To mark the coming end of Nivara Lounge, HUP's gathering favourite memories from performers and punters. What's the best gig you've seen there? Let us know: hamiltonundergroundpress@gmail.com.
When you’re new in town and find your people straight away
Danica Bryant is a singer-songwriter somewhere in the pop-folk-indie realm. Her debut album, Feast, turns 1 this month. She’s also the author of the Nivara Lounge profile on AudioCulture.
Nivara Lounge was the first place I ever visited in Hamilton, on my band’s first national tour back in 2022. The venue immediately felt like home! We were so excited winding down those mysterious steps underground, finding such an expansive space that felt simultaneously so cozy and intimate, yet vast and expansive.
Ivan and the team made us feel incredibly welcomed. Although we pulled a very small crowd that night, every person there was so invested in the music. For around twenty people, we played a set where the energy felt unmistakably intoxicating. The vibe in that lounge can’t be captured anywhere else and it brought together such a community of like minded people in a city that so many New Zealanders foolishly write off.
Ivan’s support for the Waikato music scene is unmatched and his grassroots approach to lifting up local art is something that has motivated my own passion for the cause throughout Aotearoa. It’s people like him, and places like Nivara Lounge, that remind me it’s still worth fighting in this extremely troubled industry today, because there are still small, vital opportunities to find meaning and to find something real amongst it all.
When you’ve played countless Nivara gigs but one of them really does stand out
Matthew Bannister (Sneaky Feelings, Dribbling Darts, The Weather, The Changing Same, One Man Bannister…) has been making music for so long that it’s impossible to fittingly introduce him in a single sentence.
This is going to sound self-serving but my favourite Nivara moment was when Sneaky Feelings played there in 2017. We hadn’t actually planned the gig – the main event was the Others Way in Auckland, the following day. But I figured we should do a warm-up. It was the first time we had played in about 20 years and we were pretty nervous. But the audience was great, very forgiving.
When you forget that backstage is literally just behind a curtain
Before Dan Satherley became an Aucklander known as Anecdata, he was all over the Hamilton music scene. This story, which dates back to last century, has been pieced together from a few of his posts on Bluesky.
Oh lord…my first gig was there! I gravitated more to the Ward Lane scene later on, but never got to play it. At JBC my first gigs were with Sequester, then a short-lived group VHS, then the bizarrely named SophieXEnola, then Big Elephants (with some of the Sequester guys), then Vetox, before I moved to Auckland and was in Kittyhawk.
I’ll admit that my memories of JBC/Nivara are largely bits and pieces, rather than a coherent single story. But I think my favourite was the time my band (it was VHS, I believe) were in a circle backstage getting amped up. When the band that was on before us stopped playing, everyone in the venue could hear us screaming, “KILL! KILL! KILL!”.
Got a Nivara Lounge memory of your own to share? Email it to hamiltonundergroundpress@gmail.com.