Hi Alison,

I have just watched the Gathering documentary. I was there. Watching those dance scenes just bought on such great feelings. That was a magical event. Dancing in the hot sun with the gathering team firing water over everyone… absolutely epic stuff.

I just want to take this chance to thank you and the Gathering team for the wonderful parties you put on over the years. I can`t really thank you enough because I have had some of the best times ever at these events (I went to three – and am 39yrs old  now).

Maybe you could pass this on to the team… “Thank you so much for your hard work and the parties that I will never forget”.

Yours sincerely,
David Montgomery

Thanks David! We really appreciate your thanks!

I was thinking as New Year ticked over a couple of weeks ago that it was exactly ten years since we were up on Takaka Hill seeing in the new millennium and wondering if the skinheads were gonna come and get us – and it’s now 12 years since we filmed The Gathering documentary – so it’s just brilliant that people still watch it and still love it and still feel motivated to say “thanks”.

I think it says a lot about the awesomeness of The Gathering as an event, and about how strongly TheG imprinted itself on our national psyche. Very cool.

To me the most important part of David’s email is the thanks he sends out to The Gathering crew – and it’s why I asked him if I could post it on the blog.

Every one of the hundreds of crew members worked their ass off every year at TheG, for not much (if any) money, and in enormously stressful conditions – and for the most part it was done in style, with smiles, and with complete dedication. Individual crew members didn’t always get thanked for all their hard work, so it’s really nice to have an opportunity to pass on a Gatherer’s thanks to the people who made it all happen.

The Gatherers
Friday 25 January at 7.30pm
National Radio 101FM
or listen live online at www.radionz.co.nz

You can also grab the podcast from the Radio New Zealand website at radionz.co.nz/popular/music/talk – search on “G”.

Yaay!

We’ve got video from The Gathering 97/98, The Gathering G2000 and The Gathering G2 – and mighty fine it looks too. Thanks a million to Iain for making such high-quality copies for me to put on Google Video.

I suppose my personal favourite is the G2000 Havoc! “shopping trolley” interview, where Mikey and Newsboy took me up to the Domain, put me in a shopping trolley, and wheeled me around for a couple of hours while we chatted about everything Gathering. I could not believe how many people saw that show, and for months (even years) afterwards, if I ever mentioned it, people would go “Oh my God! Was that you??? I remember that episode so well!”

I still don’t quite know how that all happened. I know I wanted to do the interview outdoors, somewhere nice and nature-ish, which is why I suggested the Domain. And I remember Newsboy already had this shopping trolley idea – although I have no clue why – and he was really, really keen on it… so we compromised and did both. As you do. The only tricky thing was that the bumps on the ground as I was wheeled over the grass tended to make my voice go all jigglyjoggly – you can hear it if you listen carefully.

That was such a fun afternoon! Mikey and Jeremy are really really nice guys – I always enjoyed doing Havoc! interviews – and that particular afternoon I reckon we were all really on form.

I seem to remember one or two of the Gathering crew not being particularly happy with that interview – I think they thought it was too silly, or not respectful enough – but I like it. It turned out to be the most memorable interview we ever did – and I think it’s a Very Good Thing to be able to laugh at yourself once in a while…

Enjoy!

I’m having a bit of trouble getting the high-res version of The Gathering documentary 97/98 online at Google Video – it took quite a few days to upload – and then it failed… I have no idea why. Rats! I’m trying again now…

So in the meantime, here’s a little news report from the same event – I guess this was probably broadcast on 1 January 1998. Nice! Let’s see how it looks embedded on the page. Hopefully the high-res will look ok. I’ll test it here before I put it on the website.

Those of you who’ve already watched the large-screen version of the doco on Google Video will be aware that the quality leaves something to be desired. It looks OK at the embed-on-my-web-page size, but anything larger than that, and there’s quite a lot of pixellation. Well, Iain has fixed all that.

Viewing it on my laptop it’s very close to being DVD quality. I began the upload-to-Google-Video process a few minutes ago, and if the experience with the lower-quality (much smaller) version is anything to go by, it will probably take a week to upload. Literally!

We shall see.  We shall also see how much loss of quality we get once Google have done whatever it is they do to videos. Hopefully not too much. I’ll link to the new version from the original page on Google, and  I’ll let you know in the blog when it’s up. Woohoo!

And once that’s done, I’ll get started on uploading the other new video I’ve got  – also in super high quality.

Watch this space!

I’ve also updated The Gathering documentary 97/98 page with new links to previews and reviews in the media.

There’s also a scan of the G2 flyer in the G2 Gathering artwork section. Thanks to Ritche Nelson aka DJ Domino for sending the scans to me. I’m still looking for any other artwork for that year – were there stickers,  a poster, or a booklet for that year? Do you have them?

Here’s how to send us stuff if you have anything that can fill gaps in the website.

Thanks heaps.

Actually one of the funnest things (as well as the satisfaction of building up our archival collection of media coverage) was checking out the newspaper headlines that we’ve gathered along the way.

The first category, of course, is the many puns and the re-using of the words “gather”, “gathered” “gathering”, “gatherer” and all variations thereof – newspaper editors really love their word-play, don’t they?

