Tahuna Break’s Adam Fuhr is a man on a mission. The talented keyboardist/DJ also doubles up as a honcho in the popular Auckland hip hop group Midnight Gallery with ex Eddie Number’s members’ Tyla Pere and Edgar Mahon, but can still recall the time when he joined the band
“I joined right at the end of 2008” he laughs. “I actually missed my final NCEA exam to record Black Brown & White Tahuna’s second album. So I figured it was a music exam and I thought what better way to learn music than to record an album and Homegrown was a couple of weeks after so I got my braces off” [laughs]
Tahuna Breaks mark their 10 year anniversary with the release of a live album, “Tahuna Breaks Live 10”. Recorded late last year at Auckland’s iconic Powerstation (where Devilskin recorded theirs) the one off show celebrating the milestone features 10 live hits from previously released albums including hit songs Stars, Move, Reflections, Casually Acquainted, Voodoo and Giddy Up (rumour is it’s a song about masturbation, who knew?)
“It’s something we’ve been wanting to do for a while” he muses. “It wasn’t until last year when we realised the band was in its tenth year, we decided to put on an anniversary show at the Powerstation. We thought “let’s get these extra members along and make it a ten piece, let’s get all the past members back for a cameo let’s record it, let’s film it” and that’s what we did”
A live recording is a gamble that’s paid off for the group, what began as an instrumental band in 2005 dreamed up at Deschlers Bar on Auckland’s High Street has snowballed into something bigger. Fuhr is quick to point out although history was on their side it wasn’t an ideal recording process
“I think there were times where I’d just get too into it” he says cautiously. “There’s times where I think we’ve gone too hard on performance and compromised the music. I think with the recording production of this DVD and live anniversary show we all wanted to make sure the music was right and tried our best to relax and that’s why you rehearse so much so it becomes second nature”
“We rehearsed three times as much as we ever have for any other gig. Leading up to the show it was quite stressful because you know you’ve got just one take, some band have done it over a couple of gigs a combination of things, all audio and all video was from that one gig of that one night, we recorded the full two hour show then for the record we condensed it down we thought ten tracks, ten years it’s kind of poignant isn’t it?”
There is always a risk involved when playing live, especially with a large contingent of musicians on stage for mishaps to occur – power outages, effects racks not working etc , however this is rock and roll and as they say the show must go on
“I mean when there’s ten of you on stage there’s not a huge amount of room to run on stage anyway” he says. “But Marty always goes hard upfront. It’s amazing the amount of energy he gets on a long tour he can be napping in the hotel one minute to full on performance mode the next doing his James Brown splits or whatever – limping the next day” [laughs]
So now the live album has been released, Summer Tours done and dusted doesn’t mean the band are ready to hang up their boots just yet
“Yeah we head to Europe around June/July to play a few festivals to be announced shortly” He says. “That’s pretty exciting and then back into the studio, and I think this next album will utilise an extended 10 piece line up and take the best things of all we’ve done so far and put them together so we’ll still have that party element to it .Try to put together what we’ve learned over the years maybe tick another box release a vinyl maybe so might as well get that bucket list going!”
“I don’t think anyone anticipated it being this long, it kind of started off as a jam band and every album we did was one more than we thought we’d ever do, and now we’re looking at getting back into the studio and recording new tracks and putting out another one – Crazy
