Going great guns
Gin Wigmore's on a roll, Felicity Ross finds.
Taranaki Daily News
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Gin Wigmore is heading back to Butlers Reef. She will be working, but not behind the bar. Once a waitress at the Oakura pub, the musician will now be on stage.
Originally from Auckland, she ditched university in Wellington a few years ago to live with her Taranaki boyfriend in 2006.
"I lived in New Plymouth around Back Beach for about six months.
"It was really cheap rent, so it was quite wicked. It was ace, I loved it. I learnt to surf down there. I learnt where all the little secret spots were."
Wigmore reckons it will be weird heading back to Butlers to perform.
"I was such a bad person to work with there. I just used to hook all my mates up when they came in, as you do.
"I would sneak people into gigs and then turn up late. I am just not good in the real world. I think that's why I am doing music, because your schedule's your own."
She has happy memories of the bar.
"When I was working there, the law of not smoking in bars came in and all the locals, that was their thing after a long day of working. They would go and have a schooner and a smoke at the bar and it was kind of like forcing these locals who had this habit of having a smoke at the bar for years to try to make them smoke outside."
Wigmore is at Butlers December 27 with Dave Dobbyn.
"I'm really stoked to be on tour with him because I have been a huge fan for many years growing up, so to go out on the road with him is a real honour."
She has just come off an Australian tour, promoting her highly acclaimed debut album Holy Smoke with musician Josh Pyke.
"I am in tour mode, so I am just staying up late and waking up late and surviving on coffee and booze."
Wigmore recorded the album at Hollywood's famed Capitol Records after being signed to Universal Motown Records USA in August last year, performing shows in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
At 16, she won the United States-based International Songwriting Contest with an acoustic ballad called Hallelujah, a song she wrote in honour of her father who had recently died of cancer.
Hallelujah was actually one of the first songs she ever wrote and it made Wigmore the competition's youngest winner and the first unsigned artist to win the major prize, beating 11,000 songwriters from 77 countries.
In 2008, she released her critically acclaimed debut EP, which featured Hallelujah, as well as These Roses, SOS and Under My Skin.
"It's weird. I've had a really different musical upbringing. My record collection is '50s, '60s, '70s - it doesn't really go past that. I'm only 23, but I feel a lot older than that at times. Wisdom has just been splashed on me every day for the last 10 years."
