Farewell, Homegrown, and thanks for the memories

Saturday, 25 January 2025

It’s hosted nearly every notable New Zealand band, about 250,000 music lovers and even a proposal ‒ but now, after almost two electric decades, Homegrown has outgrown its own home.

This week it was announced the festival showcasing Kiwi artists is leaving the capital, with managing director Andrew Tuck citing its ever-growing audience numbers and performances being increasingly pushed into every corner of Wellington’s fixed-size waterfront.

“We’ve looked at locations in the Hutt. We’ve looked at locations in Porirua. We’ve looked at locations up on the hill. We’ve looked at the stadium. There isn’t a place that we haven’t looked at. We looked at how to close streets,” Tuck told The Post. “If you could make a waterfront bigger, I’d stay.”

Those conversations, and the hard sell from city officials keen to keep the festival here, ultimately ended in Tuck and his team making the difficult decision to look for a more suitable space elsewhere. Now, four or five shortlisted locations around the country are being considered as the festival’s new base. Due diligence on those areas is ongoing, and organisers are hoping to announce the winner towards the end of April.

“If we’re going to go somewhere, I’ve got to think about how that area is growing. What does it look like? What’s transport going to look like in 10 years time? How do people get to and from the event? How big is it? Can we grow inside it once we get to a certain size? Can I fit another three stages … if that's what the New Zealand public want? It’s not just going, ‘I want to go to that city because it’s cool’,” Tuck says.

“For me, it’s about the longevity of New Zealand music and how we continually continue to support that ‒ that’s key.”

Back in 2008 Tiki Taane was the first artist attached to the inaugural festival. He performed then on the park stage with a 30+ kapa haka group led by his father.

Taane was the one who helped get buy-in from other acts, believing in its mission, says Rachel Turney, Homegrown’s former director and band manager. That year Shihad, Kora, The Feelers, Opshop, Elemeno P, The Phoenix Foundation, The Black Seeds and Ladi6, among others, played. The only act that’s been on every bill since the beginning is Sunshine Sound System.

Homegrown’s origin story begins in the 1990s with Mark Wright, who’d been organising an annual extreme sports festival called X*Air in Hamilton, loosely styled after the longstanding American X Games. By the mid-2000s Wright had moved the event to Wellington’s waterfront, where, according to AudioCulture, attendees were wowed by skateboarding and BMX legends including Tony Hawke. By 2006 Wright was toying with the idea of organising a festival focused on music, and in April 2008, Homegrown was born.

Back then local radio stations scoffed at playing New Zealand music and Tuck remembers being told the festival wouldn’t last more than two iterations. Between then and now it’s gone from selling 10,000 tickets a year to 23,000, and from showing acts on three stages to its current five that sprawl across every inch of the fenced waterfront with its VIP areas and bars. What was a one-day event is this year, for the first time, spread over a whole weekend. While the first festival had 30 acts perform it’s offering a smorgasbord of 50 this year ‒ one of those being Shihad’s last-ever gig.

“The thing about any festival is you’ve got to keep moving and evolving. The key for us is making sure that we go another 18 years,” Tuck says. “If you do the same thing year on year and you don’t change anything, people will stop attending.”

That means experimenting with new genres while continuing to bring through the best new talent on the scene. While it’s bittersweet to leave Wellywood, the freedom of a fresh location means Homegrown has a chance to rethink its layout and how audiences flow between stages.

Tuck says it’s always been a platform or incubator festival ‒ acts like Six60 and Drax Project have grown up on the stage. Those artists who cut their teeth playing second or third on the line-up in later years became headliners in their own right and now play their own sold-out shows around the world ‒ in some cases, the festival can’t even afford them any more. “You’ve watched them rise to fame, rise to stardom … We want to be able to continually do that and make sure that new acts have got an opportunity to perform, and kick-start their careers. … That’s the driving force: promoting New Zealand music.”

But it’s a fine balance trying not to alienate its base by suddenly reinventing the wheel.

