Festivals have been appearing like the details of Shane Warne’s infidelities for the last couple of years: so quickly that you’d think there’d be no more room for another one. Even more importantly, how do you define yours as different? We have international festival draws ( Byron, The Big Day Out ), country-style ( Groovin’ the Moo, Blues ‘n Roots, Falls ), boutique festivals ( Essential, Laneway ), touring internationals ( Taste of Chaos, Gigantour ) and niche market festivals ( Soundwave, ect. ). In a comparatively small scene, which of our festival needs isn’t being sated?
Of course – a uni break-up festival! It seems Sounds found something – get a bunch of bands who have nothing in common with each other (ok, apart from the fact The Tongue and Urthboy are in *The Herd ), stage it over The Manning Bar’s two levels, add beer and carousing uni students keen to forget their end-of-year exams and ignite! And, hey! We could even invite the general public!
Yes – that was the plan. And it was good. On paper.
I could go through each of these bands like usual, but we always do that, so I decided to alter the brief a little; to review the festival itself.
I’ll walk you through.
A quick peek in the top bar revealed a semi-circular walk-space with chairs and tables situated around a railing, over which you could glimpse the band playing the stage down below. I caught most of I Heart Hiroshima – much improved in the last year – from this vantage. (I say ‘most of’ because there was an attractive spiral sculpture entirely made up of circa 1950s suitcases set up at a perfect position to obscure the singer and half the guitarist.) The band’s spunky punk suited the vibe of the evening nicely.
After they finished, I ducked down a couple flights of stairs to the main stage. Urthboy was playing, and it was cooking. Not in a good way, though – the ambience you could have likened to swimming through a vapourised swamp. The kids seemed to enjoy it though. (I found Urthboy a bit rote on this occasion, a bit heard it all before – but this wasn’t quite the environment to shine in, admittedly.)
After escaping to the relative coolness of The Smoker’s Balcony – the name for any patch of once-fresh air affixed to a bar or band-room in the country, because Beer Garden doesn’t cut it anymore – for a breather, I was ready to check out Wolf and Cub at the other stage. Their frayed, quasi-glam strings with a semi-hypnotic prog skew worked well with the inebriated atmospherics pervading the place. Probably the performance of the night, actually. I have to confess I ran back into the humidity to see Salmonella Dub, though.
The Dub had the murky room going, providing some much-needed air circulation amongst pissed, writhing bodies. They were well on-form – swinging between cucumber-cool jazz-funk through to tunes that wouldn’t be out of place in the perky-café 8am scene. The multi-cultural, musical mash these guys are so adept at worked nicely: with reggae, blues, electronica and the street appeal of languid rap shining throughout the set.
Indie poster-child Gotye was about ready to geek it up onstage, so I again ran back to the climactic haven of the lower bar.
The thing about this show – currently hitting up every festival in the country, it seems – is that it depends not only upon creator Wally De Backer’s music for its emotional impact; the show is augmented by beautifully wrought cinematics, projected up on a screen behind. The music both frames and colours the images, which are played out in both live-action and digitally-generated abstraction.
In short, would’ve been nice: if you could see it. Truth was, the place was so tightly packed that you could barely see the man himself. Not the ideal place to showcase his work; something he must’ve known, as he stumbled through the set in jeans and a t-shirt – which I’d expect from a pub-rock band, but Mr. De Backer usually likes to dress like a classy accountant.
Not Gotye’s best show.
But this is all quibbling. I started off by saying I’d be reviewing the FESTIVAL.
The first thing I noticed – ok, so it fair slapped me in the face upon entry – was that the line-up was secondary to nothing less than an all-out booze-fest. The thing about the Manning Bar (apart from it transforming into a humid, sweaty den whenever hundreds of bodies are present) is it happens to be located on the grounds of a University. Now, I don’t have anything against students – but man, they know how to party; especially when they’re within cooie of end-game. There tend to be some shenanigans. A security guard there once told me a story about drunk people sitting on a railing high up tend to tumble over towards the end of the night. So, you have an idea.
Maybe I should know by now? Maybe the student discount offered on tickets and drinks is some kind of coded sign? Some kind of ‘If you’re over the age of 21, and are not engaging in formal study with us, maybe you better try The Annandale or The Metro.’ Maybe I have RUBE in bright red letters stamped on my forehead. I don’t know. All I do know, is that the poster advertising this event should have read, ‘END OF TERM PARTY! CHANCE TO GET ABSOLUTELY BLIND DRUNK! CHEAP BEER FOR STUDENTS! Oh, and Gotye, Salmonella Dub, and some other people are playing, too. So bring your friends, and pretend you shouldn’t be studying.’ Anything less is false advertising.
