The Exploding Rainbow Orchestra tells us why Auckland music matters

I was finishing up work at a Karangahape vintage shop in early 2023 when Annabel and Callum (of Sports Team/The Weed Eaters fame) started digitally imploring everyone to cancel their plans and show up for a gig at Neck of the Woods that night. The lineup didn’t make sense, looking like your average Others Way lineup of the time without any of the appropriate marketing and fanfare preceding it. On the way home I ran into Annabel, who clarified that members of international exports like Fazerdaze and Princess Chelsea were amongst the 32+ person orchestra squeezed into the Neck basement, while some of the most prevalent names in the collective would be donning their frontperson hat to perform a new track accompanied by the backing band, before scuttling back behind their instruments to let other songwriters, both in and out of the orchestra, take control of the frey.

The reports from that first Neck of the Woods show were amazing. The orchestra took up most of the floorspace, cutting the already limited capacity in half and leaving most punters on the same level as the performers. The Exploding Rainbow Orchestra Songbook Vol. 1 featured tracks from Elizabeth Stokes, Priya Sami, Crystal Choi, Samara Alofa, and more from the star studded royalty of millennial UoA music graduates who turned Auckland into the warm, welcoming space it is for young people today. Between each track, the musicians would banter and laugh before launching into wondrous, shiny, beautiful explosions of noise. 

I’m hoping that explanation makes sense, but the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra shows are difficult to put into words. Their bio on Instagram still reads “Imagine a rainbow, then imagine it exploding. Pretty excellent, no?”. As I sat at a bar a few doors down from Neck last week, Joshua Worthington-Church lamented how hellish marketing a project this cool had been. 

“You can say, "Oh, it's this really big band’, but that's so vague. And you start, ‘Well, they do this thing where we get all these songwriters…’ and you start getting into the minutia really quickly and people glaze over it; they just want to see the thing, but they need some kind of assurance that thing is worth seeing, and that's been really tricky.”

Josh is endlessly recognisable in tie dye, with a massive backpack of various wonders strapped to his back hoisted up by the best mullet in the game. You’ll most frequently see him across instruments and bands that have defined Auckland music this decade, recently taking on drumming duties in Dick Move, jumping across the stage as part of Princess Chelsea’s seven-piece Dream Warriors, and occasionally fronting Mammalien, his equally incredible solo project that bounces between freak-folk and sax-accompanied art rock.

Alongside running sound and generally being a friendly face hanging around at gigs these days, he clued me in on the secret of his success - which, like any other good New Zealander, was wrapped in self deprecation.  “I feel like I'm like the worst player in the room, but I'm good enough to hang, so I'm gonna get the most out of all of these amazing players. Why would you limit yourself to playing with three or four of them?”

Early on, the name ‘Exploding Rainbow Orchestra’ was used across his big band projects, with old YouTube footage showcasing later members of the collective like saxophonist/composer Callum Passels and vocalist/songwriter Chelsea Prastiti front and center. The project evolved after the pandemic, urged on by friends departing for OE’s and some inspiration from Josh’s lifelong favourite band, The Flaming Lips. He defined earlier iterations as a big, Soft Bulletin-style symphonic rock band. “There was a little bit of a proof of concept, and we did this recording session out in a warehouse that my dad manages out in East Tamaki, and it was, I think, 21 people.What is it worth if I give them all 40 bucks for gas to just come hang out for the day?“

Pandemic restrictions started to lift from 2022, around the time Josh became occupied with the rollout and tour of Princess Chelsea’s stellar Taite-winning record Everything Is Going To Be Alright where the bandmates started conceptualizing the Orchestras’ public debut. Despite a last minute venue change from a West Auckland warehouse coffee shop to a smaller but more befitting venue in Neck of the Woods, where the wider community were tapped to partake as songwriters, composers, and performers. Clips of the show are stuff of legend, as seen by what Sports Team put together for Priya Sami’s recently revived track “Stupid Lame Cliches”.

They ran the experiment again later that year, with ERO Songbook Vol, 2 coming in August of 2023 with songwriters like Don McGlashan, Delaney Davidson, and Hollie Fullbrook of Tiny Ruins amongst the names - back at Neck on a Sunday and Monday evening. Every line on the pages of sheet music was assembled by composers across the community, building these tracks into symphonic, big band, jazz influenced, hard out rock songs that turned everything you knew about music in this city onto its head.

A couple months after the second Songbook, the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra breached containment by way of the Silver Scrolls, with Steph Brown and Fen Ikner of Lips connecting Josh with future Taite winner Vera Ellen in their joint efforts to honour Don McGlashans induction into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame. It became an impossible task, as the curators decided on the heart-wrenching ‘Andy’ to cover. “I was like, are you fucking joking? Are you serious? That is an un-coverable song. How dare you ask me to arrange a song that made me weep the first time I heard it.”

