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Big Day Out '08 - the verdict?

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bells:
indeed, i have been on a hiatus living in a hut with no power and only my camera to keep me warm at night! it wasn't easy but it was definitely worth it. but that probably explains why i had such misgivings about the crowd and the event in general. arcade fire had a nighttime spot just because the replaced bjork, but i was disappointed nonetheless.

though you do make a good point, battles were phenomenal and they had great sound quality considering the venue. billy bragg was enjoyable but there were altogether too many dickheads reacting to his set! it was a bit too much irony for me to watch 15,000 people yelling 'fuck you i won't do what you told me' in unison so i too skipped it to see paul kelly. and i will repeat, he played a great set. not to mention, dan kelly's hair was looking to top form. how does he get the coif just right? that question will plague me for at least the rest of the year until i learn his secret.

inlander, i meant to let you know that mojo juju played not one but 3 sets in melbourne last week, but alas i was so far out of contact! they have an album to launch soon so they will be back.

i'm also rather upset because i had a free ticket to bjork at the opera house but piked out due to "fatigue". how lame is that! but i don't doubt it was a great show, i had my mate turn up at me door the next day preaching the good word far and wide. bastard.

doki:
i go to big day out every year, and i've never failed to have a good time.  Arcade Fire were amazing, i had a ball at rage, Regurgitator were quite simply amazing and i took part in boxwars, which was both stupid and a load of fun.

that said there were very few bands that i honestly cared about.  I was annoyed that i didnt get to see bjork, but only because i wanted to see her and im not a big enough fan to shell out for a solo show.  I also have a problem with a headline act not having released any new material in, like five years and the immense ticket prices.  that said, i have never had a "bad" time at big day out.  calling it the worst festival in the world i dont think is entirely justified (i know its an opininon) when its the only time a lot of bands one would like to see are in one place.  admittedly, its been getting worse

McTaggart:
You mean other than that album she released last year that seemed to draw a whole lot of attention?

bells:
I think he may have actually been referring to rage against the machine, and yes i do agree their reformation/inflated ticket prices/stadium rock tour perplexed me a little. i'm afraid i've had it a little too good lately and have been getting too used to free tickets to various events (case in point: a friend of mine rather talented in the area of freeloading has managed to see half the sydney festival and set up camp at the spiegeltent with minimum spendage...i am closely following their footsteps). i should really think about weaning myself off that habit soon because its becoming embarassing complaining about prices in public whenever i do have to pay. i sound like my father, and i am a girl. this is not a good(or attractive) thing. :-/

it is also making me lazy, as i mentioned before, so i was not nearly as fastidious about seeing things that i probably should have seen, like supporting local bands earlier on in the day when i was drinking beer in an air conditioned dressing room. seriously, who can sit in air conditioning at the big day out? i have shamed myself and the grand tradition of summer festivals. it really is getting worse though. i know i used to enjoy it and was oddly satisfied with my aching legs, sunburnt shoulders and matted sweaty hair on the terrifying train trip home but this year i found myself thinking it wasn't worth the effort. am i getting too old for this stuff? i'm not even 20 yet! perhaps my tastes are just too refined for the flag+watermelon helmet-wearing fluoro-clad aussie-bogan-knobheads who were so prolific on the day. just a thought.

Inlander:
I went with my housemate to the Melbourne Big Day Out yesterday. It was quite enjoyable! Dickheadery seemed to be at a minimum, which was most welcome, although as my housemate pointed out this may have been largely because we avoided the bars and most of the major acts. The weather was good: only around 28 degrees, and with a cool breeze blowing regularly throughout the day. One notable feature was the sheer size of the site: it was at Flemington Racecourse for the first time, and this had several side-effects. Firstly, there was a lot of walking in the day: to get, for instance, from the main stage to the Boiler Room was at least a ten-minute walk. Secondly, there was very little bleeding of sound from one stage to the next, because they were all so far apart. Thirdly, once you got away from a stage it wasn't too crowded: you could actually walk with complete freedom from one stage to another without being jostled or hassled, which was nice. Fourth and most importantly, because you had to go out of your way to get to any given stage, there was almost no spill-over of audience from one act to another. So we had none of the problems you Sydney folk had at Billy Bragg - in fact, after he sand "There Is Power In a Union" a section of the crowd even broke into a spontaneous chant of "The workers united will never be defeated"!

