Meredith Music Festival

Review: Festival reviews, eh? They always just end up being I-saw-this-and-this-and-then-this lists, which are painful to write and a nightmare to read. The point of a review is to make you wish you had been there; well, at least in the case of Meredith, which is so perfect that it makes all other music festivals look like deliberate insults. So instead of trying to be comprehensive this review will be all about The Ten Things About The 20th Meredith That Your Life Is The Poorer For Having Missed Out On.

Thing About Meredith That Your Life Is The Poorer For Having Missed Out On #10: Cloud Control Dropping Some Butthole Surfers
This is on the list because it was the first time I'd heard them do it, and it's number 10 because apparently it's pretty common in recent sets. Still, the band's segue from a strong, confident version of their single‘Gold Canary' into the loping rhythms of the Butthole Surfers' ‘Pepper' ("I don't mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows...") was delightfully well executed.

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #9: Broadcast Going "The Songs People Know? Eh, Fuck That, Let's Do An Experimental Psych Set"
My word, how this divided people. Those feeling the vibes on the first evening found the loops'n'vocal delay performance intoxicating, while those who wanted to hear ‘Come On Let's Go' live just got more and more frustrated as it dawned on them that this was less a set and more a happening (man). Still, it was pretty damn perfect as the sun was dipping beneath the treeline.

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #8: Killer Sets By El Guincho, Sharon Jones, Sally Seltmann, The Fall, Jeff the Brotherhood And Pretty Much Everyone Else On The Bill
The beauty of there only being one stage meant that a) there was no threat of a timetable clash, and b) everyone experienced the same thing, so conversations about the rockingness of Jeff the Brotherhood, whether or not Mark E Smith was bellowing "I hate festivals!", how sweet Seltmann's cover of Carly Simon's ‘You're So Vain' was or what sort of dickhead would throw something on stage during the Dap Kings' set could be enjoyed by everyone in the toilet queue, campsite, or morning line for coffee. And, indeed, it was.

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #7. The Dirty Three Being Followed By A Robot Spaceship
Booking the Dirty Three as Saturday night's headliners for the 20th Meredith was something of an attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle – literally, since their last Meredith performance had been accompanied by a reportedly spectacular electrical storm. This time around they played a predictably great set, with Warren Ellis looking like Rasputin at the height of his lunacy as the band went over time and refused to leave the stage. Any fears that their set might have brought the energy down were allayed when a goddamn spaceship was craned over the crowd as part of the festival's sky show involving lots of lights, smoke and lasers. The slightly later timing worked out well too: there were some concerns that the winds were too strong to risk suspending the spaceship over the crowd, but things had calmed adequately down by the time of launch.   

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #6: The Last Cocktail Party
Meredith is legendary for having traditions pop up without any official sanction – the Arch of Love that appears each year, the themed toilet stall decorations and so on – but one that had grown to a point that it had to be curtailed was the annual cocktail party. Held at a secret location inside the campsite and spread by word of mouth, it offers DJs, free drinks and a piñata filled with goodies (some, according to legend, being somewhat pharmaceutical in nature). Sadly, due to concerns that it breached responsible service of alcohol laws, the unofficial party was officially ended this year - but it went out with a bang, a Baywatch theme and a David Hasselhoff piñata that was just begging to be smashed to bits.

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #5: Watching Every Man In The Ampitheatre Visibly Perk Up When Nikki From Those Darlins Expressed Her Desire To "Suck All Yer Dicks!"
Those Darlins had the unenviable job of getting everyone moving again on a cold Sunday morning with intermittent rain squalls, but their bar-room rock (much less country than on their self-titled debut album) was just the tonic - though the fact that their three singer/songwriter/guitarists were all strikingly attractive women also helped, as did the fact that they were playing songs that often alluded to the joys of humpin'. The definitive turning point was where Nikki's shout out to the joys of their first Australian tour turned from standard "your country is beautiful, we're having a blast" sentient to its rather more ribald punchline - although their subsequent promise to run in the Gift turned out to be disappointingly hollow (see below).

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #4: Just, Well, Meredith
Look, everyone says this for a reason: Meredith is the perfect example of how people will generally act like grown ups if they're treated like grown ups. Allowing BYO booze (the only stipulation being that there be no glass, since the site is a working farm) meant no bar queues and hence no people buying four beers at a time only to down them quickly and act like dickheads for the rest of the night. Furthermore, the constant reminders that we were spending the weekend on the Nolan family's farm meant everyone treated the place like a mate's house rather than a public vomitorium. Add the very decent (and amazingly cheap) food, the incredibly friendly staff and the complete lack of corporate branding and this was a lovely place to hang out, regardless of the music.

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #3: The Meredith Gift
There's that moment on the third day of a music festival where you can feel your energy levels start to drop. And Meredith addresses that in the best possible way: by having people do a sprint in the nuddy. It's the least sexy thing you can imagine, unless you get off on watching scrotums and boobs flapping to a painful degree as their owners pound down the straight to a finish line that's unlikely to end in anything but a pile-up. That said, it's even more hilarious than that description suggests.

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #2: Hearing Neil Finn Play ‘Better Be Home Soon' Whilst Sitting With Friends On The Top Of A Ferris Wheel
Finn's set was a surprise highlight for me, mainly because I always forget just how many amazing songs the man has. And it roamed wildly too, from Split Enz classics like ‘I Got You' and ‘One Step Ahead' and Crowded House classics like ‘Distant Sun' and ‘World Where You Live' and on through his solo work, including asking the audience if anyone played guitar, dragging a punter up (reportedly Matt of Sydney indie kids Hira Hira) and enlisting him to play the circular riff of ‘Anytime'. What made it better for me in particular was the fact that much of his set was enjoyed from the Meredith Eye, the festival's ferris wheel – scientifically proven to be the best fairground environment in which to hear music. Hanging suspended metres above the ground and bellowing‘Better Be Home Soon' in the company of some of my favourite humans was pretty damn life-affirming, especially since it followed a rendition of ‘Don't Dream It's Over' with Warren Ellis adding otherworldly violin lines.

TAMTYLITPFHMOO #1. Custard Playing An All-Killer Reunion Set
Sure, there were moments that suggested that rehearsals for the show had consisted of everyone sitting in a van going "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I remember ‘Pinball Les'", and Dave McCormack's memory for his own lyrics was as scattershot as ever, but that's part of the charm of Custard. The other part is that they have an incredible back catalogue and this greatest hits set was one stone-cold classic after another: ‘Apartment', ‘Ringo (I Feel Like...)', ‘Lucky Star', ‘Anatomically Correct', ‘Hit Song', ‘Nice Bird',‘Music is Crap', ‘Pack Yr Suitcases' and, sending the crowd into a frenzy,‘Girls Like That (Don't Go For Guys Like Us)'. Add an encore that amounted to a crash course in 80s hip hop (the chorus of NWA's ‘Express Yourself' welded to random rhymes from the likes of De La Soul and Young MC) and subtract the inexplicable absence of ‘The New Matthew' from the set and you still have something I'll be grinning about for decades to come.

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