Māori Punk Band Half/Time Heading to the UK

HALF/TIME is a te ao Māori centred punk band featuring Wairehu Grant (Ngāti Maniapoto) on guitar & vocals, Cee (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu ki Whangaroa) on bass and Ciara Bernstein on drums. We have been invited to showcase our music at FOCUS Wales, an international music festival held in the city of Wrecsham, Cymru (Wales) that is running from May 4th-6th.

Our aspiration for this campaign is to raise funds to put towards:

• Music equipment costs
• Arranging other gigs in the UK, connecting with like minded communities/whakawhanaungatanga
• Koha to assist with travel, accommodation and general living costs

At present we have applied for funding from Creative New Zealand (awaiting a response) and are in the process of applying for more support through NZ Music Commission and other outlets.

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As part of an ongoing cultural exchange promoting language revitalisation and cultural resilience for both Welsh and Māori, Half/Time have been invited to showcase at this year’s FOCUS Wales music festival. To our knowledge this would be only the second time an act from Aotearoa has joined the showcase line-up at FOCUS across its 12 years of activity, the previous being Tāmaki Makaurau’s The Beths.

The conversations which led to this invite were sparked during an online collaboration between Waikato and Caerdydd (Cardiff) Universities, in which musicians and researchers from both Aotearoa and Cymru shared their experiences of performing music in their native tongues. As part of the trip in May, both Cee and Wairehu will be joining a panel discussion in Caerdydd to continue these conversations kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face). Half/Time’s music weaves te reo Māori and te reo Pākehā with heavy riffs, pounding bass and drums all to address the lingering impacts of colonisation in modern Aotearoa.

Punk is not necessarily a genre of music that is widely associated with te ao Māori (the Māori world). In spite of this disconnect, many independent bands in DIY music scenes across Aotearoa have and continue to bring these worlds together. Both punk and te ao Māori share beliefs on the importance of community, and Half/Time seeks to carry this forward and showcase these values in our music and performances. We are really excited about the prospect of bringing our music to a new audience in places where none of us have ever been before, and doing so on whenua we all whakapapa back to.

Paired with the knowledge that the land recalls the footsteps of our tūpuna , this call for adventure is also a karanga home; to the tūrangawaewae we’ve yet to meet but who already knows us. Both at FOCUS festival and elsewhere in the UK we aim to connect with other artists and communities who share a similar kaupapa of indigenous preservation and resistance. Ngā manaakitanga, Wairehu, Cee and Ciara.

Along with this campaign and our other fundraising efforts we will also be playing a number of fundraiser shows in Tāmaki Makaurau and Kiririroa. The confirmed dates at present are:

-Half/Time website-