A Brilleaux way to celebrate

It's all good news this week – the most exclusive little party in Tauranga is coming up and we have free tickets to give away!

Actually, all the tickets are free. But they're rarer than those little dentures they make for hens after their teeth fall out and we've got two of them.

Hobnail playing October 9.

Best of all, as far as I'm concerned, is that we're once again celebrating the launch of a local CD, this time Brilleaux's ‘Pictures Of The Queen', already released overseas during their UK tour earlier this year, now finally getting an outing here.

I've got a copy in my hot little hands and will review it next week. Right now let me tell you about the launch.

It's on Sunday, October 18 at The Matua (in, duh, Matua). 2pm. Numbers are incredibly limited. The band will play an acoustic set, the album will be launched for assembled friends and a who's who of the town's musicians. There will be free refreshments, and it'll be a blast!

Frontman Graham Clark says 'We've put on so many shows in town and asked people to shell out money to see us so we wanted to give something back, to put on a day where we could repay people for supporting us.”

With that in mind tickets are available to fans from brilleaux@xtra.co.nz. Just email and ask. They're free, but with only a few dozen, if that, it's going to be a rush. Get in now. Or, of course, enter our competition.

In the meantime, next weekend there's another concert at the Te Puna Memorial Hall. I must say, I'm a big fan of these regular country bashes. Something about having a show in a rural hall such as this feels like part of that long Kiwi tradition of fabled Saturday night dances stretching back 50 years and more.

It's a busy little hall, used not only for these shows but by community groups, and a lot of folk are counting on a proper replacement when it is demolished to make way for a roundabout in the not too distant future. The less optimistic remember such exercises where a much-loved (and ideal) building is replaced with some soulless multi-purpose edifice designed by committee to suit everyone but missing everything that made it important to the community in the first place.

But I digress...

Most of the concerts at the Te Puna Hall are organised by the indomitable Rosie Holmes, who came to Tauranga a few years back after doing a similar thing in Thames, putting on shows for touring bands, usually leaning towards that Americana axis of country, blues and folk. It works well. Tickets aren't expensive, there are usually enough people for the band in question to do okay, overheads are low, and everyone gets to hear some great music in an intimate informal setting.

This month (Friday, October 9 to be precise) Rosie's got Hobnail coming from Wellington. They've been kicking around for a while. The band started as a pure Celtic outfit, Hobnail Boots, in the mid-1990s during the boom of Irish pubs which overtook the country and saw Irish music briefly become the party flavour du jour.

Led by Robb Joass, who has come to town previously as part of the Too Many Chiefs band, which also included Hot Club Sandwich's Andrew London and Kiwi legend Wayne Mason, the band lost the ‘Boots' along the way and has morphed into a more original outfit, still dependent on the fiddle but musically broader. They now have a couple of decades on the clock and half a dozen albums under their belts. Hear more at www.hobnail.co.nz

It's a 7.30pm start with doors open at 6.45pm. $20 on the door or get a ticket in advance from Rosie at 5526291 or redruth@vodafone.co.nz


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