The smoke machine is working. That much is clear before Foley even reach the stage. Meow is thick with it, lit from the sides and barely at all from the front — a production choice that gives the whole evening a slightly hazy, intimate feel, like watching something happen through a good memory.
The crowd is big and young, mostly, though not entirely — a mixed room in the best sense, united by the kind of easy, pre-show happiness that tells you something good is about to happen. The energy in the room before a note is played is the kind venues spend years trying to manufacture and mostly can’t.
When Foley take the stage, they arrive at full tilt. High energy from the opening moment — and then, almost immediately, things come apart. A guitar issue. Sound problems. The sort of technical failure that can quietly deflate a room if a band lets it. Foley do not let it. They keep the crowd entertained while the issue is diagnosed, and when it becomes clear that the problem is bad enough to need a proper reset, they make a decision that not many bands would have the confidence to pull off: they stop, announce they are leaving the stage, and are going to come back in. Again. Properly. And they want the crowd to be louder this time.
It works. Of course it works. The room obliges enthusiastically, and the re-entrance lands with the kind of energy the first one was supposed to have. It is the sort of moment that ends up being more memorable than a clean opening ever would have been.
From there, Foley are in their element. They mention it is good to be back in Wellington — Welly, in their words — and take a moment to ask who in the room has been to a Foley show before. The answer, it turns out, is that a significant chunk of the room are what the band cheerfully calls Foley “virgins.” They seem delighted by this. There is something genuine in how they talk about their own fanbase — not as a demographic to be managed, but as something being built together, show by show.
That spirit runs through the whole night. They speak about touring with your best friends — because that is what their band is — and extend the logic outward to the room. They want the audience to leave having made at least one new friend. A disposable camera gets handed into the crowd with instructions to take photos of each other. What follows is one of the more charming technical ironies of the evening: the camera is a wind-on film model, and the younger members of the crowd, unfamiliar with the mechanism, have to figure it out in real time. The flashes pop sporadically throughout the set, evidence that they eventually manage it.
The set draws from their new EP alongside older material, and a song gets dedicated to someone called Ashley, who is celebrating a birthday. For the final three songs the lights come all the way down — no front lighting at all, just the smoke and whatever was left of the atmosphere, which by that point was considerable. No encore, as per their own stated tradition. They say their goodbyes, and that is that.
A Foley show at Meow is not primarily about the music, though the music is good. It is about the particular quality of a band that has figured out how to make a room full of strangers feel like they already know each other. Even when Air New Zealand has other ideas about their guitar.
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