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Artist
Anthonie Tonnon
12+ albums
New Zealandaucklandindie rockindie popchamber pop
about
Anthonie Tonnon’s musical story sounds familiar enough at first: he formed a band while he was at university in Dunedin and kept at it. But it’s also a story of innovation and reinvention in a changing music industry, and of memorable songs about things most people don’t write songs about. Tonnon can’t quite claim to have been born in Dunedin – he moved there from Tauranga in 1986 with his family, when he was three months old. Most of his childhood was spent in the city’s outskirts at Fairfield and Chain Hills, at a physical and cultural distance from the city’s musical heritage. It wasn’t until he gave up music lessons at the age of 16 – he reached Grade 6 as a pianist in the Trinity system, an experience he describes as akin to being “the world’s worst CD player” – that a passion developed. He picked up his sister’s unused guitar and found a book of guitar chords in the Mosgiel Public Library. “I was like oh, this is all songwriting is, you pick one of six chords from a key, fiddle around until they sound right, and sing over the top of them, and you’ve got songwriting. And it was songwriting that got me. Suddenly from having no interest in music, at that moment it was all I wanted to do.” He taught himself to play David Bowie’s greatest hits on the guitar, but it wasn’t until he got to Otago University that his songwriting took shape. He took History, winning a scholarship in his first year – and he signed up for Graeme Downes’s rock music degree course. “Graeme was ama
