Punkfest 1996

With a standard door charge of $5, it could be difficult to cover costs of hall ($100) a full PA system ($300) and posters ($20) and have money left over for paying the bands, especially if they were from other towns. We took a couple of financial losses which blunted enthusiasm, along with a couple of incidents of trouble from bogans and boneheads. But we weren’t to be deterred…

By 1996 we were starting to really get going, with out-of-town bands playing alongside the locals on a more regular basis. We realised that the PA problem was solved when we went to a party at Thistle Hall organised by kids from Wellington High School. They just used a vocal PA, organised I believe by Kerry Ann Lee. The sound wasn’t great but it was sufficient for low-key gigs, and only costs $100 to hire.

We had been getting reports from SMUT of what was happening in Australia, and of a festival called “Punkstock“. Talk had gone on about how it sucked that there were no punk festivals here. Meanwhile, I’d asked a few friends bands if they’d be keen to play a party for my birthday, which happened to be close to Labour Weekend, making it easy for out-of-town bands to travel to. At some point we realised that if we ditched the birthday party idea and got a few more bands to play, then we would have a festival instead. Punkfest was born. A mutant monster lurched into life.

Punkfest 1996 was small by future standards. Two nights, 9 bands. With the Monday being a public holiday, we thought it would be a good idea to have nothing on Friday night to give people time to travel from other towns, and for the Sunday night to be the main event. Not such a good idea as things turned out. A good chunk of the crowd on Saturday were from Lower Hutt, there to see Lower Hutt High School band Diecast. Sunday was quieter in comparison. But a seed had been planted and it was to take root.

We had decided in our initial discussions about what form Punkfest was to take. We wanted it to be like a snapshot of the scene at the time – encompassing a range of musical styles and genres within the punk subculture. And we wanted to throw in stuff that wasn’t ‘punk’ in a musical sense, but still had a relevance and connection to the punk scene either by attitude or by being a musical style that fitted in with punk. That first year Lorenzo’s Frenzies took a lot of people by surprise and went down well with their fusing of Balkan gypsy circus music with a punk beat. They always got better the more they drank, and we plied them with home-made Gorse Flower Wine.