I’ve been to a lot of gigs and concerts in the last 30 years. Getting there and back is always an adventure in itself, but nothing has been as bad as what I witnessed last night in Auckland.
Elton John was scheduled to play at Mount Smart stadium last night and tonight, his two make-up shows for his cancelled dates back in early 2020 as COVID was just starting to kick off. So I had been looking forward to this ever since early 2019 – almost four years ago! – when we bought the tickets.
To say it didn’t go to plan would be an understatement. As I write this, on the morning of Saturday 28th January 2023, Auckland is in a state of emergency. Elton’s show tonight has also been cancelled.
We were expecting rain, in an Auckland summer that’s been blighted by rain, but the severity of the storm was something else. We went to the hassle of organising our daughters to have a sleepover at my mother-in-laws, and got ready in our wet weather gear and headed out.
We’ve been to concerts in the rain before at Mount Smart. In 2015 we saw the RUMOURS-era line-up of Fleetwood Mac, sat in the open-air stand at the opposite end of the stadium from the stage. That was a damp evening, sat in ponchos, in constant rain. But last night was something else entirely.
On the way, we drove through quite a bit of flooding where stormwater drains couldn’t cope with the deluge. My little car coped very well, considering the height of some of the water we were splashing through.
And then we hit traffic. After sitting in a queue for a good ten minutes or so, we turned a corner to see a natural dip in the road completely filled with water. A car was almost submerged, stuck in the middle of a new lake. We turned around, and switched to plan B: just get as close to the stadium as we could, and walk the rest of the way.
We found a road that looked fairly empty, and drove through a lake ourselves – something I wouldn’t have attempted had I realised how deep it was – but a bit of luck, and a lot of momentum got us through.
We parked up, got into our wet-weather gear, and braved the rain for the 10-minute walk to the stadium. We got in, very damp, and found our seats. I’ve never been so happy to be under the roof of a stand before. I don’t think we had the cheapest seats – those were the open-air stand that we saw Fleetwood Mac from – but maybe the second cheapest. And the irony of ironies, the people who had paid top dollar were sat close to the stage on the field, completely exposed.
With about 20 minutes to go until showtime, my wife went down to the concourse to fill up her water bottle, so I sat listening to the rain thrash the stadium roof. We were worried that when Elton finally came on, we wouldn’t be able to hear him over the sound of the rain.
A microphone clicked into life from the stage, and a voice said ‘Hello Auckland.’ Everybody cheered. Brilliant, I thought, if a solitary mic is that loud, the rest of the band should be louder than the rain.
The voice then went on to explain that they’d had discussions with the emergency services, Elton and his band and crew, and the Mount Smart team, and had decided it wasn’t safe to continue.
A major disappointment, to go to all that fuss, and then have it cancelled with minutes to go. They could have – and should have – cancelled it earlier that afternoon when they knew the weather bomb was as bad as it was. I wonder if they didn’t because of the uproar from when he cancelled his shows back in 2020. He aborted the last show he played there mid-set, as he was suffering from ‘walking pneumonia’ (which suspiciously looked like COVID to me), and walked off with a good portion of the set still to play. We had tickets to the following night – that’s how close we were to seeing him – and the ticketholders who attended that aborted show tried to get a refund, but only managed to get a partial refund after taking it to the Disputes Tribunal.
So we drove back, slowly, through all the rainwater which was somehow still pretty terrible. I said I’d go home and play some of his LPs to take out the sting of disappointment, but this 1982 effort is frankly quite terrible (even with a young James Newton Howard as part of the band, playing synthesiser).
But what an adventure to share with my wife!
Then you look at the news, and two people are confirmed dead from drowning, and a third is reported missing. It definitely puts things into perspective, not to mention the news that one of my favourite NZ comedians Dai Henwood announced last night that he’s been dealing with stage-4 bowel cancer. I watched his 45-minute interview with Jacqui Brown this morning, and the way in which he’s confronted his illness and gone public with the news in order to help other people that may be suffering is a remarkable display of humanity; a beautiful man in every way.
Hit: Dear John
Hidden Gem: Spiteful Child
Vinyl Stylus 