MNZ Interview: Tourist

After 15 years between singles, Peter J. Rudd has rebuilt his Auckland rock band with a younger, highly qualified line-up, a second song already in the can and an album’s worth of unfinished business. Tim Gruar called Rudd for a kōrero about hauling Tourist’s musical passport from the bottom drawer and stamping it back into action.

Tourist are resurfacing after more than a decade below the radar, bringing with them a new single, My Everywhere, and a 29 October show at Auckland’s Whammy Bar. It is less a nostalgia lap than a vehicle with a familiar number plate and a freshly rebuilt engine. Original founding member Peter J. Rudd remains at the wheel; beside him are guitarist Hayz Berry, bassist Nick Pavlov and drummer Dylan Hagan – younger musicians who, as Rudd puts it, are “keen as” and pulling the songs towards the future rather than politely dusting the past.

“Today, 1 October, is the official release of our first single in 15 years as a band,” Rudd says. “So, it’s been a wee while between drinks.” It is the amiable understatement of someone who never really left music; he simply spent much of that interval helping other people make it. “I have been highly engaged with music throughout that period, just not really doing it for myself so much.”

Rudd has been playing since he was seven or eight, starting on drums and working through jazz and orchestral music at Rangitoto College before guitar and songwriting took over. Music, he says, has remained the constant across everything else. “I’m now pushing 50 and still doing it. It’s for the fun, it’s for the creative release. Some people go and run around the block or go to the gym, but music is a real release.”

For two decades, much of that energy has flowed into the Rudd School of Rock, the Auckland school he founded in 2005. It teaches guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and vocals, alongside band programmes, Rockquest mentoring and recording. Its tutors are working musicians, not laminated posters of possibility. “We’re not just teaching the instruments,” Rudd says. “It was actually going right down the continuum and really opening opportunities for these guys. Our drum tutor, for example, plays in lots of bands and is the session drummer for Christmas in the Park.”

That has meant helping with songwriting, forming bands and opening studio doors. Rudd recalls linking one former student with producer Josh Fountain, BENEE’s principal collaborator; Berry is himself a school alumnus. “Teaching is actually amazing,” Rudd says. “It helps you as a musician, going right back to basics. Sometimes less is more.”

Eventually, though, the mentor wanted his own noisy room back. “Earlier this year, I thought, actually, it feels like I need to do something for myself again. I’ve always written music and songwriting has always been a part of me.” He considered starting from scratch, then realised Tourist already had history, recognition and a catalogue worth extending. A reunion with co-founder and original bassist Rob Ranger, now in Rotorua, proved impractical because of distance and other projects. “I thought, well, Tourist has got a bit of a legacy. Maybe we should actually start there.”

Rudd and Ranger had formed Tourist in Auckland around 2000, after first knowing each other at high school. The band’s opening chapter arrived on the Beginning of the World EP in 2002, followed by the NZ On Air-supported Do You Feel the Cold? EP in 2004. Producer Greg Haver heard a rough demo of the title track – “a terrible recording,” Rudd cheerfully admits – but caught the song inside it. Tourist recorded the single at York Street Studios with Haver and engineer Clint Murphy. It became the band’s calling card, reaching number one on 95bFM’s Top 10 and crossing from student radio into commercial playlists.

“That started up a great partnership,” says Rudd. “It became our most successful song and opened quite a few doors for us.” Those doors led to local bills with Pluto, Goldenhorse, Evermore, The Feelers and Goodnight Nurse, and eventually a support slot with Snow Patrol. Further afield, Los Angeles publisher Heyday Media Group secured film and television placements, including The Butterfly Effect 2, while Tourist picked up overseas radio play and a finalist placing in the International Songwriting Competition.

The centrepiece of that first era was the album Minutes Last for Years, recorded in Wales with Haver and released in 2006. Sessions took place at Stir Studios, the Cardiff facility later bought by Manic Street Preachers and renamed Faster Studios. The building itself may have been, in Rudd’s affectionate memory, “a regular kind of grungy UK studio,” but its cupboards contained treasure. “We got to use all the Manics’ guitars,” he says. “One of the road crew would come through every other day with another case. We’d open it up and there was an SG, or a beautiful Les Paul, or a Gibson 335. It was an amazing array of guitars.”

