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.
