Interview: Gut Health (AUS) - Aotearoa New Zealand Tour

One of the most exciting live groups to be visiting Aotearoa in 2026, Naarm / Melbourne no wave dance punks Gut Health are playing their first ever headline shows here next week in Tāmaki Makaurau and Ōtautahi, brought to you by 100% Good and joined by a formidable array of local special guests. Frontperson Athina Uh Oh had a chat with Elliott Dawson (creator of 2025's excellent Certain Death), delving into Gut Health's love for playing live, their role as musical activists, film obsessions, plus more.

Concluding their mini-tour with a performance at Te Whanganui-a-Tara's hugely-stacked free all-ages CubaDupa festival, these are all dynamite gigs that punters will be raving about afterwards. Tāmaki supports Dick Move gushed: "We played at Dark Mofo with these guys last year and they are a goddam FORCE!" — so head along if you're able and read onwards...

Gut Health (AUS)

Thursday 26th March - Whammy Bar, Auckland w/ Dick Move, Grecco Romank
Friday 27th March - Space Academy, Christchurch w/ Folina E. Vili
Saturday 28th March - CubaDupa Festival, Wellington (Wellington Airport Ngā Taniwha Stage, 8pm)*

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR
*CubaDupa info and details at cubadupa.co.nz

Elliott Dawson: This is your first time in Aotearoa! One of the things that is quite a big deal for an up and coming band from here is to cross the ditch and play some shows in Australia — we have this weird cultural thing where we don’t allow mainstream success to artists that haven't had at least a little bit of success in Australia or Europe. What does making it here for some shows for the first time mean for you as a band?

Athina Uh Oh: I think when we first found out about it, it did feel quite big for us. Even getting a plane in so-called 'Australia' can be costly so being able get over (to Aotearoa), to me it's international. It's my first time going and playing in these new venues to a completely new audience of people who might not have heard of us before, that can be a fun sort of challenge or way to get out there. I think playing live shows in front of people is really important to us, so to have the opportunity to do that overseas, it does feel like a big thing.

You're playing two iconic New Zealand independent music venues on this tour, Whammy Bar and Space Academy in Christchurch. What's some of your favourite independent venues in Naarm / Melbourne or globally?

I feel like different venues offer different things, but I would say my favourite ones to play in, because they've supported us since the start, have been these sort-of mid-sized rooms that are so few and far between at the moment. The 200 to 400 cap venues, which are sort of disappearing because of the state of the world. The ones that are left mean a lot to me, like The Curtain in Carlton and The Tote. We played at The Night Cat in August last year before we went to Europe, which was pretty fun because it's got a stage in the middle of the room. Those have historical significance to us and it was really beautiful to play at the Forum a couple of times last year when we were on the Primal Scream tour.

The Forum is so sick. What was it like playing there?

Yeah it was wild! We have this song called 'Statuette', I just remember looking up at the night sky and these sort of greek statutes and I felt as if I was singing to the statues as I was looking up, it was really surreal. We love a guitar-music rock and roll venue, but also some of our favourite gigs have been at midnight in a more 'club' setting and Europe offered a few more of those for us. There was this well known venue in Brussels called Le Botanique where the stage was underground in the middle of the room which was really special. The person who was tour managing us was from Brussels and there was a lot of significance to that venue for her. It’s a nice challenge to see what we can do in a particular room and we’ve played all kinds of things from smaller rooms to bigger spaces. It is always fun playing the small ones where you’re on the floor with everyone.

Are we going to hear some of this new record on this tour?

We're definitely doing a mix. Some of the people on this tour will only be seeing us for the first time and doing some of those older songs is important to us. But we'll do some of the new stuff which we started playing last year. We've always called ourselves first and foremost a live band. So if we're feeling like a song is going to benefit from playing it in front of people and seeing how there's that audience interaction and engagement, we learn a lot from that. We call it 'one gig is 1000 rehearsals'. Getting to play to new audiences and seeing how they react will be really fun.

The bass guitar is such a huge part of your debut album Stiletto, in terms of the harmonic centre of all of the song. The guitars feel to me sometimes more like percussion instruments than melodic or harmonic ones. For you as a vocalist, what’s your jumping off point? An interaction with what the bass is doing or is it something else?

Definitely more bass driven. That’s a product of some of our references when we started the band. It's also because Adam (bassist) and I were living together in lockdown, we had started writing music together so it really was just vocals and a bass guitar when we started writing. A lot of our references or the music we were listening to at the time were quite bass heavy, but it also happened naturally in the way that we wrote and I still feel that way when we’re writing. I instinctively go to the bass. It acts as a foundation in our songwriting a lot of the time. Even the way we mix it, the bass is really important to us. I feel like the guitar is often more flourishes or more textural elements that are jumping off each other, while the bass is driving underneath.

