Next weekend Ōamaru will play host to a band many thought they'd never see again.

Ōtepoti/Dunedin's Cloudboy – whose 2001 album Down At The End Of The Garden is spoken of in hushed tones by lovers of dark and mysterious avant-pop – will be playing their first shows in 20 years, and they've picked the Grainstore Gallery as the location.

Harbour Street may seem like an unlikely location for such an illustrious event, but connections between Cloudboy and the Gallery run deep. Vocalist Demarnia Lloyd was the Gallery's first-ever artist in residence, and lived at the Gallery in 2001, working on the songs that would become the following year's Set Upon A Curve solo EP.

"I stayed there alongside piles of old bicycles and bedframes for three weeks," says Lloyd, "and recorded a set of songs based on the dreams I had while I slept there."

That's not all. Gallery owner Donna Demente was part of the performance when the band took Down At The End Of The Garden on tour.

"Donna came with us, complete with dogs, and her former partner who provided backing vocals," says Lloyd.

"Donna dressed us in masks, and graced the stage in some of the songs, helping build the visual interest and echoing the archival film footage we were screening - as if bringing it to life.

"The whole show was a visual treat complete with extra musicians, and we played in art galleries and cinemas, big sit-down spaces. It was a lot of fun and all the visual elements were quite different to what our contemporaries were doing at the time.

"When I was a child my dad was involved with the theatre and folk music scene in Christchurch with links to Playback Theatre, the Free Theatre, Splinta etc., so I inherited a sense of the performative.

"Bringing this into the Cloudboy presentation made sense to me, and Donna's aesthetic contribution added a layer of complexity, plus she was great company on the road."

Demente was also the inspiration for the opening track on the album, Teaboy. A recently remastered video features footage shot in Ōamaru's Victorian precinct in 1999.

It was an interesting time for Cloudboy. New Zealand Herald decreed Down At The End Of The Garden one of the best albums of 2001. The Listener called it "curiously beautiful".

Roy Colbert, the man Chris Knox called "The Godfather of the Dunedin music scene", said of a show at the city's Arc Café, "I haven't seen anything this good in this country for a long time."

The following year they performed Shape Of The Land, a live soundtrack for the 1926 silent movie Temuka; Scenes In And Around Beautiful Temuka. They toured the project in Europe, and lived in Berlin for six months. 

Since then it's been largely quiet on the Cloudboy front, until now. Until Ōamaru.

Lloyd will return with the core lineup that recorded Down At The End Of The Garden – multi-instrumentalist Craig Monk, keyboardist Johannes Contag and drummer Heath Te Au – and will be sharing a new film made specially for the tour by Christchurch filmmaker Stuart Lloyd-Harris.

"The Cloudboy performances will be a celebration of memories, the old songs performed by an older Cloudboy, accompanied by a new visual backdrop," says Lloyd. "It has been a long time since we were all in the same room, and we're excited to be working together again."

Cloudboy will play two shows at the Grainstore Gallery – an evening show on Saturday, November 11, and a matinee show on the Sunday. Both shows are for all-ages, and tickets are selling fast.

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