Punters Make Meredith 23 a Winner
 |
|
Meredith Music Festival 23. Supernatural Amphitheatre at Magic Hour.
Source: HeraldSun
Mikey Cahill has gathered himself enough to write 2,604 words about last week’s excellent 23rd Meredith Music Festival
MEREDITH 23 – REVIEW
A mate of mine hates the term punter. He doesn’t mind it in context: when there’s a race meet on and gambling is involved but when it’s used to describe people attending a concert it just rubs his beard the wrong way.
I was ambivalent for a while but then I had a lightb…err…penny drop moment at Meredith Music Festival on the weekend. Essentially, when you’re a punter at a music festival you’re taking a punt on which acts you want to see, which tent/mini-city to hang out in, which obscure LCD Soundsystem song to play that will make your friends super excited, which drink to go for (Mountain Goat beer, decanted wine, is it too early for Fireball whiskey at 3pm on Friday?), which friends to walk to the stage with, which strangers to talk to (most of them!) and which foot goes in front of which foot at 5am.
All of these are small decisions, small punts. I made a lot of good decisions on the weekend but, inevitably, still felt I’d missed out on a lot when we left as the Meredith Gift was starting on Sunday.
Ideally, you’d do the same Meredith twice, turning left where you went right and so on. I wonder if Aunty Meredith would approve my idea The Arch of Love has a software update, making it multitask as a time machine that instantly plonks you back at the start of Nolesy’s loooong blink? Oh my, what a thought. Onya Nolesy.
The future, it’s a time to think about the past.
All weekend long I directed my friends to read something in the Tell Us Something We Don’t Know section. It’s my favourite part of the Meredith Bible; as perennial as the grass.
No, not “The guy who was the drummer with Nirvana is now the lead singer of the Foo Fighters,” it was this nugget that changed the colour of my day:
“You know how when we talk about time, we use words like ‘looking into the future’ and moving forward in time’ as if we walk along a line and see the future stretch out in front of us? In at least one South American language (I forget the name…I think it’s an Andean one) they use the opposite, as if we walk backwards: with all the past visible to us, but the future is a mystery.”
I haven’t been moved by a piece of writing like that since I tackled Infinite Jest, no joke.
Everyone I showed that titbit gave me the same I-feel-smarter-and-more-in-tune-with-the-world-than-I-did-20-seconds-ago look. That’s what’s great about getting souped up in the Sup’, you may hurt for a few days afterwards but the pain is worth the gain. Because you definitely gain. Friends. Knowledge.
Visible, durable memories.
Thanks for taking a punt on this review. Let’s get started.
FRIDAY
~^~ Friday, 11am, 18 degrees and overcast, feeling a little undercooked after only 5 hours sleep. ~^~
We arrive in South Pines following a few garbled phonecalls and a text message that says “Yo South Pines, Sunshine Pine Drive, best we could get.”
This would prove a problem all weekend long. We were too far from the action. Each time we headed down to the stage it was like herding cats. You know how it is. This will be rectified for Golden Plains.
Disclosure’s music bubbled out of tents, glitter fell from crow’s feet, hiplashing had begun, everyone was getting in the mood. Bothersome, misty rain had forced many under cover and this always accelerates proceedings: everyone at Meredith tends to go a little harder in their campsite to compensate for the sticky wicket.
We scampered to the stage to catch Castlemaine’s star-in-the-making DD. Dumbo. My accomplice Fez (sadly he wasn’t wearing one) chided “I can’t believe we sat around our campsite all day and now we’re running to the stage.” Sorry Fez. I knew, I just KNEW DD. Dumbo would begin with his calling card, the desert boots groove of Tropical Oceans. He did, it carved out new tributaries in our minds and real name Oliver High Perry put in a strong set part Blaze of Glory, part Oscar and Martin messing with Fenders. It was like a nice backscratch from a new friend who will one day be an old friend. Dumbo needs a bigger finish though and when a mutual Castlemaine friend of mine texted me he summed up the situation. “I told him to get c**ts to dance.”
Bradford Cox is always a few dance-steps ahead of everyone. Atlas Sound, anyone!? Cox took the stage wearing a tweed jacket and unkempt blonde wig (surely the fashion item du jour of Golden Plains 2014) and led Deerhunter’s 20 limbs into battle with an as yet unseen eight legged foe. The Atlanta quintet were just finding their feet when the guitarist saw something creepy crawling around his trainers. Alerting Cox to it, Bradford shrieked like Flanders “That’s the biggest f—king spider I’ve ever seen!” and tossed his microphone dramatically. No doubt it was a huntsman, the gentle giants of the Arachnid world. Curiously, the interlude seemed to get everyone’s attention; ears pricked up and voices piped down. This was Deerhunter on stage, Deerhuntsman if you will, and they were about to get really good. In retrospect the spider should have received boots akimbo…not a shoe crunched on its head. Deerhuntsman’s Meredith setlist.fm set reads: “Earthquake, … spider interruption .., Earthquake, hmmm.” Helicopter sounded woozy, it shapeshifted into something more robust just as the night was to get more fierce, Melvins were coming. They deserved an air raid siren.