You’re also playing CubaDupa on this tour and in fact, I have it on good authority you're the first international music headliner to be booked on the festival since roughly 2019. Were you aware of that and do you have a different approach to prepping a festival set, as compared to a club gig where you're on the floor with everyone?

Really? I had no idea that is so nice! It doesn’t get that different in terms how we rehearse or things like that, we might think more about the stage plot and the production side of things. What do we want to do with the projections? How do we make it more immersive? All of those sort of things if we have the opportunity to be on a bigger stage with these resources. I think for our second album which we are writing at the moment, bringing that visual immersive aspect to especially festival shows is going to be really important to us, in terms of how we make it an all-encompassing experience.

You’re collaborating with a visual artist from Wellington on the CubaDupa set right? Could you tell me about that?

Yeah that's such a cool initiative! We're collaborating with an artist — they've paired different artists up with different musicians and we get to work with them on the projections. Their name is Rachel Campbell and she's been great. I've had these wacky ideas and she's gone all in on that so it’s been really fun. There’s been a bit of research as well, a lot of the album is about digging into history so we’ve got some archival images and (Rachel's) been great with researching some of that. That's been really fun and a good way to start thinking about the visuals for this new phase. That's been really beautiful and such a good idea. I'd love it on more festivals.

I'd like to switch to music politics a little if that is all good. There's a few things I've seen you guys that makes it pretty clear on where you stand, in terms of the wider conversation about cultural infrastructure in the internet age. How difficult has it been for you to balance those concerns with building your career as a band?

I think it's difficult for a lot of artists at the moment with this conversation, with the infrastructure around everything it can be tricky to make some of those decisions because of how everything is built. But I'm not going to lie and say that it's not something that we have to think about. At the end of the day it is more of a systemic issue than it needing to fall on the artist 24/7 and I don't blame a lot of artists for making the decisions they do about the way they want to distribute their music. All we can really do is educate and spread the word about what's going on about what the people higher up are doing. When we released all of the chat around the ARIAs, that wasn't to say that we weren't extremely grateful for everything that has happened so far. (Not) aiming that at people in (these organisations) that we've engaged with, who were lovely. It's more of a top-down thing. We are thinking about different ways to champion physical etc — and there's some great new streaming platforms we'll be adding to and sharing along the way.

You played a festival at the St Pauli football stadium (Millentor-Stadion) in Hamburg while touring in Europe. How was it playing at their stadium, and are you aware that their current club captain (Jackson Irvine) is from Melbourne, and that St Pauli are currently three points clear of the relegation play-off places?

Oh really? I didn't know that part actually. Yeah we actually met Jack last year. He put us on a show that he'd put together when we were in Hamburg which was really fun, he's such a sweet sweet human. We love everything around St Pauli. We've been there twice now and it's just got such a good vibe. The stadium is so cool, it's covered in all sorts of anarchist graffiti and I love the lore behind it and the cult nature it has, just being a lefty anarchist (football club). We loved playing there and everything about it, and the fact that we've been able to go back twice now and have a connection to the team has been really fun.

Has any of your music been synced in any TV or movies? If you could re-do the soundtrack to a movie scene with one of your songs, which song and what scene?

Woah okay. We haven't had anything synced. I'm a massive Rocky Horror Picture Show fan, so if one of our songs could be on the soundtrack to that would be amazing. Or Harold and Maude, this film from the '70s, which actually Cat Stevens did the soundtrack for, I would love to be on that movie.

I understand Adam was gifted a Germanic style longsword. This is a selfish question: how much does someone generally need to talk about wanting a longsword before their friends will buy one for them? Do you know how the longsword fighting classes are going? I'd love an update.

That was Adam's 30th birthday present and I organised a party for him at this DIY venue that holds significance to us. I messaged a bunch of his friends, one of whom is also a nerd, and asked for recommendations about what longsword would be ideal for Adam. I asked for contributions to the longsword and then I ordered it from America. We did a big reveal at the party and the look on his face was beyond any excitement I’ve ever seen in my life, he teared up. 

Inside everyone is a nine year old boy who wants a sword!

Well yeah I’m sure you hear this too much, but (Adam's) fulfilling his prophecy while he's away after the tour, because he’s a massive Lord of the Rings fan so he's going to go to Hobbiton by himself. He messaged the group chat saying that. "I just bought tickets and I started crying."