Tomas Ford Loses His Shit Over Baby Seals In New Zealand

We rejoin our hero (in this case, me) in a campervan, driving around Christchurch. He’s already done four amazing shows of his touring DJ shitshow Crap Music Rave Party in New Zealand, including last night's wild ride jumping around the room at Wunderbar in this town. You can read about those in the first part of his blog.

He is hungover. He is switching back to first person.

The second week of holiday magic is pretty awesome. As usual, one doesn’t like to drone on about stuff that can be safely filed under the heading of “good, clean family fun” on a website where I’m probably supposed to be striking a pose more of the “destroyed, jaundice rock star” variety. For what it’s worth, we demolished more pinot noir than should be humanly possible.

• BABY SEALS, DUDE. Just north of Kaikoura, there’s a little path and you go up it and there’s a couple of adorable little baby seals in a stream and it’s cute and stuff but then you keep walking and you get to this waterfall which would be pretty good anyway except OMG YOU GUYS BABY SEALS! There are about fifty of the fuckers, all over each other having adorable little baby seal playfights with each other and frolicking and HOLY SHIT WHAT DO I DO? BABY SEALS. OH SHIT. BABY SEALS. (I was quite excited about this)
• Kaikoura in general is mint. Snow-capped mountains, nice little township with good coffee, chilled out vibes, lots of seals. I took the opportunity to listen to lots of Seal – you know, he really seemed to give up on himself after that album with Kiss From A Rose on it.
• Had my most parental moment ever, semi-ironically listening to Enya in a campervan. There is no irony with Enya though; you’re either listening to Caribbean Blue or you’re not. We stop pretty quick.
• Marlborough has heaps of wine. Heaps of it. Had two of the most pretentiously presented wine tastings I’ve ever been to – Yealands makes you watch the most hilariously boring seven minute video where the winemaker talks about how organised his vineyard is before they will let us drink anything. It feels like a wet weather day at school.
• Better is Rockferry – an adorablely mustachioed European gent fills us with more wine than I probably should drink and talks about wine flavours with the kind of passion that makes us think we’re drinking something other than fermented grapes. They are, as it turns out, just fermented grapes. But really good ones. Preston asks him if he speaks French and tells him his Dad speaks French, causing said Dad to blush like a little girl. Luckily the guy’s implacable accent is not actually French.
• Christchurch is still all fucked-up in the city centre, so we had to hit suburban tourist trap the International Antarctic Centre. Lowlight was standing in a coolroom while they turned the fan on and told us it was a blizzard – for a similar experience, I suggest getting a job stacking the milk section at Coles. Preston likes it though.
• There is an awesome ukulele for $500 in a craft shop in Picton, can someone please buy this for me. I can’t believe I want this.
• Catching a ferry is so much less relaxing or pleasant than I expected. Sure, the scenery coming out of Picton was pretty at first, but the boat went soooo slooooow…

WELLINGTON

We spend a couple of days in Wellington. My run here earlier this year for New Zealand Fringe Festival was one of my all-time favourite seasons and I’d fallen in love with the city. Turns out, it’s a shit place to visit with a campervan and tour flu. Aside from having to park a thousand miles from the CBD, I made the mistake of waking up on the first day there of feeling OK and deciding to join Preston on the bouncy castle air pillow thing at the caravan park. Cue ten ecstatic minutes of weightless prancing, followed by two days of vertigo. Something has been screwed up in my ears and I spend my whole time in Wellington feeling like I am being pushed back and forth by an invisible gang of malicious school bullies.

On show night, I sit in a terrible Malay restaurant, seriously considering a last minute cancellation. Deeply out of character stuff. It turns out that after my three Malay language videos, I can no longer eat in Malaysian takeaway joints with anonymity. I hear mumbles of “youtube” in my direction. Which is a real pity, because this massaman curry has been served as some kind of flavourless soup. I get down a few chunks of soggy potato and head to soundcheck.

Bodega is one of my favourite venues, it’s a real pity it’s going to close at the end of this year. I’d noticed that the industry seems to be in a bit of a downturn over here while I was booking; half the venues I’d look up had closed over the last couple of years. This was particularly true on the south island, where I’d venture a guess to say that the closure of a bunch of venues due to the Christchurch earthquake a few years ago has had a bit of a knock-on effect, as it’s the biggest market in the south island; a lot of tours seem to stick to the North nowadays. But it seems like tough times outside of Auckland, too. This tour went really well, and kiwi audiences are pretty easy to get on board with live shows, so I’m not sure why this all is. Anyway, point of this ramble is that Bodega is closing too. And that sucks.

I’m still feeling horrible when doors open, but I have a couple of glasses of red and people stream into the room. The show isn’t sold out but it’s damn close. The effect seems to be something like Popeye eating a can of spinach – the show is one of the most hyperactive, madly energetic shows I’ve ever done. I don’t even notice the time until the five hour mark.