But first there was Edd Fisher – the Lorenzo Lamas dreamboat who wears blue and white woolly jumpers – and he wanted to get a little Afro Beat on our asses. It worked a treat, he took a punt and so did we.
We shook out the working week and he put us right in the pocket. The interstitial DJs have become one of the best things about Meredith and it ties in with that Andean philosophy, who knows what they’re going to play? It’s a delicious mystery and one 12,000 people all discover the answer to at exactly the same time.
King Buzzo is as much a performance artist as he is a musician. Melvins stopped the spitting from the sky and hailed hard-rock riffs at us from the stage, stopping and starting with a calculated, calculus intensity.
A few Pink Flamingos and life-affirming hugs later, Brian Jonestown Massacre provided an excellent rock soundtrack to catching up with people under the purple lantern, traipsing into their tents for pick-me-ups and then out into the night to high-five strangers wearing strange clothes.
Clairy Browne and The Bangin’ Rackettes were too quiet by half. Not the band’s fault, Browne and her lot were giving it to us with plenty of gusto but the sound guy simply didn’t turn up Walk of Shame and Love Letter loud enough. This problem has been largely rectified in previous years and only really hindered the ‘Rackettes at Meredith 23.
The Drones have long been Australia’s Best Live Band and now World’s End Press have a category all to themselves: Australia’s Best Chorus Band. Everything about their set is triumphant and familiar and reassuring; you’ve made the right life decisions and you’re exactly where you’re meant to be. Marching around the stage, it was like the Melbourne lads were playing Wembley. Drag Me Home, To Send Our Love, Deadbeat Sweetheart, every time they locked into a chorus the crowd sang along, spraying their friends with emotive spit (read: Pink Flamingo froth). John Parkinson is one of the most transfixing frontmen around, he has zero ego – he lives to give – and he stayed with his band at all times as they switched from fluttery new wave motifs to second Summer of Love 1989 rave-ups. WEP pulled a fast one during their last song Someone’s Daddy, bringing a bunch of disaffected female dancers on wearing bike shorts, baseball caps and subliminal propaganda tops as they pulled choreographed Commissar shapes.
On a sidenote: boogie bassist Sashi Dhahrann stumbled past me at 4am on Sunday morning, I told him how good the coda was then offered him some of my hot chocolate. He asked me if there was “anything in it?!?”, I said no, he asked again, I said no again, it was just hot chocolate and then he leaned in and threatened to kill me if there was anything in it. Steady on, sport.
Now for Hopkins, Jon Hopkins. ERMAGHERD. Words fail me but here are some. Unassuming offstage, the Englishman-with-a-set-of-Brian-Eno’s-house-keys went from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde once he took the stage, slamming cerebral techno all over our melting faces again and again, grasping at ambient moments from Immunity and fusing them with never-ending, pulverizing cliff-drops as red and green lights did more swooping than a leafy street in September. The smoke machine behind him was either working a double shift or didn’t exist at all. My theory is it was simply the steam coming out of his ears and pits and nostrils. Best. Dance. Act. In. The. Sup. Ever. I’m getting gooseflesh just writing about it. Nephew Woody brought Chic back, surely he can bring Sir Jon Hopkins back too. NB: I sustained a fat bottom lip during a dance-off with a friend of mine Clancy Pants after she threw her head back and accidentally (?) clocked me during the breakdown of Insides (or was it Light Through The Veins?). I like to think Aunty gave it to me.
With my lip iced by a Pink Flamingo, Roland Tings decided against trying to match Hopkins’ armed-to-the-teeth approach and instead toyed with us like Mt Kimbie had a few years back, laying down slippery keys choc-full of harmonies with barely a kickdrum to speak of in the first chunk of his set. Each time he did release the pounds, the crowd kicked the air and performed the one finger open-the-microwave-and-shut-the-door move but towards the end of his slot he pulled it back too much. Who knows, maybe I was the problem, I love Tings but there was a little too much Roland not enough rock.
As 4am ticked to 5am, these were the scenes in South Pines.
Friday’s Freaks:
- Stulious Caesar. A guy called Stu dressed as Julius Caesar. He was later seen playing charades with three willing centurions.
- A doppelganger for TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone with a Rainbow serpent make-over.
