Byron Bay’s annual Splendour in the Grass festival is over once again and now, a few days later, thousands of music lovers have filtered back to their homes around the country and time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the ocean.
Those of us lucky enough to attend the festival, however, were treated to a great line up that spanned back to the early 70s, but it was the UK’s finest that really stole the show over the weekend.The Fratellis, The Wombats and The Music were three bands that worked pure festival magic playing to an overflowing main stage audience that screamed every word right back at them.
The Music were a pleasant surprise, though their latest album ‘Strength In Numbers’ was generating calls of “meh” across the world, their live show is anything but. The live energy I had seen in them years earlier has only intensified and the latest single ‘Strength In Numbers’ was as ball tearing as their early hits ‘The People’ and ‘Take The Long Road And Walk It’.
Before any of those shows, however, was one of the highlights of the whole festival. Over at the G.W. McLennan stage Californian quintet The Delta Spirit wowed the few who had ventured over to that side of the festival.
The twin vocal attack of Matthew Vasquez and Kelly Winrich sent shivers down spines as they effortlessly glided between rock, soul and country closing with their epic and unforgettable signature tune, ‘People, Turn Around’.
The Living End probably had the biggest crowd of the weekend and true to form played a great set of songs that are fast becoming Aussie rock classics.
‘Roll On’, ‘Second Solution’ (which I remember ecstatically jumping around to during Living End gigs ten years ago!) and ‘What’s On Your Radio’ filled the gaps between the bands newest tracks, but even the still-fairly-unfamiliar (at least in comparison to a song like ‘Second Solution’) new tracks rendered the crowd helpless amongst their catchy power.
With The Living End out of the way, that made room for the oldest band at the festival, the mighty Devo.
Without sounding too “back in my day...”, I couldn’t help but be disappointed with the young audience watching Devo. After an amazing intro voiced by General Boy that showed footage of the band over the years explaining the history of devolution, before launching into the uber-dancey ‘That’s Good’, the band played a string of hits, but after the fourth song - ‘Whip It’, the mass exodus from the main tent suddenly saw the band playing to half the crowd they started with!
Even classics like ‘Girl U Want’, ‘Jocko Homo’ and ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ went by with a relatively small cheer but the crowd seemed to thoroughly enjoy the absurdity of these dorky characters that have only intensified their un-coolness over the years.
Between the main set and the encore saw Devo’s ‘Corporate Anthem’ played on the big screens - something that scored the biggest scream of the show as the youthful looking band saluted the crowd from the screens - with the crowd reciprocating and saluting an empty stage.
The band came back with ‘Freedom Of Choice’ before closing with ‘Beautiful World’ sung by General Boy’s fictitious son, Booji (pronounced “Boogie”) Boy, who graced the crowd (eventually, after overcoming a wardrobe malfunction) with hundreds of bouncy balls.
Day one set the bar high for day two to live up to it, and lets face it, it had no chance.
Poor sound saw the many layers of Sigur Ros lost in one big muddy lump of sound, resulting in a rather lacklustre performance and Lyrics Born and New Young Pony Club, while putting on great shows themselves, were playing to an audience who would’ve danced to and cheered at a dog taking a dump on stage.
Wolfmother headlined the show main stage with a dull and lifeless performance. It appeared as though drummer Chris Ross and bassist/keyboardist Myles Heskett were playing one show, while Andrew Stockdale fronted Andy Andy and the Andy Andy’s, an imaginary band more interested in the adulation of an intoxicated festival crowd than playing remotely in time with his actual rhythm section.
The one new song the band played was laughable too, after having such high hopes for this band it’s such a shame to realise they had hit their peak and the band hit a new low with Stockdale’s insistence on using the double necked guitar, despite only using it for a couple of bars in the overblown instrumental solo... when not blowing kisses to the audience.
It wasn’t all bad news on Sunday, however. It was the unexpected highlights that made it. Ben Lee’s stripped down performance was dripping with witty remarks like “I got to kiss Tiffany Amber Thiesson, and that’s why, I’m a lucky mother fucker, and if you don’t know, who Tiffany Amber Thiesson is, go home, and look up wikipedia, or your favourite, other search engine...” and so on while the audience repeated each line back to him.
Something for Kate front man Paul Dempsey wowed the crowd with just an acoustic guitar and his cover of Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’ was one of the highlights of the whole weekend.
Despite, however, a good and diverse line up, it was difficult to get from stage to stage due to an enormous crowd blocking every path, which after a while became incredibly claustrophobic.
The audience for most bands seemed more enamoured with intoxicating themselves with anything but the music and the atmosphere was a far cry from the all-in-this-together vibe festivals should have, which let the festival down.
And though this is, of course, no fault of the festival organisers, it didn’t help that New South Wales police seemed more intent on making sure punters knew they were being watched rather than actually helping anyone and judging by the average pupil size of the kids at the festival, their sniffer dog attempt turned out to be an embarrassing failure.
The overblown presence of the police and security combined with an audience that I certainly would NOT trust to look after their fellow festival-goer in a way reduced an otherwise great festival to an overblown blue-light disco, which is a shame, but fortunately there were just enough great performances to let you slip into a world of your own.
Oh, and while I am far from qualified to provide restaurant reviews, Sydney-based restaurant ‘Guzman Y Gomez' Mexican Taqueria’ deserves a shout out for making the trip up to Byron. Thanks to you my wallet might be a little emptier, and my girth a little greater, but your burritos are truly sent from heaven.