The first pun appeared in an article about The Gathering 96/97 – Gathering entrances good-natured crowd (entrances/trance – geddit?). For The Gathering 97/98 the Nelson Mail wrote an editorial entitled Gather here again, please. About The Gathering 98/99 we had Ticket sales gathering momentum, Gather again, and Gathering forces. G2000 saw Start gathering friends, and Gathering momentum. G1 included Gathering momentum (again! They sure liked that one!), Shall we gather by the river?, Gathering their wits after three days of raving, Gathering boss needs to gather funds, and Gathering Debt$ by the truckload (ouch!). And for G2 we had Gathering all dance fans, and Gather round one and all. Phew!

I was thinking that it would often be possible to identify which of the six Gatherings was being referenced, just by the headline.

The Gathering 96/97 would be the trickiest, as we only had a small amount of coverage that first year. My favourite would probably be Police praise party-goers – just because it’s a rather unexpected news story, and because it was the first of many times that the peaceful nature of The Gathering was remarked upon and praised by “the grown-ups”.

My favourite headline of The Gathering 97/98 is Huge crowds jam road to Gathering, with a special mention to Gather here again, please – the first because it succinctly describes both the growing popularity of the event and the pain-in-the-ass that was the road and the traffic queues – and the second because it exemplifies the huge amount of support we received from those living in the Nelson/Golden Bay area, especially in the early years.

The Gathering 98/99 is probably best represented by the full-colour full-page feature articles in the Nelson Mail, the Christchurch Press and the New Zealand Herald – At The Gathering, Dance ’til you drop – and more, and Club Takaka. Cool!

G2000 was all about the drama, I suppose. Being listed in Mixmag’s The 100 best parties on the planet was pretty exciting. More exciting to the media, though, were stories such as Hundreds of fake tickets to Gathering in circulation and Attack rumours probed. And after the party it was all Gathering revellers evacuated, Headmaster hailed as hero, and Evacuation ends dance festival. I guess the Christchurch Press feature article headline Rhythm of the rain pretty much sums up G2000.

In the run-up to G1 we got Valley site for this year’s Gathering (and variations thereof), then Cheaper rival to Gathering party (and variations thereof), and then afterwards we had Man evicted as his girlfriend ‘freaks out’ (and variations thereof), Drug abuse widespread – Gathering survey suggests 93pc indulged and Ecstasy most popular drug at Gathering (and many variations thereof) followed by Survey of Gathering drug use doubtful – organiser (and variations thereof) followed by The Gathering faces crippling debt crisis (and variations thereof). Doh!

G2 began with Dance party gets green light despite being in red and Digweed drops in, moved through Partygoers have drugs tested, and Competition grows for Gathering dance party, and ended with Gathering future in doubt, Gathering in strife, Gathering faces oblivion – and finally – Goodbye to the Gathering. *sigh*

Rather than ending on that sad note, I’ll give you my all-time favourite newspaper headline – from the Nelson Mail in an article written by one of their journalists who made the pilgrimage to The Gathering for the first time for G2 – Summer of my disco-tent – which all of you fans of Shakespeare will recognise as a play on the first words of the first soliloquy in Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York

Clever… very clever!

All these news articles – and many, many more – will be available for your viewing pleasure as part of the new Gathering archives website which is nearly nearly ready to go online. Only a few more days now, I promise!

I’ve put it on Google video, because it’s nearly 50 minutes long, and it wouldn’t fit on YouTube.

And if you want to view it at a larger screen resolution – go here to Google video.

The 97/98 doco was the first one we made about The Gathering – here’s the story…

Two weeks before the start of The Gathering 97/98, I thought it might be cool to make a documentary. It must have been karma, because a few days later I bumped into my old friend Kylie Plunkett (who was working at TV3 at the time). Kylie took the idea and ran with it – and made it happen. She was amazing actually – she spent so many hours of her own time editing it after the event. The documentary cost us under $1,000 to make.

We put together a team of friends who worked in TV and film, and persuaded Rocket Rentals to lend us a Beta SP camera for 2 weeks – for free. How craazy is that! Thanks a million, RR!

Our film crew of Kylie, Zef Fugaz and Weston Owen worked pretty much non-stop before, during and after the event to create a record of TheG 97/98. They recorded behind-the-scenes views of the setup and running of the party; the wild and crazy days and nights of the party itself; interviews with the crew, and you – the party animals; and interviews with “grown-ups” like the Mayor of Tasman District and the local police.

The 19 hours of raw footage was then edited down to 38 minutes by Kylie (first edit) and Nick Murray (final edit) and Katie Wood mixed the awesome soundtrack. Kog Transmissions in Auckland got together a bunch of NZ electronica artists involved with The Gathering and they produced a double CD of original tracks for us to use. Some of the tracks had been released on NZ CDs already, and others were previously unreleased and were created especially for the film.

The documentary premiered at the Wellington Short Film Fringe Festival the following July, to a packed house – the first in the Festival’s history – the compere got us all doing a Mexican wave to celebrate. Woohoo!

After the premiere Gatherers across the country wanted to see the movie. I organised an independent tour, and the documentary played to packed houses in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Nelson (as part of the Nelson Cultural Tourism Symposium). I spoke at each screening, covering all aspects of the movie and of The Gathering itself. It was a very effective communication tool – and great to get such positive feedback!

The extended version of the movie was completed a few months later. It’s about 50 minutes long and includes the documentary itself, plus extra bits that we wanted to include but which had to be cut as we tried to get the movie down to half an hour, out-takes and funny sections of interviews, and more partying footage.

The raw footage, master tapes and copies of the documentary and the extended version now reside at the Film Archive, and the documentary is now part of the New Zealand National Collection.

I hope you like it!