at me. The dancefloor is going mental. The stairs to the stage start out the night as a kind of extended catwalk into the crowd and end up as some kind of shirtless, bro-ish, sexually ambiguous crowd of dancing dudes. I am constantly staring at their butts because they are WAY too close to my laptop. Every time a girl comes up to dance she dances directly in front of me – one of them eventually says “I get it, it’s just for boys.” NO! NO! I didn’t ask for this! I barely want this! I hate having people on the stage – they always steal my stuff! But now I look like I have intentionally cultivated this… sex pit. WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING…

QUEENSTOWN

This restaurant has an 80s sophistipop playlist to die for. Go to youtube and put Simply Red’s “Money’s Too Tight To Mention” on right now. Then do it another three times while eating overpriced salmon. But it’s nice; there’s views out over a massive lake and a general Aspen-ish yuppie vibe.

It contrasts hugely with my accommodation, which is what backpackers would call a “nice backpackers,” but that my sadly fussy mid-30’s self can’t help but call “fucking horrible.” Sharing a bedroom with seven strangers in their early 20’s is not a thing I can do anymore. One of them is a horrific snorer and there’s another who seems super-dodgy, like he’s going to steal all my equipment in my sleep. The cheapest private room in Queenstown was $250, so this was pretty much the only option. It makes me hate life.

The party is Sunday this week, so I have Saturday to myself. I’m kinda bored. I drink hot chocolate. I drink wine. I drink tea. I watch a terrible movie (Independence Day 2: don’t do it). When I come out, Queenstown’s Saturday night is in full swing; think Surfers’ Paradise. Lots of drunken children, inherited money falling out of their pockets, that kind of thing. I consider calling in sick.

The next day I do more of the same, and find a café to finish off a video I’m working on. I’ve recently become internet famous in Malaysia for a cover of a friends’ Malaysian version of a Rihanna song, creating a fun situation where I am famous in a language I don’t speak. The new video does a similar trick with a Black Eyed Peas song. I hate the originals of both songs passionately, but that itself seems pretty on-brand for me these days, and the videos are turning out really well. This one’s going up tomorrow, who knows if it’ll do anything. The internets are fickle.

I turn up to the show and discover they have moved my start time back to ten. On a Sunday. I’ve sold basically fuck all tickets here and have become zen about the fact that I’m probably about to DJ to nobody. I stand around drinking with some locals. We open doors and for the first three songs there’s nobody. I slowly drink another glass of wine.

Before I know it, the small bar is totally rammed. It’s suddenly one of my all-time craziest parties. Beyond packed with happy drunks. Everyone joins in absolutely every stupid idea I throw at them! Some huge maori bloke shuts the lid of my laptop and I tell him not to be a dickhead and he looks like he’s going to kill me and I don’t die! Tons of attractive people are making sexy eyes at me! This pinot is delicious! These requests are ridiculous!

It’s the perfect sized crowd – I can do all the clowning around I’d do with a small crowd but it’s so tightly packed that it feels mega. Everyone is playing with me, screaming along the words to every song and the requests are enjoyably strange. The dancefloor doesn’t let up until 2, peaking out Dave Dobbyn’s massive Slice Of Heaven.

HOLIDAY FUNTIMES

Waking up is hard to do, but I manage it. I sleepwalk my way onto the plane, convincing myself I need to be chipper as a grumpy and tired Dad does not make for a great holiday. My body is basically intolerant of coffee but I have, like, five and somehow manage to present as a human being when I meet my wife Eleesha and son Preston.

We pick up the campervan and proceed to get lost in Christchurch airport for an hour and a half, before deciding to head straight out to the country.

The next day we decide to make a break for the snow. There’s a lot to cover on this holiday, and most of it is far too wholesome for the purposes of this blog, so here’s the dot points:

• I’m too hungover to enjoy the maze in Wanaka.
• Oamaru has a gloriously quaint as fuck tourist museum called Steampunk HQ. I thoroughly recommend it.
• Snow is really awesome! Playing in it is awesome! Photographing it is awesome! Hell, just seeing it on the top of the mountains is TOTALLY AWESOME!
• Ice on the roads is less awesome. But frozen grass looks psychedelic!
• Don’t try to park in Queenstown in an eight foot campervan during ski season
• AGHHHH DID I MENTION SNOW
• It is much further from Wanaka to Queenstown than I thought but holy shit if that road isn’t incredible.
• Milton (I think, anyway, one of the towns between Alexandra and Dunedin) is bloody adorable and has this little felting shop with all this vintage stuff and there’s good coffee with CWA ladies talking loudly about dead friends and it’s just the best.
• I wear a wee red peak cap for the entire time. Let’s be real: the wind is cold and is just going to mess up my hair.

