“I popped that up; I had two demos that I’d recorded and I uploaded them,” says Thompson. “I remember being at the last band practice before my release show for my first album, and I hit the $50K. So, then I all of a sudden had $96K New Zealand to record another album!”
When Thompson told the Sellaband A&R team that she loved Lucinda Williams, they offered to set her up in Texas with Williams’s guitarist/producer Gurf Morlix. “I’m devastated now that I didn’t choose to do that, but it did seem petrifying to a 22-year-old,” she lamented.
At that age though, her dream was to have a radio hit, and Opshop were the latest local darlings of the airwaves. Their producer, Welshman Greg Haver, suggested travelling to the UK and working at Modern World Studio in Tetbury, Gloucestershire. After a fundraising concert in Hokitika to cover the airfare, Thompson and her brother, jazz guitarist Chris, headed to England.
“That was mental, to go from a little home studio and being sad because I didn’t get real drums, to Greg going, ‘Would you like an orchestra?’ But I still had nobody telling me what I was meant to do, and I had absolutely no idea.
“When you listen to the production value of that album, there’s no way in hell I could take that on tour and play it the way that it sounds on the album. Nobody had explained to me that if you put an orchestra in your song, how are you going to recreate that live?”
with her debut album ‘Impossible’ Thompson “achieved what I wanted to achieve”
Released in 2011, Impossible included two songs that garnered radio play after Haver put Thompson in touch with a radio plugger. “So, I achieved what I wanted to achieve,” she said. The airplay and her Sellaband fan base helped her win a radio competition in which listeners voted for an artist to open for Elton John in Dunedin that year.
Thompson has been based in Christchurch since 2012. There, she is a mentor for Music Managers Forum Aotearoa (MMF Aotearoa) and is the go-to person in all matters crowdfunding. She set up Quirky Music, specialising in development, digital marketing and social media management.
“The problem for me during my whole crowdfunding thing was explaining to New Zealanders what crowdfunding was,” she said. “And at that time, nobody used their credit cards online for anything, so trying to convince them that it was safe to do that. But half of the money came from New Zealand, and half came from fans overseas.
“I just found that there was still that need for help after the fact. For some musicians I’m a project manager or even just a sounding board. Imagine if little Katie Thompson had had access to MMF with her first album. The only resource I really had was CD Baby, like, googling and trying to find out things like, what was an IRSC code, and who do I talk to to get that?”
Thompson was born and raised in Hokitika, where her mother Sylvia played piano, and her father Wayne was a drummer in pub bands. One set of grandparents was into the old-time country music of Slim Dusty and his ilk while the other listened to The Pogues and Irish music.
“One grandad would sing ‘If You’re Irish Come Into The Parlour’,” Thompson said. “All the grandchildren knew all of the words! I really thought I was Irish. I’m devastated that I’m not. Dad was more like Van Morrison and Cold Chisel. Country was never a strong force in our household at all. Maybe a Rolling Stones album that was a little country would be the closest you’d get.”
From day one at Hokitika Primary school, Thompson was in the school choir
From the day she started at Hokitika Primary school, she was in the school choir. When she graduated to Westland High School she joined the school’s municipal and brass bands and its orchestra as a percussionist.
“My dad had bought a shitty old drum kit for my brother to play on, and I was the one who took to it.” Inspired by the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Audioslave and Blink-182, she was the drummer in all-female school rock band Aprillis, who competed in Smokefreerockquest.
When Thompson was 13 or 14, Westland High employed new teacher Sophie Ralph, who proved influential in her musical evolution. “She was like, ‘Well, you’ve got to write songs for NCEA, so you’re gonna have to figure out how to do that’,” recalled Thompson. “She said, ‘Set your goals for your music and make it as big as possible.’ I was like, ‘I wanna release an album by the time I’m 21.’ I managed to do that when I’d just turned 22!”
Already tired of lugging the drum kit and the family’s PA system around, Thompson locked herself away with her younger brother Chris’s guitar and chord book. “I figured, ‘If you can do it, I’m pretty sure I can figure it out, too.’ I still remember my brother banging on my door trying to get the guitar back. I was like, ‘Just give me a minute!’”
The Thompsons began attending the Hokitika Country Music Club and jam nights at the Woodstock Hotel where Katie was taken under the wing of club stalwart TC Wells. “He taught me how to basically do the country music competitions. I realised I was very late to the game because the other girls had been playing this game since they were six.
“But TC was great. He would burn 21 songs from his favourite female country artists that he thought I sounded like or I should listen to, and I’d go away and learn up all the new songs. They were Lucinda Williams, Alison Krauss, The [Dixie] Chicks, Trick Pony, Tift Merritt, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt. A fine collection of ladies!”
