Harvest Festival 2012

This year's Harvest line-up is a killer, with a throwback to the '90s and some of this decade's finest music.

Beck, Ben Fold Five, Cake and the Dandy Warhols will be representing the '90s revival. Sigur Ros, Grizzly Bear, Beirut, Santigold and the Liars will also be gracing the immaculate lawns of Werribee Park.

Harvest line-ups are all about quality; they admirably stay away from flash-in-the-pan acts and go straight for well-established musicians who have earned their keep, usually for longer than a decade. Harvest experienced some teething issues last year with gigantic queues for food drinks and the loos, however organiser AJ Maddah stressed last year that this would not be the case this time around.

Beck, who hasn’t performed in Melbourne since 2003, will definitely be a highlight. Eleven albums worth of material should guarantee a lengthy and sexy set. There's not a person alive who hasn’t been reduced to tears from a luminous set by Sigur Ros. True story.

And then there's the Arts Programme. Over 80 acts and installations featuring over 400 artists make up this slab of the event, including the part-cabaret, part-theatre, part-catwalk freakshow, Bourgeois & Maurice in what will be the critically acclaimed London duo's Australian Premiere. Also taking to the Australian stage for the very first time are burlesque multi-award winning US superstars, Trixie Little and Evil Hate Monkey. On the local front, alt-performance mega-stars Briefs join the bulging Harvest arts line up, freshly laundered from their recent European jaunt after thrilling audiences in London, Edinburgh and Dublin. Comedy, theatre, aerial dynamics, sequins, sideshows, immersive playgrounds, installations and a hundred magical nooks and crannies will turn the world spectacularly askew this November, in the unsettlingly delicious universe of Harvest's Arts programme.