Thankfully, Vera Ellen was incredibly well equipped to tackle that track, allowing the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra to showcase their insanity to all the music industry big wigs at Spark Arena and a live broadcast making it incredibly clear who the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra were and why they exist. It provided a clearer path forward to the ERO’s home for the past couple of years, Hopetoun Alpha - located behind Te Karanga-a-Hape station, and usually doubling as Whakamana Cannabis Museum. The space is designed like a more compact Auckland Town Hall, with the usual weed paraphernalia pushed to the side as the team made way for a mini bar, a soundsystem, and 38 orchestra musicians. This was in 2024, with performers like Oliver Devlin of Hans Pucket, Grecco Romank, and Julia Deans commanding the orchestra to their most dense compositions yet as Josh danced at the front, waving around a massive glow stick as a conductor's baton. 

I remember that 2024 show vividly. After a whirlwind few days made Jazmine Mary’s ‘My Brilliance’ hit directly like a dagger in the heart, the successive gut punches of Keira Wallace and Mousey took me down to the floor. These emotionally driven singer songwriters usually working within the reins of minimalism excel against the orchestra, with composers from across the collective designing and articulating each detail of the arrangement meticulously. Finn Johansson and Oliver Devlin were more playful with their tracks, bringing the world of their music further to life than ever before, while Grecco Romank premiered an album track called ‘Asbestos Tarot’, which I was later elated to hear the studio cut of at Kiriata me Puoro, our first Misheard event where Josh, having never met me or Hiri before, helped us load out the projection screen into the car. They also broke out of the indie sphere with incredible R&B and hip-hop tracks from RNZŌ, Hales, and Diggy Dupé, the last of which closed out the Jukebox of Joy last week. 

2025 was just as electric, especially as the team were able to bring in new artists changing the face of Aotearoa music for the better and weirder. Ladyhawke, Reb Fountain, and Green MP Steve Abel were some of the best-known contenders, while our friend Maebh McCurdy tore the room down before joining the ERO the following year. “That's who I'm excited about, people I've never heard of before, just an 18 year old who's gonna blow my mind. It was Leigh (her FKA)  last year.” (Maebh, the HRT is reverting your age back a decade!) 

And so comes the jump to the Aotea Centres’ Kiri Te Kanawa theatre. I told Josh it felt like a reasonable jump, from Hopetoun Alpha to KTK - he made it clear that it was absolutely not. “Hopetouns’ about 400 cap, and we had to take some of that down because we were spilled so far out in the room. KTK is like 2000 cap, and it's got one of the biggest stages in the country. It's easily the biggest show I've ever been involved in in this kind of role.” The theatre is folded into Auckland Live’s council-owned portfolio of theatres and event venues, but the team helming the lighting, sound, publicity, and production are largely the same. “Bob Frisbee will always be handling sound, Matt Crawley will always be promoting it.” 

On the night, the usual suspects lined the seats of Kiri Te Kanawa as Annabel, Callum, and anyone else the Sports Team were able to wrangle sprinted between the steps, capturing footage for what will make an absolutely killer documentary one day. Finally, after only seeing sporadic clips of Elizabeth Stokes’ “Dogfights” online, I saw it performed for the second time ever live - despite the fact that it’s genuinely one of the most beautiful songs she has ever written. The arrangement had seemingly further developed, as the orchestra had nearly doubled in size since the first gig - allowing performances that had been shown publicly at a max of twice beforehand to breathe new life into Tāmaki Makaurau. 

Similarly incredible compositions came from Mainard Larkin, despite the fact that Josh initially bought him in under the impression he’d be getting a Randa track before receiving an alt-country banger about wrestling, but the unsung crowning jewel of the night were those onstage throughout every moment. Liz Stokes, Princess Chelsea, and Josh Worthington-Church were all obviously incredible, but as Elisa and Chelsea Prastiti of SKILLAA stood at the front of the stage, letting go of their gowns and roles as backing vocalists for a brief few minutes to tell the room exactly why they were hired was mental. Prastiti gave Josh the rap he wanted, as she almost broke into horrorcore lamenting the state of the government, while Elisa broke from her indie roots into operatic wonders, stunning the entire room and leaving them in silence.

I don’t think the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra could take place anywhere else in the country or the world. Obviously, having our jazz school linked to the indie community isn’t even unique in New Zealand, but Auckland forgoes Wellington's grassroots links for access to the industry and community that’s equally as intimidating as it is welcoming. Each member of the ERO comes from their own faucet of the scene, with members from symphony orchestras, jazz ensembles, every indie band you’ve seen on Karangahape Road, and community members that have been lifting up those around them for years.

Seeing familiar faces from across To The Front Aotearoa approach music with the same level of joy they’re passing on to the next generation of artists makes it blatantly obvious why all these brilliant musicians have stayed in such an underfunded and corporately overrun city like Auckland. Even if this just isn’t infrastructurally a great city for music, and any steps towards making it more accessible like the City Rail Link are endlessly delayed before successive projects, like the Auckland Light Rail plan that would have gone right past my fucking house, get cancelled in lieu of more motorways that destroy communities for a few billion in change. The persistence, shared in Auckland's music scene and exemplified by Joshua Worthington-Church and the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra, is unmatched, and I told him my honest belief that it exemplifies why Auckland music is special and matters. “I really hope that that's true. That's what I want it to be, a representation in a really honest sense of what that word means. It would be insanity to claim that we'd achieved that, but it is the goal.”

Yeah, the Exploding Rainbow Orchestra has achieved it.