Soon Thompson was writing her own songs. Every Thursday at the Red Lion Hotel and Sunday night at the Woody, she would sing three songs with a group of musicians that included Wells, John Nieper, Marie-Lou Annett, Wendy Gibbins, and Coalrangers father-and-son guitarists Des and Dean Hetherington. She would often play drums on their songs. “Such a good training ground and supportive environment to come up in,” she said.
One Christmas, her boyfriend Nathan Moore (now her husband) bought her a recording voucher for two songs to use at the home studio of Ryan Neville in Christchurch. Having worked up more of her songs with Dean Hetherington, the pair headed back to Christchurch and recorded the album Tall Poppy. It was while rehearsing for the launch that Thompson learnt she’d cracked the US$50,000 threshold on Sellaband.
at the ‘Tall Poppy’ launch, the CDs were late arriving over a snowy Arthur’s Pass
The 2009 release show at the Woodstock Hotel was sold out; on the day, Thompson was still waiting on the CDs to arrive from Christchurch over a snowy Arthur’s Pass. Thankfully they made it in time and she sold 350 copies. “But I didn’t know you could report your sales!”
Following the Sellaband success and the release of Impossible, Thompson’s husband, a building contractor, moved to Christchurch to help with the rebuild after the 2011 earthquake. Thompson and Moore’s wedding had been four days after the disaster. The September 2010 quake occurred while Thompson was recording in the UK.
A year or so later, she joined her husband in Christchurch. “I think I cried for a year straight, missing my home,” she said. But soon she found a good friend in rock singer Emma Dilemma (Emma Cameron) from the band Decades.
“The first gig I went to was Delaney Davidson, then I went to a rock show. Emma just came bounding up to me and she’s like, ‘Hi. I’m Emma. Here’s my band’s CD,’ and she gave me a burnt CD. She just looked at me and was like, ‘I don’t know anybody else here, is it okay if we stand together?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ It was really cool to be around another female musician. I started to find my people.”
For her 2013 live EP, Moving On: Live At Quicksand Studios, Thompson advertised on TradeMe for audience members to bid for the opportunity to drink beer, eat pizza and watch the session. The following year, for NZ Music Month, she covered one New Zealand song a day on YouTube .
Another online competition spotted by her mum led Thompson to Vienna in 2015. She finished sixth in digital music label Global Rockstar’s international talent search, and they invited her to be one of six artists from six continents to co-write and produce a song in an Austrian recording studio on the theme “Music has no borders.”
“An artist each from Argentina, South Korea, South Africa, Canada, and Sweden,” Thompson said. “We wrote a song and recorded a music video. Absolute madness. I think it was for six days and then I flew home again. It was fun. A lot of my career has just been down to opportunities coming up and just saying yes and figuring it out after the fact.” The video, ‘To The Moon’, was released on Global Rockstar’s YouTube channel.
“A lot of my career has just been down to saying yes and figuring it out after the fact”
After an opening slot for The Warratahs at a Music In Parks event in Auckland, The Warratahs called on Thompson to open whenever they were in Canterbury, and she was support act on part of their Drivin’ Wheel Tour in 2015. That was followed by a low-key songwriter tour by Thompson and Warratahs main man Barry Saunders.
The gigs led to an ongoing association with The Warratahs where Thompson took care of their social media output and has remained an adviser to Saunders. After a crash course from drummer Mike “Snapper” Knapp, she even had the occasional responsibility of controlling the band’s sound and lighting.
“When Snapper passed [in 2022], there was a big hole in direction,” she said. “Like, he was very propelling. He would come up with the next great thing that The Warratahs should do, and that’s what they would do. He was always encouraging me and telling me to think of the big picture and go for it.”
An admirer of Ben Edwards’s work with Marlon Williams, Nadia Reid, Tami Neilson, and the Lyttelton scene, Thompson chose Edwards to produce her third album, Bittersweet, released in 2019. “I didn’t have a band at the time, so my one stipulation with him was whoever we choose to play on it must be open to the idea of being in a band.
“Like, ‘It’s not a commitment that they have to be in my band if they play on this, but it would be nice if you can point me in the direction of people that would be open to that.’” The musicians from that recording – Ryan Fisherman, Elmore Jones and Rob Grover – have more or less remained her band since then.
In the 2020s, Thompson was brought on board in administration and digital marketing roles by the Tussock Country Festival in Gore and has since become the lead marketer and artist liaison for the festival. In 2025, she took over social media for the New Zealand Gold Guitar Awards that bring the festival to a close and realised a long-held dream of visiting Nashville for a songwriting retreat. There she cried at the Grand Ole Opry while watching the artists TC Wells had put on those burnt CDs all those years ago.
