HBHS Rarotonga Music Tour

Everywhere we played, people danced.  Teenagers, pre-schoolers, honey-mooners, the desperate and dateless, district health nurses, tourists rich in years, locals rich in culture – everywhere, people danced.  So, after a while, we danced, too.  The last night of the HBHS Rarotonga Music Tour saw the boys grooving with a group of delighted RSA matrons, to the dulcet tones of a midi system + ukuleles + two local gents singing ‘Dancing Queen.’ The boys were perfect gentlemen throughout the tour, and it was lovely to have their maturity acknowledged by many of our fellow guests at the Edgewater Resort.  Dancing to local music with grandmothers (and some lovely young Australians) on a balmy tropical night was the perfect final gig of a perfect tour.

The Music Tour travelled to Rarotonga on Friday 29 June.  The Jazz Band, Gypsy Pickers, the Messant Family and Ollie and Sam all performed at a range of venues, with support and direction from Mr Botting, Mr Skandera, Mr Booth, Mr Rickard, and Mr Sutherland.  The boys set up the gear for their first performance at Tereora College approximately six hours after they landed on the island.  We left HBHS at 12.00pm and didn’t start unloading food and equipment at the Rarotonga Backpackers until 1.30am the next morning. 

Do you have any idea how much unwieldy and expensive kit travels with a band?  Small ‘kit’ miracles were performed hourly by the boys – Oliver Wilding and Sam Franecevic deserve special acknowledgement for taking on much responsibility for the gear, its distribution and its storage.  Instruments are temperamental, and the boys were careful to make sure that nothing was overheated or roughly handled.  Uneven power supply made setting up more interesting at a couple of venues, but the most pressing problems were solved on the fly.  In all organisational respects, this was a professional music tour, and the boys behaved like the professionals that many of them aspire to be.

Tereora College rocked.  The boys performed with panache and had to fight off the attentions of the young ladies in the audience by the end of the assembly.  Word got around the island very quickly that the HBHS band was worth a listen, and offers of gigs over and above our set engagements started to flow in.

The boys then played two local primary schools, the fishing club, the New Zealand High Commission, a high-end resort and Sails restaurant.  We could easily have stayed and played for another two weeks, but Mr Botting was missing his grandson. Down-time on the island was used visiting the market, swimming in the pool and the ocean, snoozing in the sun, making friends with the locals (people, three–legged dogs, roosters) and hunting down presents for family back home.  It was exactly the way it sounds.

The shock of arriving back in bitterly cold and dark New Zealand was acute. 

Rarotonga is tiny, hospitable and endearing – a lot like that great aunt you keep meaning to visit.  My advice: get to it.  By all means, go and see your great aunt, (she misses you), but also go and see Rarotonga.  It was very kind to us, and it will be to you, too.  The main industry on the island is tourism, and mid-winter is, by all accounts, the best time to go. 

The Music Tour was brilliant.  Thank you for making this happen, Music men, and thank you for letting us come along and see the magic, first hand.

Ms Crawford