Alex Casey attends the 90s Mania concert featuring Vengaboys in Christchurch’s Town Hall. 

I am squarely in the target market for 90s Mania, a “pop royalty extravaganza” nostalgia tour fronted by Vengaboys. The Platinum Album (2000) was among my first CDs, the perfect accompaniment for kicking back in an inflatable chair with one’s Discman. A quarter century later, I still relish in remembering the past, spending my professional life writing about pop culture nostalgia, and my personal life rebuilding my childhood VHS collection. 

Which is all to say, I wanted to love 90s Mania last night at the Town Hall so, so much. In fact, my hopes for it were so high, my nostalgia so strong, that my main motivation for wanting to go was nostalgia I had for another nostalgia tour that I went to in 2019. As I wrote for The Spinoff at the time in a syrupy Lou Bega-induced haze: “it was comforting that people on both sides of the stage were frantically trying to bottle the brief moment of nostalgic joy forever.”

But here in 2025, by way of 1999, something was off. In the foyer, squinting at all the space buns and sequins, you could almost be in the 90s – but the illusion would quickly be shattered by some guy in an All Blacks jersey holding as many beers as humanly and legally possible. Also breaking the spell was a vicious rumour circulating that the main Vengaboys singer, Kim Sasabone, had taken a break from touring and wasn’t even there.

We took our seats upstairs for the opening act Sash, a DJ whose bone-shakingly loud 90s European dance pop was further amplified by the Town Hall’s world-renowned acoustics. I assume Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney ran out of time to test just how intense an electronica remix of Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ could possibly sound, but by the end of the night I could not hear near, nor far, nor wherever you are. 

Behind Sash, footage of a much younger Sash, playing to a much larger and more enthused crowd, reminded us all of the crushing passage of time. “You are now in 1997 – do you remember those days?” Sash bellowed into the mic. “They were so much fun… and now they are gone.” As a gaping pit of sadness opened in my stomach, my friend acutely diagnosed the vibe: it was like a fake concert in a horror movie, right before something bad happens. 

Vengaboys took the sparse stage soon after Sash, and the rumour was confirmed: original Vengaboy Kim Sasabone had been replaced, as had “the cowboy one” Roy den Burger (who, as it turns out in my furious post-show research, left the group in 2006). Any confusion about who we were actually watching wasn’t helped by the opening song, a cover of LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock Anthem’ (“Vengaboys are in the house tonight, everybody just had a good time”). 

Thankfully, the Vengaboys were soon playing actual Vengaboys songs, and the vibes needle swung from “horror movie opening scene” to “inappropriate Wiggles show”. As the crowd was instructed to put their hands up and down to the tune of, you guessed it, ‘Up and Down’, the screen onstage displayed a Attenborough-style montage of ladybirds and snails having sex. Later, someone would throw their bra onstage, and the sailor would sniff it way too deeply. 

One positive of the kids-show-vibe was having the extremely simple lyrics projected on screen, which unearthed decades of misinterpretation by me and many of my peers. It’s never too late to learn something new, and last night I learned the song actually goes “I want to go boom boom” instead of “I want a double boom”, and also that the Vengabus travels from New York to San Francisco in “an intercity disco” rather than “an inches elmo disco.”

Perhaps naively, I had been expecting some deep cut album tracks, brushing up on the likes of ‘Yours or Mine’ and ‘Cheekah Bow Bow’. But the ‘boys stuck to just the hits – and apparently everyone else’s hits too. Opening with a 2011 LMFAO track perhaps should have warned us that we were about to enter a chaotic and completely incongruous “90s” setlist including ‘I Was Made For Loving You Baby’ (1979), ‘We Will Rock You’ (1977) and ‘The Harlem Shake’ (2013). 

Much like me deciding which TV Hits posters to hang in 1999, Vengaboys and 90s Mania threw absolutely everything at the wall. When they played their own hits it was a jolt of nostalgic dopamine, but you could never fully relax into it for fear it would suddenly morph into an ‘I Like to Move Move It’ X ice bucket challenge megamix. As they finished ‘Kiss, Kiss, Kiss’, we scuttled out of the doors before the encore. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t look back.