Emerson has achieved a lot since winning the solo-duo category at Smokefreerockquest in 2024, including a national tour, festival slots, and co-writing sessions with Ladyhawke and Gin Wigmore. She was also singer/guitarist for indie rock band Fan Club, before they called it a day in 2025.
Emerson found it was a heavy lift, however, to get from competition success to finding her own place in the local music scene. That’s why she was grateful to receive help from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland not-for-profit studio/venue Big Fan.
“There are definitely some gaps between success in a competition and building a sustainable career as an artist,” she tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “The biggest ones for me were recording music sustainably, finding opportunities to perform, collaborative songwriting, and understanding how the wider music industry works. Those are all areas where Big Fan played a really important role in my development.”
Image: Emerson performs at Morningside Mixtape Credit: Bryan Lowe
Big Fan was launched in 2022 by super-producer Joel Little (Lorde, Taylor Swift) and his wife Gemma. They created the combined studio/venue space to help foster young talent. This aim inspired Big Fan’s current project, New Fans, which engages young people in every aspect of the live experience — whether it’s booking the shows, working as crew on the events, performing onstage, or just being a member of the audience.
This program builds on Big Fan’s previous efforts to bring young people into the music scene, and the organisation’s general manager Savina Fountain is sympathetic to the challenges of starting out. She formed a high school band with friends in the late ’90s and, when they entered Smokefreerockquest, they found they were the only female musicians in the East Auckland region. After two years of the competition, Fountain realised that her terrible stage fright wasn’t improving and instead directed her love of music into putting on all-ages shows.
Savina first met Joel when they were both studying at MAINZ, and she later booked his pop-punk band Goodnight Nurse for an all-ages show. She joined Big Fan in the early days and shared Joel and Gemma’s vision of creating an all-ages venue where young people could feel welcome, whether as performers, technical staff, or fans. The venue does have a liquor licence, but often closes the bar during youth-focused events such as the mentorship program Ignite.
Savina has been gratified to see how Big Fan’s efforts have borne fruit: “Coast Arcade are a great example of a band who have come up with us. They went from playing support slots down in the venue to putting on their own headline shows, and now they’re almost too popular for our venue, though they still record here.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
“Their drummer Thom [Boynton] and bass player Leo [Spykerman] both did our Big Fan internship program. Thom also took part in Ignite, which led to him working in the industry, at production company Tone Deaf.”
Coast Arcade also did their first recordings at the Big Fan studio, which provided a “welcoming, low pressure” environment when they were a young band still learning the ropes, as lead singer Bella Bavin explains. “They’ve played a significant role in helping Coast Arcade grow from a high school band into a band that are trying to make this our career.
“What’s especially cool now is seeing younger bands come through the same doors. Some are artists we’ve played with or mentored, and now we’re watching them record, play shows, and build their own communities at Big Fan. It’s a really rewarding full-circle moment and a reminder of how important spaces like Big Fan are for the future of Aotearoa music.”
View this post on Instagram
The impact of Big Fan was equally important for Emerson, who also emphasises the community aspect. “One of the biggest challenges I faced when transitioning into a solo artist project was learning how to perform with backing tracks and an in-ear monitoring system. I had no real idea how to set that up or integrate it with a live mixing desk.
“Two of my bandmates — my guitarist Liam [Beasley] and drummer Elliott [Borland] — who both completed Ignite training were instrumental (pun intended) in helping me figure it out. Big Fan was where we did our first full rehearsal to test whether the whole setup would actually work.
“In that sense, the support wasn’t just about access to a venue — it was access to a community of knowledgeable musicians who helped me take the next step.”
In subsequent years, Emerson took part in Big Fan’s songwriting workshops Fan Camp and Co-Lab, which gave her the confidence to pursue this side of her work, and these days she is regularly involved in co-writing and top-lining with producers and artists. Her connection to Big Fan remains strong: she played the main stage at the Morningside Mixtape Festival that the venue put on in April with the support of the Eden-Albert local board.
Savina has been happy to see that Big Fan is not just boosting artists, but also helping youngsters into behind the scenes roles. Emerson’s bandmates Liam and Elliot went from the Ignite course to working in the industry, which has seen them act as backstage staff at Laneway and Splore. Equally important are the promoters that have gained a foothold through working with Big Fan — a notable example being Beatdown Events, run by Malachi Freeman, who’s gone from booking Big Fan to putting on shows at Whammy Bar and Tuning Fork.
Big Fan is now trying to create an even broader community of young people going to shows through its New Fans initiative, as Savina explains. “The whole idea is that we want people to get in the habit of attending shows by local musicians from a young age. To do that, we need to put on authentic shows that will appeal to them. There’s no point in me booking a whole bunch of bands as someone in their 40s, so we have asked young promoters to apply to put on shows.
“For example, the person who is organising the first New Fans show is a 16-year old young woman who has never put on a show before, though she’s been to gigs here. She has roped in someone from her school to perform who is 16 as well, so that should give them a ready-made audience of other classmates. That’s how I used to promote shows when I was young – just putting the word out through my school and the neighbouring ones. That was enough to draw a crowd.”
Image: Savina Fountain (second left) and Emerson (third left) speak at Music Careers Expo Credit: Irena Ekens
In fact, all the crew roles at the New Fans shows will also be filled by young people who’ve applied for their respective positions, with the crew at Big Fan taking them step-by-step through the whole process. The promoters will be empowered to find an audience in a way that is more natural to them, whether it’s posting on social media or putting up posters around their school. The New Fans events have a door price of only $10 and will take place bi-monthly, starting tomorrow (June 12th).
Savina is excited by the idea of young people having their earliest live music experiences at a small independent venue with local musicians on stage. She points fondly to a memory from the Morningside Mixtape as exemplifying this goal.
“What was cool about that festival was seeing the crowd was literally made up of people of all ages,” she recalls. “I remember this one moment when the Boondocks had just finished playing in Big Fan and the doors opened up and all the crowd emptied out. There were literally people of every age — from babies through to old people. That was just the coolest sight to see.”
Sonic Bloom presents New Fans, an all-ages show featuring vyreli, Hazy Way, Crying Ivy, and Not Exact, this Friday, June 12th. Tickets are available here.
Apply to be involve in the next event here.
Gareth Shute is a writer and journalist from Aotearoa. His latest book, Songs From the Shaky Isles: A Short History of Popular Music in New Zealand, is available to purchase here.