As for the music: Braggy was in great form, and it was terrific to see him keeping it old-school with just him and his electric guitar. He's never shied away from expressing his opinions without hesitation from the stage, and it was really interesting and uplifting hearing him talk about the recent Australian election. Billy Bragg was actually the first act of the day that I really wanted to see - at 4 o'clock! But we got there early and checked out a couple of other acts to pass the time: we went to see Dizzee Rascal, for as long as we could take the heat in the Boiler Room, anyway: I gave up quicker than my housemate, I must confess, as I could just handle the heat but when somebody lit up a cigarette next to us it was too much for me to bear. I went outside and listened to the set from the relative comfort of just outside the tent. I would have liked to be able to hear the lyrics more clearly, as it seems to me that this is one of the main reasons to listen to somebody like Dizzee Rascal. We didn't stay to the end of the set, because my housemate got sick of the heat in the Boiler Room, too, and we went to get some ice-creams. After that I dragged my housemate to see Spoon, not in the expectation that either of us would enjoy ourselves but rather because, having been profoundly nonplussed by them the first time I'd heard them, I wanted to give them a second chance because so many people rave about them. Alas my nonplussment could not be abated: what is it with this band? Why do people like them so much? I just don't understand! After a few songs I turned to my housemate and asked her: "Is this doing anything for you?" "No" she replied, "they're really boring." Reassured that I was not by myself, adrift in some kind of musical insanity, we gave up on Spoon and continued our journey to see Billy Bragg.

After Braggy, it was across town again to see the Arcade Fire. Sadly in our eagerness we got there early and had to endure the last twenty minutes of Grinspoon's set. We gritted our teeth and put up with it, knowing that it would surely be worth the punishment. Fortunately, the Arcade Fire were every bit as amazing as everybody had said they would be: the sound quality was good, they played a good selection of songs (although "Wake Up" seemed slightly out-of-place as the opener), and in general my only regret was that I couldn't see the stage clearly enough to watch them all running around. "Haiti" was a highlight, as it's one of my favourite songs of theirs. It was also nice to see Win Butler getting into the audience to belt out some of "Wake Up". One mystery, though: they had a large set of organ pipes at the back of the stage, and a keyboard that somebody played and which produced an impressive noise during "Intervention", but from the glimpses I got it didn't seem that the two were actually connected. Were the pipes just decorative? Was the impressive sound just sampled and synthesized?

After the Arcade Fire we dashed across town again but only managed to catch the last minute-and-a-half of Battles - which I wasn't overly disappointed about, as after the massive sound of the Arcade Fire my poor jangled ears needed a bit of a rest. Then we finally managed to meet up with some friends I'd been playing 'phone tag with all day, and we all went back to the main stage to see Bjork. This time the crappy band we had to put up with while we waited was silverchair. Other than noting that Daniel Johns is looking alarmingly like Jason Akermanis these days, the experience was wholly unremarkable. Bjork's set duly started, which was a relief to all, and she was very polite, repeatedly thanking the audience, wishing them "Good afternoon", and apologising for not being able to sing very well at the moment. After one exuberant song she commented: "I can't sing, but I can jump". It was an enjoyable enough set, although to be honest I find Bjork's music to be rather wall-like: with a very few exceptions, it doesn't seem to reach out to try to make a connection with the listener, or not with this one anyway, but instead it's just kind of there, and you take it or leave it. Still, she gets some serious novelty points not only for having a whole brass section on stage with her but not a single stringed instrument of any kind, but also for the seriously weird touch-screen and other strange device shenanigans that one of her musicians was getting up to: in particular there was some kind of weird circular table thing, which was a screen, and which had a whole bunch of blocks with different symbols on them arrayed around the edge, and he'd pick off blocks with great eagerness and place them on the screen and the blocks would start communicating with each other, or something, and then he'd turn the blocks and . . . I don't know, it's impossible to describe and I don't even know what if anything it had to do with the music, but it was fascinating to watch and he certainly seemed very dedicated to it!

After Bjork it was time to get the hell out of there before we were overrun by Rage Against the Machine fans. My friends went home, while my housemate and I trekked back to the other side of the site to see Paul Kelly. I was hoping for some nice gentle acoustic stuff after the Bjork's big beats, but he was in full band mode instead. It worked well with "From Little Things Big Things Grow", which was the first song he played and which started with just him and his guitar, before the band came on one member at a time, gradually building up the musical layers until the song finished fleshed out by the whole band. "Dumb Things" was also great. Then things got a bit weird when Kelly introduced the band and my housemate realised she knew one of the musicians. (We were sitting down, so she hadn't been able to see him). It was about 9:30 by that stage, though, and it'd got cold, and we were both tired and we wanted to beat the rush to the train station, so we left, with only our memories, our ringing ears, and a thin layer of dust coating each of us.

Non-musical highlights of the day:

- Not having to queue, even for a minute, to get in, even though we had bags that had to be searched (we'd both expected to have to wait at least half an hour);
- Having a "high on life" moment during the Arcade Fire's set when I suddenly realised how utterly bizarre and amazing the sky is;
- Watching a bunch of fifteen-year-olds rush the stage when Paul Kelly started his set;
- Also during Paul Kelly's set, my housemate asking me: "Can you feel the earth moving"? and realising that yes, the earth was moving. At first I thought it was because of Rage Against the Machine over on the main stage, but it stopped shortly even though Rage continued and I'm now convinced that it was an extremely minor earth tremor, of the kind that happens from time to time in Australia.

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