HALF/TIME: WELCOMED TO WREXHAM
Who are you, and who is Half/Time?
So, yeah, my name is Grant. I'm a musician and a visual artist and researcher based in Kirikiriroa/Hamilton. Half/time was a project that started as a solo act. Back in 2020, I actually started writing the music of half time as like a lock lockdown activity. It was the first time I'd ever sung songs in Māori. I'd always kind of been in these DIY music spaces, but I just never really sort of bought that part of my identity into that sphere.
A lot of it came off the back of my PhD that I'm doing at the moment, which is looking at the crossovers of Māori and punk culture. And interestingly that's actually how I met our base. Cee plays bass in a punk band. We kind of talked a little bit about turning half time into a band even that early on, but it never really came to fruition until we met our drummer, Kiara. Kiara is quite prominent in the diy scene, plays in a million bands and constantly, our bands were playing gigs together. I just asked Kia, I was just like, hey, me and Cee are thinking of doing half time as a band, would you be keen to play drums?And she was instantly on board. It's only been this year that we've actually started as a band as well. It coincided with us being asked to come overseas - we only had our first practice after being asked.
What is FOCUS Wales and how did the opportunity to perform arise?
So the opportunity was also related to my thesis in a lot of ways. I got invited to be a part of this online panel midway through last year, which was hosted by both my university, Waikato Uni and Cardiff University in Wales. It was an exchange looking at language revitalization through music. Because the language revitalisation movement in Wales for Cymraeg is quite similar to the revitalisation movements that have gone on here for Māori. And yeah, so we had this really cool panel discussion with a bunch of musicians from over there and a few of us from here.I didn't know what Focus Wales was prior to that.
Yeah, so it's, it's pretty exciting and I put in the application in the second half of last year and I kind of forgot about it for a while. Then mid January we got the invitation and by this point, yeah, Kiara and Cee and I hadn't even played together yet. So, yeah, I just asked Cee and Kiara, hey, I know we haven't played yet, but do you wanna come to the UK?
So yeah, a little bit of a blurb about the festival is, it's a, it's a three day international sort of musical showcase and industry like network. It's part music festival and part like producers and industry professionals being able to meet each other - and it's like 250 bands over three days. It takes over the entire town of Wrexham.
Why do you think it is so important to take the opportunity, and perform at FOCUS?
I mean, it's a really cool way to bring those worlds together. It's, so part of what we're doing over there as well is, so we're playing, we're playing three dates at Focus, which is from the fourth to sixth of May. And then we're gonna go down to the south of Wales and we're gonna play a few shows down there and then we're doing Cee and I are going to be part of a panel discussion at Cardiff Uni basically building on the talk that I mentioned before. But doing it in person with a whole bunch of musicians from over there and that's gonna be really interesting. I think it's gonna be a really cool exchange and like, I'm just really interested to hear from Welsh artists that perform in Cymraeg.
How are you going about raising money for the trip?
So, I mean, we did, we looked into a few different funding avenues when we got started, obviously because it's like I mentioned before, it's like we only got invited officially to the festival in mid Jan - and so we only really had a few months to actually get together what we needed. So it was a little bit scary but we just decided to commit to it and just to try for as many avenues as we could.
We put in an application for Creative New Zealand's Arts Grant, unfortunately we were unsuccessful with that, which was a shame. But boosted first came to my attention because, my friends, Coco and Tuki who run Wheke Fortress and, they were extremely successful through, Boosted, with sort of getting, getting that place started up and, yeah, so we, like, it was sort of just the first thing that came to mind for me.
But I guess, to me it kind of made sense in terms of like, the sort of risk sharing mentality that comes with, with fundraising, I think is like you, because you, you're sort of making an agreement with anybody that is willing to donate to your cause. And it's like when it is this thing that is like, this only goes ahead if we get everything that we need and it kind of feels like a bit more of a short thing. We did fundraiser gigs and at those events, we would often just mention the Boosted and we actually ended up printing out like a QR code so that people could donate.
Part of it was just asking people. With our fundraising shows, we set the door charge at a pretty standard $10, but we said on our posters, if you're in a position to give more, then that would be appreciated - but you don't have to. We were really blown away by how generous people were with just that simple request. There was no pressure attached to it and we didn't make it some weird VIP pass if you pay a certain amount. It was just really nice to see how willing people were to give a bit more when they can.
Where can people find you to follow your journey and support your trip?
We’re on Instagram and Facebook, Half-Time with a slash in the middle. We've got an “all my links thing on”, on our Instagram with the academic stuff too. My Instagram handle is @shamblerambler. It's really interesting having the name, half time, a lot of the time because we get tagged a lot in sporting events.
Yeah, I haven’t thought about that but yeah, pulling people in, from a different demographic.
It must be really, really weird when people accidentally land on us thinking that it's a halftime show or something and it’s a Māori Punk band.