Father Time has caught up with the magnificent Arrow Miners Band.
In a variation of ‘the day the music died’, the band — formed in time for the first Arrowtown Autumn Festival 40 years ago — will sadly disband after playing for the Super Seniors High Tea on the latest festival’s opening day next Thursday.
More than 35 players have graced the band over the years, but they’re now down to a handful — literally — including just one original, Joe Guise, who still plays his button accordion.
"I think we all feel pretty sad we can’t keep going," says drummer Peter Doyle, who’s been onboard since the early 1990s.
"It’s been hard because there’s been people falling off the perch."
Initially the Arrow Bush Creek Miners Festival Band — "I always got the name mixed up," Doyle, an original festival compere, says — it first played on a trailer pulled by Arrowtowner Don Simmers’ 4x4.
The band’s first pianist, Simmers says "it was an enormous amount of fun".
"It was such a camaraderie because all these guys sort of came out of retirement — I was the youngest by, like, decades — and they were as excited as standard two schoolboys.
"And these guys had all this skill and knowledge of music."
Many had played with dance bands, pipe bands or brass bands.
Instruments ranged from the piano, violin, guitar, banjo, sax, accordion and drums to Barry Bain’s amazing 1890s sousaphone that wrapped around him and Les Rogerson’s lagerphone — a stick with bottle tops on it that he rattled.
The band of course was synonymous with the autumn festival, often accompanying the Buckingham Belles can-can dancers, but they played far and wide including two visits to the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival, on Queenstown’s Earnslaw steamship, at Arrowtown’s The Hills golf course for the New Zealand Open and as part of the late Kevin Lynch’s History Alive Arrowtown visitor experience.
In 1990 they played "very reverently" on Buckingham Green, Simmers says, for the late Queen’s visit to Arrowtown.
He recalls characters such as banjo player the late Owen Marshall — "he was a tearaway, he would go into a bar and say, ‘let’s drink this place dry’."
Band members could also find a libation at a caravan set up on that green.
They’d busk with a gold pan raising money for Arrowtown’s Lakes District Museum (LDM), for painting the Arrowtown Post Office and supplying the Buckingham Belles’ younger troupe, the Mini Belles, with new costumes.
Funds also went on restoring the vintage 1948 Austin truck the late Alma and Jack Stevenson donated them in 1995 — Alma later wrote a children’s book about the adventures of ‘Old Red’.
As for their music, it included World War 1 songs and standards from the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s.
Says pianist Cheryl Collie, a 2011 ‘newcomer’, "the appeal for young people was the rhythms were something you don’t hear today, and little children identified with it".
"It always amused me how lots of Japanese tourists would be singing along, they knew the words to those songs like Roll Out the Barrel."
Lyn Jefcoate, who played double bass after initially playing electric guitar on an accompanying trailer, says "one of the problems was trying to get new blood as the young people don’t want to play the stuff we play, but then, by the same token, we can’t play what they play".
Accordionist Colin Macnicol, who joined after retiring to Arrowtown in 2007, says in country band line-ups you had a piano, piano accordion and drums.
"I’ve had young people come up and say, ‘what’s that instrument?"’
In the end, as the band’s music fades out, it’ll be the characters the band’s remembered for.
Such as founder Ray Currie and Trevor Hollebon, who both also sang, co-founder Ross Martin, Gordon ‘Prof’ Harwood, Eric Chard, June and Archie Flint and Bill Landreth putting down his drum to dance around.
Seven members — Doyle, Guise, Rogerson, Bain, violinist Noelene Tait, who would wander around the crowd and have to be called back, button accordionist Ray McGregor and Collie — were painted by local artist Thomas Brown, who put the first six on concertinaed cards.
And, to put a coda on proceedings, former LDM director David Clarke’s writing a booklet, out later this year, that’ll tell the full history of the band.
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