Live at Spark Arena
4 February 2025
Live Review by Music Journalist: Paul Marshall
When Opportunity Hits Hard: Skram’s Wild First Arena Night.
You can’t beat summer in New Zealand. It’s the season when touring artists descend on our fair shores like migratory rock ’n’ roll birds, chasing sunshine, cold beer and enthusiastic audiences who know every word. Wednesday night at Spark Arena promised exactly that with headlining act OneRepublic.
Inside Spark, as the house lights dimmed, I surveyed the stage and clocked the word SKRAM emblazoned across the kick drum. A name that suggests chaos. Or at least noise. What followed was… something else entirely.
Skram are a Wellington-based, hippiesque glam-pop outfit, five members deep, though only two appeared to have received the memo about dressing like rock stars. Those two, the singer Henry Ashby and drummer Felix Nesbitt also happened to be the most competent musicians on stage. The remaining members looked like they’d stopped by straight from their day jobs, while the bass player appeared to still be in his pyjamas. Commitment is a spectrum, and Skram covered most of it.
Musically, they delivered nursery-rhyme-styled pop songs, the kind that feel designed for festivals at 2pm rather than arenas at prime time. A group of younger fans beside me began dancing somewhere between pure joy and a Hopak folk-dance frenzy: fans, or simply beat warriors answering the call.
To be blunt, Skram felt better suited to opening The Rocky Horror Picture Show than warming up for one of the world’s biggest bands. They would have absolutely killed it opening for Dutch progressive rock band Focus, whose chaotic global hit Hocus Pocus sits squarely in their wheelhouse.
“This is our first ever arena show!” shouted Ashby, proudly. And yes, it showed. When they asked the crowd if they were excited to see OneRepublic, the roar was seismic, easily ten times louder than the polite golf clap that had followed Skram’s own songs. The contrast was brutal and immediate.
There were details you couldn’t script. The female backing vocalist wore a T-shirt reading “Hi Mom”, which unintentionally summed up the set’s wide-eyed innocence. Short on material, the band rolled out a limp cover of Coldplay’s Yellow, a song so over-played it should come with a licensing warning.
Then came the finale. The singer strapped on a half-sized guitar, promptly lost control of it as it slid off his shoulder, hurled it to the ground in frustration, and announced they were “missing the guitar.” Whether this was symbolism or simply chaos remains unclear.
Adding to the confusion, the female backing vocals were mainly buried so low in the mix that it was impossible to tell whether she couldn’t sing or the engineer simply forgot she existed. Either way, my first impression of Skram was… not kind.
And then, plot twist.
Before OneRepublic hit the stage, I ran into my friend Greg Haver, there in his official capacity as photographer a path he originally fell into after shooting a UK band I was touring here. Haver, whose day job includes producing records for global stars, asked what I thought of Skram. I didn’t hold back. He calmly suggested I go home and listen to their recordings.
Worth noting: Greg Haver produced them.
On the drive home, I queued up Skram on Spotify. And to my genuine shock, I couldn’t believe I was hearing the same band. Recorded, Skram are excellent. Sharp, well-crafted pop songs with hooks, texture and a left-of-centre twist. Polished. Confident. Genuinely exciting. It was a different universe to what I’d just witnessed at Spark Arena.
Context, it turns out, is everything.
Skram had only 24 hours’ notice before stepping onto that arena stage. They weren’t originally on the bill. The opportunity came about after OneRepublic wrapped their last world tour date in Wellington and headed out for post-show drinks. They were taken to a local bar known for live music, where, by pure chance Skram happened to be playing. Ryan Tedder remembered them. When OneRepublic landed in New Zealand, he reached out and offered them the support slot.
No flights. No big budget. The band drove themselves to Auckland because they couldn’t afford to fly. Thrown into the deep end, under-rehearsed, under-resourced, and staring down a packed arena.
Suddenly, the scrambled mess made sense.
What I saw at Spark Arena wasn’t the true measure of Skram. It felt like a band blindsided by opportunity, caught between potential and preparation. If their recorded material is anything to go by, Skram deserve another look, just maybe not on a 10,000-seat arena stage yet.
With time, confidence, and the right setting, there’s clearly something there. And next time, hopefully, that includes a bit more cohesion in the wardrobe image department, preferably decided before leaving the house.
Reviewer: Paul Marshall
Photography by Paul Marshall
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