NZNewsUK up close & personal with The Black Seeds in London

Kiwi music giants The Black Seeds are back in Europe for their “annual jaunt to the northern hemisphere.” Pre-show in London, I was fortunate enough to have a chat with the band’s Nigel Patterson.

The Black Seeds have been together now for 11 years and have been touring the UK and Europe for the past 7 – so they’re almost as established here as they are back in New Zealand. Although the 2013 tour has been largely festival-focussed, Nigel has said that because of the time frame this time around, they’ve been able to incorporate some club shows into the tour as well. Which is great news for London-based Kiwis who always eagerly await their yearly visit, but aren’t necessarily festival-goers.

Last year saw the release of the band’s fifth studio album – ‘Dust and Dirt’ – and this tour has enabled the boys to introduce new material alongside the hits we already know and love. It seems a 50/50 mix of the old and the new is the right balance.

“This tour’s been massively successful,” Nigel is pleased to report. “The band sounded awesome, and the crowds have just been pretty incredible – night after night – just really loving the music.”

And it’s been a pretty full-on tour: 3 weeks on the road, with 15 shows. “But it hasn’t felt stressful,” Nigel says. “We’ve recently moved to a tour bus style of touring, and that’s really made life a lot more comfortable for us.” With 3 shows to go, the band are feeling “pretty good for this stage of the tour” – whereas usually they’d be starting to feel worn out with flights, hotels, and driving themselves around the place. “With the tour bus we just get on – last night for instance, we played our show in Dublin... 1am, we were straight on the tour bus, drove all night, we all slept, and we arrived in London 1pm today.”

Although there’s always a large Kiwi component, Nigel says that they’ve also been enjoying much more of a European following. “In Germany, it’s mostly Germans... In Holland, definitely mostly Dutch. Ireland – there were a few Kiwis there last night, but lots of Irish people – and Bristol, it was definitely weighted more with English people.”

And London? “Tonight it will be predominantly Kiwis. You know in London, Kiwis really are a force in themselves! And actually, I think that can be both a positive and a negative thing for us. It’s hard to gain a larger British following in London.”

Overall, establishing themselves up here hasn’t been the easiest of roads in any event. It’s a long way to come, and not easy to finance. “We’re just like any really hardworking band,” Nigel explains. “And it’s a juggling act between coming here often enough, and not coming so often that people start to take us for granted and some might start to say: ‘Well, I saw them last time, so I don’t really need to see them this time round.’ We want to keep the live show so good that people can’t live without it; they have to see it. It’s just like a drug – they’ve got to really want it, really want to see it, and don’t want to miss out.”

So what’s next for The Black Seeds? Nigel is quick to answer: “I think that we will look to do another album, because that’s what you do. We make music, you know. We’ll have a bit of time off once we get home, but then we’ll look to pick up where the last album left off. The music industry is changing so rapidly, and it’s just going in a crazy direction, so you just have to take a moment to have a look at everything that’s going, what’s going on in our lives, and where we want to go to next. But fingers crossed, we’ll do a new album and then we’ll be back on the road in the big tour bus. I don’t see any reason – and I don’t think anyone in the band wants to stop now – we’ve worked so hard you know, we need to keep going... until we physically can’t go any more.”

And I’d say the guys definitely have the stamina to keep going for considerable years yet. Playing to hundreds of fans at the O2 Empire in London’s Shepherd’s Bush, the band delivered a high-energy and polished performance, barely breaking a bead of sweat. New material was lapped up with as much enthusiasm as the old classics. It was a solid 2-hour set with the audience still desperate for more. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if the roar for an encore was heard back in Wellington – could that be the true cause of the earthquake?!

The band definitely met their objective of keeping the show so good that people can’t do without it, with many of the audience commenting as they left that they can’t wait until the next one.

There were also plenty of compliments for The Black Seeds’ opening act – Iva Lamkum – who I also managed to grab a quick chat with before the show. Iva has only been on the Wellington music scene for about the past 6 years, and this is her first European tour. Described by some as New Zealand’s answer to Amy Winehouse, Iva has an incredible voice, and her unique sound easily captivated a London crowd who were seeing and hearing her for the first time.

Her voice aside, there’s something else that makes Iva a little unique. Unlike many artists on the scene, music and becoming a singer wasn’t really a passion of Iva’s growing up. “It was kinda like a switch where I just changed my mind,” Iva explains. “I met all of these amazing jazz musicians from Wellington, and it went from there. I was asked to help out this girl named Jess Chambers, and she said there was this 2-hour slot where I could take the other hour to play this random gig, paying $300. I thought, sweet – that will pay for my beers! It worked out well; a few friends came and saw me, as well as Caleb, who started managing me. We had mutual friends, and he wanted to take things further. I thought cool, I really didn’t know where this was heading. We ended up working together and building an independent label, writing music, and promoting our music on our own. We released an EP back in 2008, and we just had good results from it. It was pretty unexpected – I had just wanted to release a CD, but it just went from there, with better managers and better labels, and they were keen to work with me. I started to think wow, people are taking this seriously, so I should really start to take things seriously! I just kept going and going, and it was hard work – but I was happy with where it was going, and obviously it’s landed me here.”

Like The Black Seeds, Iva is over here doing a festival-focussed UK and Europe tour – including Glastonbury! Not bad for a newbie. She also got to play a festival in Norway, where she experienced 24 hours of daylight for the first time. Berlin and Hungary are next on the agenda.

Overall it was a fantastic night of Kiwi music, with both Iva Lamkum and The Black Seeds demonstrating that the characteristic sound of Aotearoa is equally embraced on the other side of the world as it is at home.

ENDS

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