- An adorable Sunflower girl who carried a giant fake sunflower and a cherry disposition all weekend long.
SATURDAY
Four hours sleep at a festival is worth eight hours in the real world. Please note this.
Blog-darling and Milk Records cash cow Courtney Barnett was as welcome as a latte and a gozleme and all three coalesced as the deadpan dish dished out History Eraser, Lance Jr and the headache-defeating slide-chords of Avant Gardener.
The sun was shining, everything was alright with the world, little did we know (although we had our suspicions) the magic hour was about to happen.
Mac De Marco played a set that featured the following co-signs: methamphetamines, Weezer’s Say It Ain’t So, Bruce Willis’ iPhone library, True Blood zingers, The Beatles, brown overalls, Lynyrd Skynyrd, three broken strings, Limp Bizkit, crowd surfing and the biggest Boot Moment of the Weekend for final song Still Together. DeMarco was Best On Ground at Meredith 23.
I missed Dick Diver (idiot!) due to bartending commitments at the BeechCombers Las Vegas Cocktail Party in Bavaria but heard reports that singer Al McKay quipped “I get so tired of the fashion and the fascism it makes me want to go out there and try a little smashism” before his band launched into Head Back and brought dancers on stage wearing Gina Reinhardt and John Howard box-heads. Much smashing ensued. They received The Boot as McKay whacked his against the Mining Magnate’s grinning mug. Beautiful.
After 90 minutes of listening to disco (Chemise, Cheryl Lynn) in Bush Camp I drained a few Pink Flamingos then watched Fez (still not wearing one) and a girl who’d lost her voice play back-to-back air guitar to all of Helmet’s set, the best moves coming in Wilma’s Rainbow and Unsung.
Spiderbait were Spiderbait. So dependable.Fun fact 1: Kram got dacked in ‘93.
Fun Fact 2: Kram is actually the guy who does the squeaky voiced teenager in The Simpsons.
May the funk be with you. Chic featuring Nile Rodgers is more like Nile Rodgers featuring Chic. He and his charges sounded tighter and a little more dangerous (although still too clean at times) on this visit to Postcode 3333, ready to give us a good Rodgering from the get go as he wacka wacka-ed thorugh Original Sin, Let’s Dance, Dance Dance Dance, Good Times, He’s The Greatest Dancer and everything in Nile’s river-long repertoire that made us wind up our waist line to the bass line. A rock pig punter next to me commented “I think I like funk more than heavy metal now!” His eyes may or may not have been the size of Marimekko plates.
Big dumb hip hop was the order of the night for Tranter and he sure delivered, giving everyone an excuse to bust out baggy moves and low-slung grass-cutting moves that finished with a perfect Mariah Carey Fantasy moment and led into Tim Sweeney. If Hopkins owned Friday’s nocturnal emissions then Sweeney dominated Saturday night. We were drinking it up from the front left about 2.4 metres from the monolithic speaker as verdant light gushed at us. The giggly one from New Yor-kehh started with Afro Beat, moved into disco, played a few unShazamable tunes and teased out Animal Collective’s My Girls over six minutes; a knowing nod to when the band were here and didn’t play it live.
Andee Frost’s set was enjoyed from our headquarters in South Pines, he played Donna Summer’s I Feel Love Pachanaga Boys’ Time and a simply searing set of futurist techno and jacking house. Check http://nowayback.com.au in the next few days. It’ll be up. It was a joy to lie in my tent with a dopey grin and wiggle my toes until 7am came, the music stopped and sleep was attempted.
Saturday’s freaks:
- A guy wearing a ‘Pugs Not Drugs’ t-shirt with a picture of a scrunch-faced dog on it. Not that much of a freak but certainly worth a mention.
- Girls wearing custom-made Pink Cockatoo suits prancing around like flamin’ galahs.
SUNDAY
Sunday was Sunday. It was hard. Two hours sleep = four hours sleep in the real world = not enough.
We went down and saw Beaches and they were breezy and taut and really, really loud and all the things they should have been. But once again it was the Interstitial stuff that made my heart go boom boom. Zan Rowe played Primal Scream’s Loaded and a bunch of young dudes who weren’t born when the song was released ran down to the breasts of the Amphitheatre and danced like it was 3am again. Grouse. She snuk in some obscure hip hop then Pantha Du Prince and Bell Laboratory and – BAM – my hangover was gone. So too was my time, I was missing my girls and although a part of me wanted to stay with the animal collective, we packed up, stopped by Vanessa to blow an incredible 0.0 and made it home to Collingwood by 4.30pm for a bath with my baby daughter. Don’t worry, I showered first, after three days of not washing my body the past was a little too visible to us.