It’s a messy crowd and far too packed for me to run through the crowd, so I don’t do a lot of stuff in the audience. I spend most of the time onstage. There is a lot more lip syncing than usual. And I feel a bit of punk attitude creeping into the show – up until now, I’ve always tried to be unrelentingly positive onstage, but tonight it’s working a lot better to give people a bit of lip when they ask for stupid requests. I seem to have found a place with the show where I can do that and not ruin someone’s night by coming across as an asshole. Or maybe I do come across as an asshole. I don’t know. It probably doesn’t matter, it works and seems to add another kind of energy to things.

The show ends and I score a lift back to the caravan park. People are nice here.

HAMILTON

I don’t know what has happened, but I’m cured. Completely. I’m not even hungover. People always ask me if I get exhausted doing all-night hyperactive DJ sets (well, that and if I have to take huge amounts of meth to get through them), but the love of a good crowd can be like wireless charger for my body.

I’ve ended up flying to Hamilton, because on windy New Zealand roads there’s no way the camper would make it there from Wellington in time for the party. I get picked from the airport by an amazing AirBNB host, which is handy as it turns out the airport is about fourty minutes from the town. Having met me, she heads off to a 50^th in Rotorua and leaves me alone in her house – I couldn’t do that myself, but I guess I have a trustworthy face or something.

The venue is an awesome little basement space called the Nivara Lounge. It’s more of a cabaret room than a party space – I’d love to come and play a show here at some point, but it feels a bit odd for a DJ show. The people who run the joint are awesome though, and though I can feel a dodgy show coming, I’m also in a pretty bloody good mood. It’s closing night of the tour, after all.

Hamilton itself is pretty cool – everyone in NZ rags on the place like it’s Bunbury or Newcastle or something, but I find a main street full of cool little Asian restaurants, packed student bars, an awesome little bookshop and a statue of Richard O’Brien aka Riff Raff and the writer of Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s on the site of where he once worked as a hairdresser before heading for the bright lights of London. For some reason a policeman is loitering around it in a way that would suggest he is trying to score drugs if he wasn’t in hi-vis uniform. He takes pity on my shit selfie skills and takes this photo.

Anyway, Hamilton is not a bad little town and people are uniformly nice to me – I start to wonder what is with NZ’s attitude to it. I ask my AirBnB host the next day and she says it’s basically the Adelaide of New Zealand when it comes to fucked up murders and stuff. Oh. Good to know.

The party itself is fun but it’s a bit awkward as the cabaret vibes of the room make my DJ antics seem like they’re meant to be a full show. Crap Music Rave Party is better when people are dancing with their friends and not really giving a shit about what I do – I’m just putting out heaps of energy and being an idiot, it’s not a super-skilled performance that rewards close observation or anything. It also seems like the whole crowd is from out of town, so it seems like I’ve picked the wrong venue in the wrong place for this one. But it’s fun and it’d actually be an awesome venue for live music. I’ll go back again, but probably to croon some tunes.

After the show, I sleep in a proper bed for the first time in a couple of weeks.

Oh my god.

HOLIDAY GRAND FINALE

The last week of the holiday is a blur. We race up to Lake Taupō as soon as I fly back into Wellington, effectively driving three quarters of the way back to Hamilton. Again, we’re back in happy families territory so the dot points are:

• We spend a lot of time looking at smoke coming out of the earth. The Craters Of The Moon are probably the best for this, it’s pretty quiet and you feel like you’re in some kind of alien valley. Te Puia in Rotorua is a bit more commercial, but smoke and boiling water and mud and stuff is still pretty cool.
• Having an hour long argument with my son in some thermal baths in Rotorua.
• Glow worms on the roof of the Waitomo caves are one of the most awe-inspiring things in the history of the world.
• Distances continue to be a bitch. It takes me three hours to drive to the aforementioned caves from Rotorua; Google reckoned it would be about an hour twenty. Thanks, Google.
• Taupō is a tourist dive shithole that feels like it should be in an American spring break movie or something. Rotorua is a bit more chilled.
• I can not tell you how excited I get by a well-designed caravan park at this point.
   
• The Chills’ Heavenly Pop Hit fills me with all kinds of delight every time it comes on shuffle. It’s a fight between that, Tall Dwarfs’ Nothing’s Going To Happen and Pop Mechanix’ Jumping Out A Window for my favourite NZ song ever. All three songs will make your life better, go and listen to them now.
• Every single petrol station, caravan park shower and supermarket in New Zealand is thrashing the hell out of Broods’ actually kinda kickass electropop banger Free. At the start of the trip sounds totally mint and it sends me into impromptu dance convulsions. But I am now very, very sick of it. It is everywhere.

On the plane ride home, I try to watch Grimsby but have to stop when it gets too stupid. I try a couple of other movies, but they don’t take. The guy next to me drinks five baby bottles of pinot grigio while doing his accounts. I sit in silent alcoholic awe and end up listening to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. It’s my go-to depression LP. If I’m in any kind of good mood, this album sounds like shit to me, and so it does right now but I only have a couple of albums on my phone. That’s cool though; I swap it for some more Seal.

I’m still gently buzzed on champagne we down on the stop in Sydney on the way back anyway. I chuck my arm around Preston’s shoulder, order some more cheap wine, stare at the wall for five hours and smile.