Cover story: how music nostalgia is booming

Sunday, 1 March 2026

No longer the domain of pub covers bands, music nostalgia is hitting the big stages, writes Stewart Sowman-Lund.

At Synthony, you can hear your favourite dance tracks re-imagined with a full orchestra. In Big Horns, a brass band injects new life into jazz and funk classics through the decades. And at the 27 Club, you’ll discover a theatrical spin on the music of pop and rock icons like Amy Winehouse.

It’s almost like a new wave of cover bands - but certainly not confined to Cossie Clubs or corner pubs.

While music snobs may once have turned their nose up at the concept of re-imagining other peoples’ famous tracks, nostalgia - or perhaps elevated nostalgia - is all the rage. From a vinyl record boom to legacy film sequels, not to mention a never-ending spate of music biopics, the most consistent money maker in the arts at the moment seems to be dipping back into the trends of yesteryear and turning them on their head.

It’s a trend that’s hitting theatres too. Auckland has just welcomed a revival of the Rocky Horror Show which will be followed by the local premiere of & Juliet, a show that takes the music of Max Martin and places it loosely into the world of Shakespeare.

Then there’s Come Together, an annual rock supergroup tour, this year recreating the music of Radiohead and Talking Heads. In July, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox - the jazz group that reworks pop music into vintage genres - returns to our shores.

Revisiting music that holds “deep nostalgia” for people is engaging, believes Big Horns’ music director Dixon Nacey.

“It's really a powerful way of bringing a slightly new viewpoint on how to get the most out of these great songs,” Nacey says of his group’s Auckland Arts Festival show.

He thinks there is a trend of “revamping” popular culture for the modern age, but it has to be unique.

“One big part of it is the live element. Rather than things just being sort of programmed and running tracks with the band, we're 100% live. I think that's a really important thing.”

Some of the songs, especially those from the 60s and 70s, don’t need too much adjusting - “you might just do a few tweaks here and there” - but others have been given a fresh coat of paint.

“My background is in jazz, so it's kind of easy to slightly overcook things and get a little bit excited and go a little bit left of centre,” Nacey says. “But just keeping kind of true to the music, and just adding some dynamic range in there, and some of these great other elements to keep it novel, but also keep it recognisable. And that's nostalgia there.”

On an even larger scale, there’s Synthony. What started as an experiment in elevating electronic music through live performance has blown out into a huge annual music festival in Auckland along with a global touring production.

To the uninitiated, combining a 50-piece orchestra and dance music may seem impossible. Even music director Dick Johnson admits being a “bit of a snob” at the start.

“I'm a DJ. I've spent 30 years making my own original music,” he says.

“But then, honestly, I went to the first one … and I was completely blown away, because, you know, it's the music that I loved back in the day, and it's just recreated into something new with the orchestra. You know, it's almost like a new piece of music.”

In short, he says, the show is an “orchestra event like no other orchestra event”, seamlessly merging two worlds that may seem completely unrelated. It’s become a phenomenon.

“So you've got the weight of a 50 piece orchestra recreating these tracks from the 90s, early 2000s and then we have guest vocalists, guest instrumentalist, sax players, trombone players, performers dancing and this really incredible visual show as well … it all comes together as quite an epic show,” he says.

“You know, it's very much a show. It's not just like a DJ with an orchestra. It's a full thing.”

Johnson believes the nostalgia trend definitely helped boost Synthony’s appeal, as does the fact that how people engage with dance music has changed - at least among a certain demographic. Fewer people want to stay out clubbing until 4am, he believes.

“We are the biggest cover band in the world,” he says. “We started out definitely with [an] older generation. But it's just a really great clubbing experience,” he says.

With a growing audience comes the chance to modernise Synthony’s setlist. It’s not just 90s tunes anymore, but music from the noughties; Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia are two examples - “classics for those people who were going out then as well”.

For something more intimate, there’s 27 Club, which makes its local debut at the Auckland Arts Festival. Creator Zac Tyler describes it as a “live rockumentary”, combining storytelling elements with live musical production.

The name comes from the informal title given to a group of artists who all died at the age of 27, which includes icons like Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

The end result is part stageshow, part rock concert - but another example of classic music being revived for the modern age.

The show’s concept first came to Tyler around 2013, a couple of years after pop singer Winehouse died from a drug overdose.

“I thought there must be a show in this,” he explains.

“I originally conceived it thinking that it could be a great way to educate kids about drug abuse and alcohol abuse, and kind of, in a really cool way, talk about these things openly.”

By the time it premiere at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in 2013, the idea had morphed into a full on theatrical experience. Then, when it was revived at the Adelaide Fringe in 2021, it became a “full rock and roll” experience.

Tyler agrees that nostalgia is having its moment, believing we are at a point where “everyone’s kind of looking back”.

That’s not why his show was created - and the performances are certainly not mimicry - but it does allow audiences the chance to see music performed by artists who no longer have their own voice.

“What we try to do in the show is not replicate anything, but we kind of take the energy of what we know of these artists,” he says.

“I think that there is something that collectively everyone can get in the same room and go, ‘I was there’, or ‘I was at the end of high school when Nirvana were big’. I think that there is a sense of everyone coming together and kind of, I don't know, living their best lives and thinking about when they were younger.”

The 27 Club is definitely not a tribute show in the traditional sense, says Tyler. It’s more about the art and the artists. “You'll see that it kind of runs almost like a theatre show - you just get the rock concert as well.”

The performers involved - which includes Australian rocker Kevin Mitchell from Jebediah - aren’t from “the corner pub,” says Tyler.

“They’re coming from some of the biggest stages in the world.”

If the 27 Club was simply a tribute to Nirvana, Tyler says it might be easier to sell tickets. But he hopes his show has more of a lasting impact.

“We love these songs. We love these artists. What's a way we can do this in a real artistic way that still feels faithful? I think that's kind of where we arrived at it.”