Splendour In The Grass 2010

Review: Look, I'm exhausted. I mean, Splendour will take it out of you, but this time around there were three days of camping and music bookended by the longer travelling time which meant...  

What? Oh, yeah, Splendour was at Woodfordia this year, the site of the Woodford Folk Festival, as opposed to Byron Bay. So that's another what, five hours added onto the drive north from Sydney? And that's a solid 15 hours drive each way. Sleep will be interrupted by waking suddenly, certain I'm about to rear end a swiftly-braking freight truck in the rain and mist outside Kempsey.

Rather than try and pretend I saw everything – spoiler alert: I didn't – or try to weave a narrative arc around not showering for several days and sleeping on the cold, cold ground like an animal, I'll go for a bunch of lists you can enjoy at your leisure.

TOP FIVE WEATHERS OF SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS
5. Freakin' freezing and windy (Sunday night only)
4. Raining (a few moments on Saturday)
3. Maybe a little nippy (evenings)
2. Incredibly, offensively hot (Friday)
1. A bit unseasonably hot and humid but actually quite nice (most of the time)

TOP FIVE THINGS I MISSED AT SPLENDOUR
5. Washing. Apologies to the owners of the Port Macquarie hotel I stayed in on the way home: I did things to your bathroom that no shower should have to endure. Terrible, shameful things.

4. Ash. It hadn't occurred to me how much I should have seen them until I was walking down the hill to the campground to get my coat for the evening and heard ‘Oh Yeah' blasting across the valley. It was a similar feeling the next day when the Vines were playing ‘Get Free', but I'd grown hard and cynical by that stage.

3. Florence and the Machine/The Strokes On Saturday, as gates were closed and a near-riot averted at the Amphitheatre entrance. People were getting chased by security, fences were being shaken violently and it all looked like it was about to get really exciting... and then it calmed down, people milled around, and then the gates were opened again as people calmly left Florence. By all accounts both acts were exactly as great as you'd expect, meaning they pretty much did the same shows they were doing this tour.

2. The air mattress pump that I'd deliberately put next to the door and completely overlooked when I was packing the car in a blind 6am panic with a screaming hangover on the Thursday. The mattress acted as an adequate groundsheet, but wasn't quite as insulating as I'd have liked. There's possibly a lesson there, and that might reflect more upon myself than the festival.

1. Richard Ashcroft's "voice problems" that were "definitely not" the reason he stormed off stage on Sunday night. According to those there and not at either Pixies or Empire of the Sun – and there were not many of them, to be fair - it was one of those voice issues that unfortunately manifest themselves as a big petulant tantrum about being upstaged by the competition and lead the sufferer to sing perfectly well for half a song, get shitty at the tiny audience, throw their mic down and stomp off stage. You know: probably something bacterial, then.

FIVE THINGS THAT COULD HAVE RUINED THE FESTIVAL AND DIDN'T, BUT ARE STILL WORTH MENTIONING
5. Drink tickets. Yes, they made the bar lines shorter. Yes, they meant that bar staff had an easier time of it since they didn't have to check ID. And yes, they meant that you thought "Oh, OK, four tickets for a Smirnoff Ice" rather than "why the hell am I paying eight dollars for a mid-strength vodka mixer? What am I, a schoolgirl?" But it also meant that plenty of dollars were unnecessarily spent. Cleaning out my pockets after the festival revealed a solid six drinks worth of unused expenditure – which I ain't getting back now.

4. The indifferent first aid folks. Fine, sitting there doling out sunscreen for three days must have been trying, but responding to a question about Betadine availability with a "nup" rather than a "oh, why do you need it?" (tick bite, incidentally: not a big thing, but something still requiring attention) isn't exercising top-flight duty of care.

3. The smell – oh dear god, the smell. It had been raining for days before the festival and of course you're going to get mud and animal shit and chemical runoff, I understand that – but by the end of the festival there were certain places whose floors were churned to a fetid paste, and several evoked the olfactory horrors of WWI trenches. Take note if there's a sudden cholera outbreak among Australia's hipsters, epidemiologists: your patient zero was probably singing ‘La Bamba' at the top of his lungs with the mariachi band on Saturday.