Down memory lane

Turney, who’d been involved in Homegrown from its humble beginnings right up until last year, says the festival is in some ways now a part of her DNA. At the start, it was hard to get off the ground and few believed in it. But, driven by a determined Wright, the event pushed to become what it’s known as today.

For the artists performing it’s like a giant summer catch-up party towards the end of their busy festival season. But for those in the control room like Turney and Tuck, their best memories are watching the smiles from the command centre on monitoring screens that track traffic flow from drones.

Turney remembers a proposal on the rock stage when it was held at the TSB Arena one year; five minutes of silence and everyone putting their phones in the air after the March 15 terrorist shootings in Christchurch; Dave Dobbyn and Peter Urlich singing Bliss for the first time in 20 years; Supergroove reforming and playing in 2009; and finally securing the elusive Fat Freddy’s Drop, who normally only perform their own shows.

“It was the team,” Turney says, when asked why she stayed so long. Those loyalists would set up for a few weeks and work their magic to make sure the festival went ahead rain or shine, although the pandemic did cancel the 2020 and 2022 festivals.

“We put these smiles on people’s faces. That kind of thing really makes your day, knowing that you’ve been a part of it,” Turney said.

Tuck thanks Wellington City Council and WellingtonNZ for their support and the strong relationship built over the years and wants to make sure Wellingtonians know those officials have “done nothing wrong”. Being based in Waikato and travelling down to the capital about every six weeks for the last 20 years has become more difficult as Tuck has built his own life with his partner and four children.

He also wants to give flowers to the businesses that have supported it over the years: lighting, sound, police, security, catering/food trucks and sponsors.

‘Like a teenager growing up and leaving home’

Heidi Morton, general manager of events and experiences for WellingtonNZ, won’t disclose the level of financial sponsorship provided to the festival. The agency found out in December the 2025 event would be the last in Wellington.

While the capital’s waterfront was a unique part of Homegrown it was constrained in its ability to expand, Morton says, including weight loading limits in certain areas. Additional funding was discussed, but city officials were ultimately told the reasons for moving were not financial.

According to independent reporting by WellingtonNZ, in 2024 Homegrown provided a $2.8 million benefit to the Wellington region, with 14,400 out-of-region visitors.

“It’s like a teenager growing up with you and then leaving home,” Morton says, adding the agency has a “strong pipeline” of future events it is working on to replace the Homegrown-size hole. “We are very confident that Wellington remains a strong proposition for promoters and organisers of events in Wellington, both financially and our and [the council’s] ability to work collaboratively.”

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau is grateful to the organisers and artists who contributed to its success.

“While we’re disappointed to see the festival go, it opens the doors for exciting new possibilities. We are committed to fostering a vibrant and dynamic cultural scene in our city and have a packed year-round events calendar.”

Some commentators have compared the loss of Homegrown to that of the Wellington rugby sevens in 2017, while other local arts contractors have lamented the potential loss of employment.

Elaine Linnell, general manager of the NZ Events Association, says regulatory challenges around liquor licensing, a scarcity of funding support, rising production and freight costs, and the fact that people are not buying as many pre-sale tickets as they did pre-pandemic were all factors affecting events’ viability.

The World of WearableArt contest is a great example of an event that began elsewhere (Nelson) and now has forged a different identity in another location, Linnell says. “If the content is right, people will buy the tickets.”

Locations that have been suggested for Homegrown’s next chapter include Napier, Auckland, Tauranga, Gisborne, New Plymouth, Christchurch and Hamilton.

The future

Tuck says Wellingtonians will have an opportunity from next year to fly or car-pool to the festival, as out-of-towners have so loyally done over the years.

“We always focus on making the best festival possible. We’re always pushing limits to try and make it bigger and better and fun. So that won't change for us.

“When the curtain falls at 11pm on Saturday the 15th [of March] it will probably be a bit of emotion as we farewell Wellington for the last time. I think it won’t be till then that we realise that we won't be back there again.”

Tickets for Wellington’s last Homegrown are on sale at homegrown.net.nz