To stand on a stage in front of New Zealanders and claim to be good at what you do is to be seen as a heretic.<\/p>\n
Prime ministers get booted for doing it. All Blacks wouldn\u2019t dare.<\/p>\n
Kiwi culture dictates that you must be anointed as a great, a legend, a national icon.<\/p>\n
And when and if that adulation comes, you must always play it down, and say someone else should really take all the credit for your performance. <\/p>\n
To accept it is to risk opprobrium. You\u2019ll get your flowers when you\u2019re dead.<\/p>\n
And yet, here they come. <\/p>\n
The Six60 heretics, playing to an expectant crowd in the Hawke\u2019s Bay settlement of Puketapu on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
Before the main show is a fun entree from talented 22-year-old Hawke\u2019s Bay singer Makayla.<\/p>\n
Six60 have performed to hundreds of thousands of Kiwis since Covid, and show no sign of slowing down.<\/p>\n
As the sun goes down on us, a crowd that has waited months for this moment gets to see the most popular Kiwi band of a generation.<\/p>\n
What makes Six60\u2019s body of work over the past decade and a half so different from others from these shores is that they\u2019re not shy about their success, and they won\u2019t be cowed.<\/p>\n
This is a band that has put in the hard yards in the recording studio, building a compilation of close to 30 hits that have collectively taken over our radios.<\/p>\n
All She Wrote, Only To Be, Long Gone, Special, Don\u2019t Forget Your Roots – together as a package they work so well, and as a result they\u2019ve broken down a door to headlining huge shows to hundreds of thousands across New Zealand since Covid-19.<\/p>\n
And Chris Mac, Ji Fraser, Marlon Gerbes and lead singer Matiu Walters lean into that, hard. <\/p>\n
\u201cCan\u2019t stop believing I\u2019m the greatest,\u201d Walters sings, and there\u2019s no doubt in his voice.<\/p>\n
Matiu Walters sings Six60’s new song ‘We Made It’.<\/p>\n
For the 5000 people at the fun and classy and scenic new Shed 530 venue, and a few in the million-dollar homes overlooking it, Six60 had a treat planned.<\/p>\n
A new album has been in the works all winter, so they played what Walters suggested could be the first single.<\/p>\n
It turns out it\u2019s a song about sitting down and reflecting on their accomplishments.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s called We Made It.<\/p>\n
The ballad, which follows the template of the sunshine pop rock they\u2019ve mastered, gets the crowd\u2019s attention and applause.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it a hit?\u201d Walters politely asks everyone afterwards. You get the feeling he already knows the answer.<\/p>\n
They start the night with their sing-along waiata Pepeha. <\/p>\n
The funky Vibes gets the crowd moving, but as the show goes on, Six60 lean back towards their more relaxed hits, Only To Be, Purple, and Someone To Be Around, as they shake off some of the rust of a season without playing together and a few sound issues.<\/p>\n
In the middle is a fascinating collaboration on Uphill with Yelawolf, a rapper the group befriended on a trip to the American Midwest.<\/p>\n
It shows the pulling power of Six60 that he travelled halfway across the world to sing a song with them.<\/p>\n
In another world, this entire gig might not have happened. Six60 might not have made it.<\/p>\n
Shed 530 was hammered by Cyclone Gabrielle. <\/p>\n
The valley paddock the punters were standing on in their droves on Saturday was once upon a terrible time covered in silt.<\/p>\n
Organisers were then earlier this year forced to postpone the scheduled Easter show to ensure the venue was ready for a band as big as Six60 as its crowning opening.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s safe to say it is now.<\/p>\n
Six60 promised new music to Hawke’s Bay punters and they gave them a taster.<\/p>\n
As Six60 and Walters – wearing an All Blacks jersey – finish their encore to adulation, the full setlist shows just what they have achieved. <\/p>\n
Don\u2019t Give It Up, Please Don\u2019t Go, Closer, Rise Up 2.0, Fade Away – none of them are played on the night.<\/p>\n
Yes, that\u2019s right, this is a Kiwi band that can choose not to play five of its platinum charting singles and still deliver a show packed with hits and intrigue.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no other band in the country like them. <\/p>\n
They\u2019ve made it all right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To stand on a stage in front of New Zealanders and claim to be good at what you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101124,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[95,5195,73902,156,3278,305,702,1362,117,111,139,69,762,418,68191,8628,165,8229,14443],"class_list":["post-101123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-and","tag-be","tag-cowed","tag-entertainment","tag-facts","tag-have","tag-it","tag-made","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-review","tag-shows","tag-six60","tag-song","tag-their","tag-they","tag-wont"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}