2. The camping grounds, which were a good 15 minutes walk from the festival site with a dirty great hill in the way. It made it harder to get a good camping vibe going, since most people stayed on the festival site the whole time and only returned to their tent to "sleep", not least because most people's hearts were bursting by the time they got to/from the campgrounds.

1. The massive amount of corporate crap around the festival. I'm no Marxist rabble-rouser, but when Madison and General Pants are running pop-up stores on site you need to ask whether this is a festival you can, in good conscience, hang around within. Even the Amnesty International people looked vaguely embarrassed.

THREE THINGS DONE AMAZINGLY WELL BY ORGANISERS FOR WHICH THEY SHOULD GET SERIOUS PROPS
3. The set-up generally. The Ampitheatre was a bit of a hike from everything else, but the stages were well positioned, as were the food markets radiating around the laneways, and there were bars and toilets staggered all around the place. I saw few queues more than a few minutes long, and there was little sound bleed from one place to the next, with many of the DJ venues geographically close to but several metres vertically below the stage on the hillside, neatly dodging the blasting speakers. And for a pop-up village of 32,000-odd people, it was remarkably well run.

2. Getting people in and out. Now, I heard stories about people having huge waits on the Thursday night, tales of three-hour waits as they lobbed in at midnight and waited for the OK to attempt to set up camp, but our experience was extraordinarily swift: turned up Friday morning to no queue, got our several wristbands, security gave the car a once over, and away we went. Getting out on Monday morning was also amazingly fast: there was less of a queue of traffic than at most shopping centres on a Saturday morning.

1. The scheduling on two of the three days. Friday and Sunday were perfectly well planned, though Saturday had more than a few clashes, and (as mentioned above) also led to the only near-crisis at the festival when most of the people on site attempted to get to Florence and the Strokes. But for the rest of the weekend things went like clockwork, with people streaming from stage to stage with a minimum of fuss. It's also worth pointing out that everything ran to schedule: when was the last time you saw that happen at a festival?

THREE ACTS I ACCURATELY PREDICTED WOULDN'T BE TERRIBLY GOOD IN A FESTIVAL ENVIRONMENT
3. School of Seven Bells. Love their record, loved them at the Gaelic a couple of years back, but playing in the middle of the day seemed horribly inappropriate. That new drummer's adding nothing either. Still very easy on the eye, mind.

2. Band of Skulls. It might have been a middle-of-the-day thing too, but then again their psych-rock thing would have sounded derivative and dull regardless of when and where they were playing, unless it was a dimension in which Black Mountain had never existed.

1. Kate Nash. You'll need more than a sign on front of your keyboard saying "A cunt is a very useful thing" to impress people, missy. Like a few decent songs, for example.

MOST LUDICROUS STAGE OUTFIT
Jonsi: and that's no mean feat at a festival with Empire of the Sun, Goldfrapp and Scissor Sisters in it. Then again, none of them really committed to the headdress-muppet-as-couture, which is what gave the angelic-voiced Icelander the edge in this hotly-contested category. 

THE TOP TEN PERFORMANCES ATTENDED BY ANDREW P STREET
10. Scissor Sisters/Mumford and Sons (tie)
Mix Up/Ampitheatre, Sunday
Both are bands I thought were generally OK, and both were bands I caught more out of vague curiosity than any particular desire to see perform, and both genuinely surprised me – for very different reasons. The ‘Sisters are completely in their element live. Ana Matronic had always seemed a bit surplus to requirements on record, but that woman owns the stage – no small feat with Jake Shears getting his kit off alongside her – and her How to Take Speed lecture was a comedic delight. Mumford & Sons, meanwhile, were far more earnest and emotional, but the genuine feeling in their performance turned what could have been a hideously mawkish moment like, say, 20,000 people singing along with ‘Little Lion Man' into something quite magnificently moving.

9. Philadelphia Grand Jury
Ampitheatre, Sunday
Local kids made good – very, very good – with a main stage appearance in the middle of the day. Sound wasn't great for the first few songs but the trio were in fine form, with pre-recorded banter between songs and lively versions of ‘Going to the Casino (Tomorrow Night)', ‘I Don't Want to Party (Party)' and Jay-Z's '99 Problems' getting the crowd on fire. Best banter: introducing drummer Calvin Welsh ("54 years of age, father of four, the wanderer, the only African-American I know!"). Worst song: the new single. Sorry guys, you could see the energy dissipate even as you played it.

