Crowded House

Crowded House last performed in Wellington in 2021 in a concert delayed by pandemia, after reforming a couple of years before (checks notes) back in 2019. We went along to see them then. Their second album since reforming, Gravity Stairs, was released earlier this year and they are now touring this album. They’re playing the TSB Arena in Wellington, so of course we got tickets to go see them.

 

Did I say “got tickets”? Therein lies a tale. Normally, the process for getting tickets is: go on ticketbastard, buy tickets, download tickets to Google wallet…job done. But Crowded House have, both this time and last time, issued souvenir tickets for you to stick in your scrapbook or whatever. They look like this: 

All well and good, but on the morning of the gig, I received the customary “important information about your concert” email from Ticketbastard, and I thought I’d better download my tickets, forgetting that they were sent by mail. I found this out as I checked my account. And, on the morning of the gig, no sign of any tickets! Contacting Ticketbastard is necessarily hard, as they don’t want you bothering them once they’ve got your money, but I persisted with their dreadful hold music until I got through to someone. They assured me that the tickets had been sent, and that they would email me a copy anyway, and if that didn’t arrive in time I’d be able to pick up ordinary tickets at the box office at TSB Arena by giving them my receipt number. OK then.

Here’s what actually happened: the email never arrived. The tickets did, in the Saturday morning post, which is cutting it a bit fine if you ask me, given the reliability of NZ Post. Anway, we had tickets.

I’d booked dinner at Bin44 as I’d been a bit remiss about booking things early. It’s an OK pub-grub style diner, with burgers and the like. I had a Korean chicken burger and Nicola went for the prawn risotto.

Across Queen’s Wharf to get to the TSB Arena and we arrived in time to watch the support act, Mel Parsons. She’s actually been around for quite a while, releasing six albums in the process. She performed a half hour set to sporadic polite applause.

Then on came the main event, preceded by Bowie’s Five Years over the speakers…because they reformed in 2019? Maybe. The set list contained quite a lot from the new album, naturally, and also some from albums I don’t have so there was a bit of unfamiliar material in there as well. But they soon got down to the classics and gave us all the old faves as well. 

And, as ever, when they came back on for an encore, they gave us a proper encore – five songs in total, four classic crowd-pleasers and one from the new album, and of course finishing up with the inevitable Better Be Home Soon. This may have been due to the fact that they’d deviated from the original set list when they started playing requests from the crowd towards the end of their performance, as some of those encore songs were probably scheduled before the break. The set list in full can be found here.