NZ music community stalwart Leesa Tilley worked with Jeff Buckley on the Grace Tour Photo: supplied
Leesa Tilley is a musical polymath who launched and managed the first four years of the Ragamuffin Music Festival as a promoter. Over the years, she has organized and presented numerous events, worked as an audio engineer and with iconic artists such as Fleetwood Mac, The Who, Bryan Ferry, Joan Armatrading, David Byrne, Crosby Stills & Nash, Jackson Brown, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, The Beach Boys, Backstreet Boys, Slash, and Whitney Houston, to name just a few.
Tilley has also held leadership roles as the director of Matariki ki Waikato and WOMAD. Additionally, she is part of the Ray Columbus organization and collaborates on film and television projects with Agent X.
Maggie Tweedie invited Tilley onto the RNZ Summer Mixtape to select songs that reflect her music career.
From her early life in Tokomaru Bay, Tilley began exploring her love of reggae music, growing up near Lee Tamahori’s sheep station in the East Cape, where she saw the genre's popularity in Aotearoa. “Herbs were from Ruatōria, and they were a really big part of the music growing up,” she says.
Tilley’s musical journey also led her to DJ a mix of surf, reggae, and hip-hop at the Tatapouri Hotel. It was a gig that required punters to remove their Swandri's and gumboots at the door.
“At some point during the night, I'd have to DJ under the DJ desk because there'd be a bar fight,” she recalls. “Afterward, someone would come out with a big broom and sweep it all away, and we'd all start again.”
Leesa Tilley in her music store The Beatbox with the Dead Flowers instore signing their records Photo: supplied
She soon realized it was time for a festival centered on reggae music, with Māori and Pacifica artists at the forefront. This vision led to the creation of the Raggamuffin Festival in Rotorua, which was welcomed by peers like actor Temuera Morrison, who offered his home as a place for artists to convene during the festival. In the first year the festival sold 35,000 tickets and featured iconic bands like The Wailers and Sly & Robbie.
Songs played:
Tilley opens the RNZ Music Mixtape with Mokotron who she says “is the future of Māori music”.
Tilley was traveling in Croatia near the end of the Balkan War, retracing her Yugoslavian roots, when she heard the Lana Del Rey song “Doin’ Time” on the radio.
The track, which borrows from Sublime and The Beastie Boys, and traverses Trip Hop felt like a peaceful antithesis to the war zone.
“The other reason I chose it is because I'm a huge Rick Rubin fan,” Tilley says. “As an audio engineer, I studied his work, and I loved working in a record store when Licensed to Ill came out by the Beastie Boys.”
Tilley’s favourite Björk tracks are Venus is a Boy and I Miss You, but instead, she has chosen the darker, more industrial Army of Me. “There's nobody who gets as experimental as Björk. She’s just up for anything, and to me, that’s what makes her a pioneer of music. If I were to become a musician or an audio engineer again, I would want to be like her, because she has no limits.”
Tilley worked with PJ Harvey at a stage during the Big Day Out and has seen her perform live multiple times. The song Rid of Me reminds her of her time studio engineering with punk bands and owning a music store from 1992 to 1996, right in the heart of the grunge era. She recalls watching Sonic Youth and the Seattle scene blend rap, hip-hop, and metal all at once.
“PJ Harvey kind of represents that space for me, but in a really beautiful, riot-grrrl kind of way.”
While Tilley doesn’t remember every hip hop artist she has worked with, the list is enviable. She admits to having a preconception of Snoop Dogg “which was kind of blown out of the water. He’s a very smart guy”
"Snoop Dogg was with Ice Cube and Bone Thugs and Harmony in 2009 I guess Lauren Hill, Mary J Blige, I guess they could fit into there. But it was about four or five years and I was touring. We're probably touring 50 shows a year. You know, the likes of David Byrne and Brian ferry, Joan armor trading, Fleetwood, Mac Backstreet Boys, Motorhead Beach Boys, Crosby Stills and Nash the whalers, Sly and Robbie, you know, all those artists, all the Marleys. It was really great!”
In the early 2000s, while Leesa Tilley was working as a booking agent, she met with Ray Columbus to discuss expanding his business. Ray asked her, “Would you like to come on board and manage artists with me?”
Columbus became a father figure to Tilley, who recalls the two of them sitting around for hours talking about music. “I miss him dearly. I have a lot to thank Ray for. He's been a huge influence on my career and on all the people I met through him as well.”
Tilley still owned her music store in Gisborne when she moved to Auckland and got the rare opportunity to work with the late Jeff Buckley in the mid-90s, when he began The Grace tour in Aotearoa.
“He met the band here, and they went into rehearsals in New Zealand. I was really lucky to be there when they were preparing for The Grace tour. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1997, drowning in the Mississippi River. His career wasn’t long, but it left a lasting impact. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page called Grace one of his favourite albums of the decade. Robert Plant was really into him. Bob Dylan said he was one of the greatest songwriters of the decade. David Bowie listed Grace among his top 10 desert island albums, and Morrissey also considered it one of his favourites. He’s been incredibly influential.”
During her first week, Tilley got the call to pick up Buckley, whom his peers called "Scotty," from the airport. She describes him as a lovely man who truly valued connection. “The depth you hear in his singing and his performance is who he really was. I guess it sort of spoiled it for everyone else because no one else really had that.”
Tilley recommends the new documentary about Buckley, It’s Never Over, saying, “It’s actually very close to what he was like.”
