Gig Review: Tami Neilson @ Opera House, Wellington – 3/10/2025

No support band was necessary when smokin’ Tami Neilson played the Opera House on the first night of her Neon Cowgirl tour. The album’s absolutely crackling hot band hit the stage first – dressed in neon lime-fringed black, the men all wearing cowboy hats – playing Neilson on with a ferocious blast of driving rockabilly. Brett Adams is on lead guitar and male duet duties. Neil Watson plays guitar, pedal steel, and banjo. Tom Broome is on drums; Chip Matthews on bass; Steph Brown (of LIPS) on keys. Aside from duet partners, the only album band member missing is Chet O’Connell. 

Neilson tells us they will be playing Neon Cowgirl in its entirety for the first time. Although she says an awful cold diminished her vocal power last month, and occasionally pauses for a breather and a suck on her water bottle, there is no lack of evidence in her range. It seems only reasonable you’d need to hydrate after scaling the peaks she does. 

She starts so strong – with a mesmerisingly powerful take on Foolish Heart – it’s emotionally scary to imagine where she can go from there. Her stage costume is black with a lightning bolt and stars appliqued on the front, and ‘Cowgirl’ stitched across the back. When she lifts her arms, the full effect of neon-lined cape sleeves – spreading like wings – is magic. 

She straps on an acoustic to play with the band for Salvation Mountain. A soaring version of Neon Cowgirl reduces the Opera House audience to teary puddles. Sisters Zoe Moon and Deva Mahal – in huge ten-gallon hats, and appropriately even bigger boots – provide the Ashley McBryde and Shelly Fairchild vocals for a take on Borrow My Boots that tears the house down. 

Neilson is a natural at between-song patter, her tales studded with connections to musical idols. She prefaces Keep On with mention of the personal inspiration Wynonna Judd provided it, when she echoed the titular words Neilson’s father had written her in a letter.

The pace jumps up a notch velocity-wise with Heartbreak City, USA, then we hear the origin song of You’re Gonna Fall, unbelievably rejected for inclusion in a recent Spongebob Squarepants movie (despite Neilson having enjoyed huge success with her work in the franchise’s Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie). Vocally versatile Adams lends great Lee Hazelwood vibes (in place of JD McPherson from the album) to Neilson’s Nancy Sinatra stylings, served on a bed of Watson’s pedal steel. 

Neilson rightly calls One Less Heart “one for Roy”, and it really does play like she surely had her ‘true christening’ in Roy Orbison’s arms, as Neilson Family legend has it. Brown and Neilson handle Loneliness of Love alone, the singer saying it’s all she can do to keep from crying to perform it. Neilson is so confident at genre-jumping, allowing a road-dirty U-Haul Blues – stage-lit in purple, yellow, red – then a soulful Love Someone to incrementally accelerate the pace. She points out that, when she and brother Jay wrote the latter two years ago, things seemed sufficiently messed up to need it, and that the need for such a song has only increased since. She seems almost possessed in her delivery, and it’s powerful to witness.

With the whole album played, the second half is a grab bag of delights spanning Neilson’s discography. The band play her back on, and there’s been a costume change. They’re now in yellow jackets, and she’s wearing a hot pink tasseled skirt, and a frill-sleeved pink T-shirt with ‘Yee Haw’ sequined across the front. She’s got her harmonica too, and applies it liberally to Ain’t My Job from her 2022 album Kingmaker.

Neilson contributes acoustic guitar to the blistering blaze that is the super-fun Come Over from her 2014 album Dynamite. The first, deliciously stretched, vocal note of the finger snappin’ Silver Scroll winner Walk Back to Your Arms elicits a big cheer from the audience. She straps on her acoustic again for Ten Tonne Truck from her 2019 album Chickaboom.

She plays acoustic to Adams’ Spanish guitar, and he plays “the Willie Nelson of New Zealand” to her vocals, on one of her “all time favourite songs”, Beyond the Stars (which she cowrote with Delaney Davidson and performed with Nelson on Kingmaker). Watson’s beautiful pedal steel and the susurrus hush of Broome’s feather lightly brushed drums offer the intimacy of a campfire performance. 

There are a lot of what Neilson calls “vibe changes” through the night, pacing the show well, and ensuring no one drowns in the frequent tears she’s jerkin’. That said, she doesn’t shy away from setting the sad numbers high on the shelf she’s gonna knock them from, breaking your heart into a million tiny pieces. 

“Time to get a little rock ‘n’ roll,” she says to introduce an explosive Mama’s Talkin’, with duelling guitars from Adams and Watson. The Big Mama Thornton vibes are strong with this one, but the writhing rockabilly vibes also remind me of The Cramps. 

It’s no wonder she needs to have her gorgeous high heels removed at this point. (Oh, to be the guitar tech who also peels the shoes from Tami Neilson’s feet. There really is something reverent about it). The unique torture of high heels is so relatable, and yet so often unacknowledged, it feels pivotal for her to practically address it.

“This is for all my girls out there,” she says, by way of introducing Careless Woman (from Kingmaker). With its handclapped rhythm and hard-won wisdom, it surely had every woman in the room feeling the conclusion, “I wanna be her when I grow up.” 

She rips through Holy Moses (from her 2016 album Don’t Be Afraid), and grabs her acoustic again for the propulsive Woo Hoo (from her 2014 album Dynamite!). Her vocal performance on the song that took her to the Grand Ole Opry stage – Patsy Cline’s Three Cigarettes in An Ashtray – is the stuff dreams are made of. The notes seem tangible; her eyes following the final words as they rise into the Opera House ornate domed ceiling. Shuffling her channelling like a hand of cards, she returns to the Thornton feels of You Were Mine (from 2020’s Chickaboom!), practically blowing herself offstage. The band return to play her back on, the audience chanting, “Ta-mi! Ta-mi!” Encore Roimata / Cry Myself to Sleep (from Waiata / Anthems 2019) sends us out into night on more of that gleaming pedal steel, marrying Te Reo Māori and Reo Pākehā to Cline stylings in a way that makes you glad Canadian Tami Neilson has made Aotearoa home.

Photo Credit: Nina McMillin for Muzic.NZ
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