CubaDupa, the Te Whanganui a Tara festival, is one of Aotearoa’s biggest and most diverse street parties. Spanning two days it hosts more than 800 performers over 250 performances, all crammed into the streets, parks, bars and alleyways of Wellington‘s CBD. Ben Collier of The Nukes, chronicles their CubaDupa 2024 adventure. With a career spanning 15+ years, performing a multitude of shows and festivals in Aotearoa and Australia, the group are no strangers to touring and out-of-town excursions. 

I was heading down from Auckland as a member of the original ukulele trio The Nukes, along with bandmates Dave Parker and his son Josh Parker (JayP). Our assignment was a little complicated – as well as performing a set of original material, we were to be the destination and welcoming party for the Uke-a-Dupa Parade. 

A hikoi made up of various school and community ukulele groups, plus miscellaneous interested parties, was set to descend on Glover Park on Sunday at 1pm. There, we would lead the amassed orchestra through a handful of tunes that they had learnt, providing sound reinforcement and direction from our place on stage.

Our flight left Auckland slightly behind its scheduled departure of 4pm on Saturday. We became friendly with another group of Welly-bound musicians (Warren Duncan and band) while waiting at the airport bar, each promising to try and see the other’s set…(we didn’t).

Landing in Wellington on a cloudless, windless day is always something of a treat, especially if you have a window seat. Our shuttle driver and our new-found musician friends displayed great patience and grace while we all waited for bandmate Josh to retrieve their forgotten airpod case from the plane we had just left…

My wife Nadine, rangatahi Ash and best friend Nigel had flown into Wellington on Friday night to see some old friends and get the full experience of CubaDupa. I was keen to catch up with them, but first, the band needed to run through some logistics and finer musical elements in preparation for our ukulele extravaganza. We had arranged to meet local musician/teacher Sean O’Connor and Ali Caldwell from the NZ Ukulele Trust at the West Plaza hotel. Ali and Sean had been instrumental in coordinating the Uke-A-Dupa project and were both keen and anxious to find out if we were all on the same page.

After an hour or so of tuning, chatting and strumming we decided that everything was as clear as mud, agreeing to reconvene at Glover Park at 11am the next day. Time for a beer and a burger.

At the Little Beer Quarter, one of the windy city’s seemingly endless array of funky craft beer bars, I found my whanau. They all seemed a little weary after an afternoon of sensory delights and were grateful for the opportunity to rest up in a relatively calm and cosy environment.

Dinner done and dusted, we set out to see Samoan heavy-metal band Shepherds Reign perform at a stage on Lambton Quay. It was a mighty and impressive display, though it proved too much for the flagging energy levels of Nadine and Ash. I bundled them into an Uber and set off with Nigel to find another beer at another perfectly ramshackle brew bar.

Our next appointment was Battle Ska Galactica at Jack Hackett’s Irish Pub. If there was a directive for Wellington’s bars to subscribe to a hip, funky or bohemian aesthetic then it would be fair to say that Jack Hacketts didn’t get the memo – or chose to steadfastly ignore it. Still, the enthusiasm and diversity amongst the crowd of the capacious venue were sufficient to keep the atmosphere abuzz. Battle Ska Galactica, as you may have guessed, is a ska band and they did their ska thing with all the pogoing vim and vigour that one might expect of the genre.

Sunday morning came around wearing a grey cloak, with damp fringes. Was there a wet weather plan? If there was, we didn’t know about it, so we pushed on. We packed our amps, ukes and various paraphernalia into suitcases and schlepped our way up the famous Cuba Street.

As it turned out, our eagerness to get a head start on the day’s proceedings wasn’t shared by any of the other participants. We found Glover Park practically deserted – not a sound person or festival official in sight. ‘Not to worry’ we thought – ‘they’ll come’. And soon enough they did. Ali and Sean stopped by to drop off some gear and check-in, then hastened away to organise their various charges into something resembling a fanfare.

Soundcheck happened, as it nearly always does, and at 12.30pm the hikoi arrived in a maelstrom of flag waving and a tsunami of strums. The fact that they were half an hour early didn’t seem to worry anyone greatly. All we knew was that we had to keep the group entertained until 2pm. This is when my bandmate Dave ‘fingers of fire’ Parker’s pedigree emerged in its most glorious form. 

A primary school teacher and seasoned wrangler of ukulele urchins, Dave is perhaps the most qualified person in the world when it comes time to take charge of an unwieldy conglomerate of four-string fanatics. It was quite a scene. They played songs, we played songs, we all played songs together. There were dance competitions and giveaways… before we knew it, it was 2pm and we were rustling ourselves and our equipment offstage to make way for the next band.

We hung about the park for a time watching the very good folk fusion act that followed, then stashed our gear backstage and headed to the pub. We had arranged to meet with a local animator, to discuss ideas for a video of our upcoming children’s song Max The Musical Mosquito.

“How do you anthropomorphise a mosquito?”I asked him. “With great difficulty”, came his languid reply. Our meeting adjourned and glasses empty, we retrieved our gear and schlepped our way back down Cuba Street. 

As we made our way back to West Plaza and our awaiting airport carriage, I remarked to JayP about the great diversity abounding CubaDupa saying, “I feel like I’ve seen every kind of person.” JayP responded in a typically cautious Gen Z fashion, “Well, not EVERY kind of person”. Okay, Josh sure… but you know… most of them.