8. Dan Sultan/Washington (tie)
GW McLennan, Friday
...because I was lying on a hillside in the sun dozing through both their sets, which were getting massive reactions from those less drowsy than I. But they both sounded great and were perfect to listen to while I lay there in the grass, a light breeze drifting over me, while you were at work.

7. Broken Social Scene
GW McLennan, Sunday
They're hit and miss live, and this was definitely hit. Kevin Drew was effusive and engaging rather than irritatingly twee, and they did a kick-ass version of ‘Texaco Bitches' that I still can't get out of my head. See also: Hot Chip and the rearranged ‘Over and Over' from Friday.

6. Pixies
Ampitheatre, Sunday
For a band going through the motions for money these days, they could have rehearsed those motions a little more: Joey Santiago has never played less well in his life with bum notes and misfired guitar solos, and the Kim Deal/Dave Lovering rhythm section were adequate rather than amazing – but Charles Kitterage Frank Black Francis Thompson IV was carrying the set by sheer force of will for a huge performance that contained all the expected hits – ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven', ‘ Debaser', the encores of ‘Where Is My Mind' and ‘Here Comes Your Man' – and some jaw-dropping surprises (‘Rock Music'! ‘Alec Eiffel'! ‘Break My Body'! ‘Alison'! ‘Planet of Sound'!). Still, for what's likely to be the band's last ever Australian show it could have been better.

5. Surfer Blood
Ampitheatre, Sunday
Their glorious Mary-Chain-surf-party vibe was perfect for the mid-afternoon sun having just enough energy to keep the front of stage crowd dancing while allowing those on the hill to lay around languidly. Except when they played ‘Swim', of course: no one could stay still during that.

4. We Are Scientists
Ampitheatre, Sunday
Easily the funniest band on the bill, and even though they were minus their proper drummer and seemed to be playing everything at breakneck speed, they played a killer set. It was weighted toward the new Barbara album, but older singles like ‘Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt', ‘It's a Hit' and ‘After Hours' got the big responses. And the between-song schtick was great, whether dismissing the myth of opposite seasons or proving that stand-in drummer Danny "Youth Group" Allen was genuinely Australian. (Keith Murray: "Prove it, Danny: say something that only an Aussie would know." Allen: "Go Souths").

3. The Drums
Ampitheatre, Saturday
To be honest, I enjoyed making fun of them almost as much as I enjoyed their set – though the people I was with didn't find my amazing "Joy Division: the beach party years!" joke nearly as funny as I did – but the Drums' weird theatrical mix of stripped-down primal rock and kooky dance moves were downright charming. And ‘Let's Go Surfing' got the crowd frugging more enthusiastically than any daylight crowd I've ever seen.

2. LCD Soundsystem
Mix Up, Friday
It was the same set as their Hordern Pavilion show from start to finish (minus ‘New York I Love You', fact fans), which loses them points for repetition – but since the set was all-killer (‘Drunk Girls', ‘Daft Punk Is Playing at My House', ‘All My Friends', ‘Pow Pow', ‘I Can Change', ‘Losing My Edge', etc, etc, etc) they still owned the place. Last ever Australian show? Probably. And what a way to go out.

1. Paul Kelly
GW McLennan, Saturday
Look, everyone's seen Kelly before and the man's a national treasure (Clare Bowditch had described him as "our real Prime Minister" earlier in the day and who could honestly disagree?). But seeing him in a festival environment makes clear a) how many songs the man has, and b) how good his band is these days. Guitarist/nephew Dan Kelly was missing, but Ash "Even" Naylor was covering the guitars with aplomb and Vika (and occasionally Linda) Bull were on hand for vocal duties – and the Vika-sung ‘Sweet Guy' tore the roof off the place. ‘Dumb Things'. ‘To Her Door'. ‘Before Too Long'. ‘How to Make Gravy'. ‘God Told Me to'. ‘Everything's Turning to White'. Amazing.
 
TOP THING MISSING FROM THE CAR WHEN I UNPACKED IT
My kick-ass festival hat. Has anyone seen it? Andrew P Street