DUNEDIN

We drive and drive and drive. Driving a campervan was scary at first – it’s a heavy vehicle but now it’s heaps more comfortable than my usual sedan-type situation; I can drive for hours and still feel super-comfy. I can see why baby boomers are all about the 4WDs and SUVs on that level. On any other level though, fuck that.

Dunedin is the Adelaide of New Zealand. I mean that in a good way, I like me some Adelaide. There’s heaps of manufacturing, university stuff, hipster bars and churches. Even the way they do their footpaths and street lights constantly makes me feel like I’m driving around Thebarton.

We arrive early in Dunedin but aren’t in the mood for walking around a city centre, so we head to Tunnel Beach to hide out in our van. I hadn’t heard of it before, but the pictures on tripadvisor are promising, so we head there. Preston and I decide to go check it out as the reviews are awesome. We get over the hill and head down a path, that leads down a hill, down another hill and then down a steep cliff. At this point, I start to worry about the walk back but the sunken cost is too high to turn back, so we press on. After a final staircase, we’re on a hidden beach. It’s beautiful. The waves crash up against the cliff-face all around us. All I can compare it to is if someone built a swimming beach in cliffs of the Great Australian Bight. Epic. The walk back up is even worse than I expect. The path has turned to mud and our legs have turned to jelly. When we make it to the top, we are silent, exhausted, hollowed-out shells of our formers selves. Good: time to do a four hour hyperactive party show, then.

We set up in Ironic Café in Dunedin – they don’t usually do this kind of thing, so I’ve hired a PA. The PA hire company presents me with massively oversized speakers. I politely ask them for something much smaller as there’s no way I can get it to the venue without breaking every bone in my body.

The show is odd for the first three hours. It being a café, my son comes along to watch his Dad be batshit crazy for a couple of hours. So there’s that, which always means I’m simultaneously showing off to him and kinda trying not to look as fucked up as heroin-era Iggy Pop. He has fun and eventually passes out from exhaustion across the road in our campervan.

I continue on – Dunedin’s university crowd are predictably standoffish, and there’s a sense that maybe they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. Between 10-10:30, it seems like the crowd are more interested in hanging out in the beer garden. Whatever, they’re having a good time, I’m having a good time, I’m not fussy. But by the end, it’s ecstatic. The dancefloor is going nuts, everyone is screaming every word and nobody wants to go home.

Sometimes that kind of gig gives a powerful rush of endorphins, but not tonight. The walk up from the beach and the show combine to make me an exhausted mess. I crumple into the campervan and realise we haven’t booked a site for the night. We drive around, following a few dead ends Google Maps throws up and then sneak into a caravan park that we’ll pay for in the morning.

The showers are locked with a keylock. Four hours of drinking and jumping around like a madman has made me smell like a thousand asses.

Giving myself a sponge bath with a chux and some shampoo in sub-zero weather is not something I want to write about in a blog. Just know that it happened and it wasn’t pretty. There was a lot of shrieking, shivering and a facial expression like Batman reliving his parents’ murder.

It doesn’t help. But I sleep.

CHRISTCHURCH

We drive. Or more specifically, my wife drives and I sleep. Or more specifically, my wife drives and I intermittently pass out, scull bottled water and moan softly to myself.

Suddenly we’re in Christchurch. Eleesha drops me at the venue for soundcheck and then scurries off to spend the night hanging out with Preston as the bar is 18+.

I arrive to discover that the venue I’m playing, Wunderbar, is the coolest venue ever. It feels halfway between Studio 54 and the house of that couple who were in The Cramps. It also doesn’t have a venue technician, a detail that I missed like a total noob. Luckily I can set up the basics myself and eventually one of the regular techs who works there stops by to give me a hand, a semi-anonymous favour which I fear I may never repay.

The party is sold out and just fucking wonderful. People are ready to dance from the get-go, and they mess around with me with glee, playing into my stupid games and throwing more energy back at me than I’m even putting out. We run over by an hour and I don’t even notice. I should be exhausted, but instead I am full of energy, having fed like some kind of party vampire on the vibe of the room.

That said, the stage is really, really bouncy, and about an hour into the party my jumping around results in my DJ setup falling to the ground. I plug it back in and it mostly works, but it means every thirty minutes I have to have a talk break as the USB driver shits itself. But the crowd go with it! It’s magic!

At the end of the show I crowdsurf and the crowd carry me onto the bar. One of the barmen doesn’t like that, muttering something about performers-who-think-they-can-do-whatever-they-want at me. The moment fizzles. Boo. Anyway, this is the first time I have crowdsurfed for about a year and it tastes like victory.

We all run back into the live room and dance to Bomfunk MC’s. Everything is wonderful. The hangover is going to suck.