A survival guide for 2025's big gig apocalypse.

Desperate times call for desperate measures: it's time to watch all that concert footage on your phone.

Kia ora.

If you were anything like me, you spent your weekend combing through all of the videos coming out of Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, where Liam and Noel Gallagher reunited for the first Oasis shows since 2009. I was looking for awkward glances, side eyes, an angry word – anything that might suggest their legendary sibling rivalry might flare up again. I have a ticket for the very final show of their tour in Sydney in November, so, before Cardiff’s show, I put my odds at 50-50 that they’d make it there.

Now, those odds have risen to 75-25. The Gallagher bros played well, sounded incredible, and even seemed to be enjoying themselves. Perhaps that’s because of the tour’s huge stakes. “No one seems interested in pretending this tour is anything other than a hugely lucrative cash-grab, and clearly, you only grab the maximum possible cash if the tour doesn’t descend into the kind of bedlam to which Oasis tours were once prone,” writes The Guardian’s Alex Petridis in a five-star review.

But there’s a different kind of problem at play here. After watching ‘Champagne Supernova,’ ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Hello’, I had to turn it off. I couldn’t take it. That feeling came over me once again, a sense of déjà vu I’ve been experiencing all year. Despite rumours it might happen at Eden Park, Oasis aren’t coming to Aotearoa on this tour. Like Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar, they’re another major act going to Australia and asking us to pay for flights and accommodation to see them play.

All of us music fans in Aotearoa are missing out in a major way, and with AC/DC the latest act to give us a miss, this woeful trend doesn’t appear to be stopping any time soon. So, today, I thought I’d put together a survival guide. How do you look after yourself when Australia is getting all of the shows and we’re getting none of them? How do you cope? What can you do? Here are a few ideas. A warning: some of them are laughable. But perhaps humour is the best way to get through it?

Ask your parents about all the big gigs they’ve seen.

Six60 filed Western Springs in 2021. Photo: Chris Schulz.

Your granddad probably saw Led Zeppelin play Western Springs in 1972. Maybe your dad went to Bob Dylan in 1978, or your cousin snuck in to see Bob Marley in 1979. Did your mum swoon over David Bowie in 1983, or did your uncle cheer on Michael Jackson in 1996? We may not be getting big shows right now, but we’ve had many big shows in the past. Find someone who went to them and ask those old-timers to put their feet up on a stoop and share their memories. (If they bang on about $22 tickets, $10 T-shirts and $2.50 beers, tell them something came up and you have to leave.)

Watch all that footage stored on your damn phone.

You know you’ve done it. I’ve done it too. Despite my constant pleas to put your damn phones down at concerts, no one ever does. So unlock your phone, go to your Photos app, and start scrolling. There, you’ll find hours of concert footage you’ve never seen before. When I did this recently, I found videos of Adele, Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift all performing in Aotearoa like 2025 had never happened. Then I kept going, watching Mike Skinner crowdsurfing, Amy Taylor screaming into the abyss, and JPEGMAFIA going completely off at the Powerstation (see above). I’d never seen those clips. Didn’t know I had them. Had a bloody good time though.

Find clips of the acts you can’t see playing bad shows.

Angus Young struts. Brian Johnson howls. But something is just … off. Recently, this live footage of AC/DC went viral for all the wrong reasons. You can’t help but watch it and wonder if it’s not such a bad thing that the rockers aren’t coming here on their PWR UP tour. Same with Katy Perry on her Lifetimes tour. Is this mean? Sure. But they’re mean for not bothering to come here in the first place. So we’re all square.

Put your own show on for your friends and family.

During a recent family holiday, my sister arrived and immediately pulled out a bag containing something I hadn’t seen in a very long time: a Playstation 2 console, two microphones and six different versions of the karaoke video game SingStar. Suddenly, I was screaming ‘99 Red Balloons’ like I was a member of Limp Bizkit giving Nena’s 1983 classic a nu-metal makeover. My sis probably won’t bring SingStar on another family holiday after that. The point is, I had fun. For a brief moment, it felt like I was playing the biggest gig of my life.

Watch old shows on YouTube.

For my series The Ones, Villainy front man Neill Fraser told me he was obsessed with something I’d never seen before. It was a Smashing Pumpkins live show in Hamburg from 1998 that he’d recorded off the television then watched over and over again. It was, he said, the reason he bought a guitar and started a band. I found that show and he’s right: it’s awesome: dark and nasty, with D’arcy Wretzky right there on the stage next to Billy Corgan at one of their last shows together. There are thousands of live shows on YouTube. Find one, close the curtains, dim the lights, press play and sit directly in front of your television. It’s not the same as going to a big gig. But it’s something.

Go to smaller shows and support local artists instead.

Plenty of local acts are stepping up and filling the gaps left by the big ones. Supergroove just played 15 shows around the country. Marlon Williams just finished his biggest tour yet. Ladi6 is selling out venues. There are a tonne of ways to support the artists you love. If you can afford it, you should totally do that. Support independent record stores. Buy vinyl directly from the artist. Start with Jazmine Mary, Phoebe Rings and Ringlets, but there are so many local artists worthy of your time. If there’s one good thing that could come out of this horrible trend, it’s this.

This is an ongoing series about Aotearoa’s big gig drought. Here are parts one, two and three.

Thanks for being here. If you’d like to support the work I’m doing, the best way is to become a fully-fledged subscriber. If you do this, you’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling from the fact that you’re supporting an Aotearoa music journalist do his thing, and keeping a dying art form alive. Cheers to all that already do this. You’re the only reason I’m able to keep the dream alive…

Bonus beat.