Haver hoped James Dean Bradfield might appear, but schedules refused to cooperate. Tourist had to settle – tragic, really – for the Manics’ armoury. “We never actually got to meet the guys,” Rudd says. “But we got the gear to use. I’m precious with my guitars, so to let some Kiwi guys use them was really generous.” When the Manics bought the studio in 2008, Tourist’s earlier stopover suddenly looked like a perfectly timed advance booking.

There was also a perfect rock-album division of labour. Ranger completed nearly all his bass parts in a day. “Basically, he could kick back drinking beer for the rest of the two weeks while we were overlaying guitars, percussion and vocals,” Rudd laughs. “He religiously stayed at the studio – apart from tipping out to buy another six-pack. We’d come all that way and the bass player was done and dusted.”

Tourist toured New Zealand and the UK, filmed music videos (such as Did You Kill Your Love) in Wellington with director of photography David Paul, then quietened after further singles around 2009–10 and members leaving on OEs. Through those changing line-ups, Rudd half-jokes, “I’m the Tourist,” although the new group is emphatically a band, not hired hands.

It may also be the most academically overqualified guitar band currently threatening a concrete basement: Rudd on vocals and guitar, Hayz Berry on guitar, Nick Pavlov on bass and Dylan Hagan on drums. “It’s a highly academic band,” Rudd says. “One’s about to be a doctor in biology, another has a master’s in architecture, we’ve got a land surveyor as our youngest member, and I work in tertiary university research commercialisation.” Pavlov, who came from Russia to Auckland to complete a PhD in biology, previously played in a Red Hot Chili Peppers covers band back in Europe – an impeccable qualification, though Rudd jokes that he still “had to teach him how to play rock bass.”

Berry – “Great rock name, yeah?” – helped spark the comeback when a casual jam became a writing session. “In some ways it’s a shame it’s not the original line-up, but it actually feels okay,” Rudd says. “Having younger members is quite nice, too – to bring them through and give them an opportunity. I don’t know why they want to hang out with an old guy like me.”

My Everywhere makes no attempt to disguise its guitars as an algorithm-friendly lifestyle accessory. Polished, melodic and sturdy, it plants one foot in the expansive British rock of the 90’s and 2000’s and the other in the present. “I don’t write with a genre in mind,” Rudd says. “It’s all about the song for me. I’m not trying to fit into a fashion, clearly, because it’s a pretty straight-ahead rock song.” Live, he promises, the band is rawer and slightly heavier.

The recording was produced and engineered by Scott Seabright at his Onewhero studio on the Waikato–Auckland border. Recommended by Haver, Seabright understood Tourist’s fondness for Vox AC30s, Hot Cake pedals and hollow-body guitars without embalming the music as a period piece. “It’s still very analogue,” says Rudd. “Real microphones, real guitars, real amps, real drums. It’s organic.” Even the solo is defiantly unfashionable: Berry handles the lead while Rudd supplies what he calls his “single-string solo” underneath. “Solos are not trendy, popular or cool necessarily, right? But it’s all about the song. What works there? Does it need something? Why not?”

There is plenty more coming. A second single is recorded, mastered and “ready to go”; more studio sessions are planned, and Rudd says the band already has enough material for a full-length record. “I still like the nostalgia of a full album project,” he says. “We’ve got enough songs ready to go for that.” If work, study and ordinary life cooperate, they hope to complete it for release around the middle of 2027.

First comes Whammy Bar on Thursday 29 October, with local four-piece The Inheritance opening; its members have played in acts including The Dead Flowers, The Ruby Suns and Leonard. Tourist’s set will be almost entirely new material, with Do You Feel the Cold? the lone passport stamp from the old country, plus a cover or two. “It’s our first time playing at Whammy Bar, so that’ll be cool,” Rudd says. “It’s a bit of a ‘dive’ bar, but good sound.” Fifteen years after their last single, Tourist are not asking whether anyone remembers them. They have one new song out, another packed and an album’s worth of road ahead.

Tourist release their new single at Whammy Bar, Karangahape Road, Auckland, supported by The Inheritance, Thursday 29 October 2026