Nambassa Festival

The three-day Nambassa Festival, held on a Waihī farm in 1979, is the subject of this restored documentary which beams us back to simpler days.

Philip Howe’s Nambassa Festival is a snapshot of Aotearoa at the end of an era, defined by a spirit of self-conscious innocence that the 1980s was about to stamp out. The footage is a catalogue of everything the seventies flower power counterculture had supposedly been about: great music, peaceful mass gatherings, alternative lifestyles, spiritual exploration and walking around public events topless.

But of course it was the music 60,000 people came to see. And the stage performances are treasures, ranging from a frenzied Split Enz, The Plague (wearing paint), Limbs dancers, to a yodelling John Hore-Grenell and prog rockers Schtung.

Of the Split Enz show, Mike Chunn wrote: “I was blown out of my high perch by an inspired awesome, display of edgy, driving pop music.”

– Chris Brown