St Jerome's Laneway Festival 2011

Review: Oh Summer, you're a capricious minx. The day began fiercely hot as punters poured into Rozelle's Sydney College Of Art, with vendors selling watermelon and ice cream near the gates and speculating about what colour yacht they'd buy with the day's proceeds, before the clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped by 15 degrees in the space of about 90 seconds. Another five degree drop would have seen the majority of the city's hipster community dead from exposure in their too-short shorts and ironic t-shirts, but it didn't seem to affect the celebratory vibe of the day.

Mind you, part of that vibe may have been due to the very, very visible presence of police and sniffer dogs. There were some friendly and huggy folks at an unusually early point for a music festival (hi there, complete stranger who felt like a snuggle during the Antlers!) who are probably feeling a little low on serotonin right about now.

Anyway: we arrived just after midday in the blazing furnace-strength sun to the rhythmic indie of Rat vs Possum, who got the early crowd unexpectedly lively given the time and the temperature, and proceeded to develop our strategy for the day, which was to catch as much as we could of as many bands as we could: no small trick given that the scheduling across the three stages was such that there were always three bands playing at the exact same time. This was particularly cruel later in the day when Yeasayer, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti and Les Savy Fav were all in the same slot – though that was not quite as cruel as the lot suffered by all bands playing after Les Savy Fav, to which we shall come shortly.

The Holidays took the Car Park stage augmented by a backing singer and a percussionist to launch into a selection of sophisticated pop-soul music that brought to mind – and I kid you not – mid-period Style Council or Swing Out Sister. If you're a café, your new soundtrack has arrived.

The 80s revival continued at the Clock Tower stage with World's End Press – or, as I will forever know them, The New ABC – who had the crowd a-dancin' in the sun. This was in contrast to Brooklyn's the Antlers, whose audience were far more blissed out – and frontman Peter Silberman is possessed of an unearthly falsetto that could make a grown man weep, and strange women hug (cf above).

The spirited folkery of Oxford's Stornoway proved they were the Mumford & Sons it's OK to like, while Brisbane boys Violent Soho showed that Alice in Chains did not toil in vain. In a particularly egregious piece of scheduling NYC's Bear in Heaven and locals PVT played at the same time, forcing punters to chose which set of thumping electronica-influenced indie rock they wished to experience (for my money, PVT won by a hair – but that's mainly because they had ‘Window' in their set). Local Natives drew an unexpectedly huge crowd to the Inner Sanctum and their summery indie sounds were perfect for the day, even as the temperature started to drop.

Jenny & Johnny were a revelation: their sugar-sweet music sounded fine on record, but on stage the interplay between Jonathon Rice and Jenny Lewis – both established artists in their own right – really comes into its own. They sounded amazing, and if Rice's cut offs were among the day's sartorial crimes, Ms Lewis's shimmy-enhancing dress more than made up for it.

Beach House were one of the day's stars and more than a few people have cited them as a highlight. And they were very good indeed (well, once the front-of-house turned on Victoria Legrand's vocal mic, at least) but to be honest, you'd get a similar experience listening to the CD and watching a lava lamp. Maybe you had to be right up close, which we were not since we wanted to catch some of Menomena (another definite highlight not least since their slashing, crashing take on ‘The Pelican' was a revelation: their records are really good, but they're a growling beast of a band live) and Cloud Control. And this was the gig where I realised just how big they've become: the entire Inner Sanctum crowd were singing and howling along with every note of ‘There's Nothing In The Water We Can't Fight', and ‘Gold Canary' (with segue into the Butthole Surfers' ‘Pepper', which has become something of a party trick) had the audience grooving awkwardly. Considering this is the last hometown show for the band before they head overseas indefinitely, this was a great way to go out. 

Now the clashes went from "annoying" to "impossible", not helped by the day's first few drops of rain following the gusty winds that were fast turning the venue into a dust cloud. It was at least fairly easy to ignore Two Door Cinema Club – at least, assuming you've seen Bloc Party before – but being forced to choose between the hypnotic, rhythmic stomp of Warpaint (who were clearly having a whale of a time, which is always good to see) and Blonde Redhead was agony. Then again, BR were playing a set heavily drawn from last year's Penny Sparkle – which, it's fair to say, is not their masterpiece – which meant that there was a lot of polite applause for most of the songs interspersed with people going nuts when they dropped classics like ‘This Is Not' and ‘23'.

Poor, poor Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti. Theirs was probably the smallest crowd of the night, and perhaps if we'd stayed longer we'd have been won over by their theatrical rock, but they clashed with two of the day's highlights in Yeasayer – who opened with ‘O.N.E.' and sounded great – and Les Savy Fav, who were already tearing the Clock Tower stage a new one. 

When tediously holding forth on the subject of Les Savy Fav I've often declared that there are two kinds of people in the world: those that love them, and those that haven't seen them live. Much of that is down to Tim Harrington, who barely missed a note as he climbed across nearby awnings, ran through the crowd, changed costumes as often as possible and tackled and dry humped a dude in the garden, keeping up a rate that would be tricky for Mick Jagger circa 1972 and downright inexplicable for a bald, overweight, middle-aged man. About a third of the audience ended up smeared with grey dye from his mighty beard as he tore through the crowd - and the rest of the band were a machine behind him, racing through a killer set that boasted ‘Patty Lee', ‘Lips n' Stuff', ‘The Sweat Descends' and ‘Let's Get Out Of Here'. 

The problem with the festival not finishing with Les Savy Fav is that all subsequent bands were shit by comparison. That was especially true of Foals, who seemed limp and derivative (yes, I too enjoyed the Cure as a younger man) and Deerhunter, who I generally like but who competently played a bunch of songs - and after LSF I needed my mind to be blown for anything to register. Holy Fuck were up to the challenge though, pumping through an abrasively energetic set – but by this point the sun was down and the ambient temperature was about 17 degrees, meaning that bed was becoming more and more attractive a propostion.

There were still the three headliners to go first, though. Goyte leapt from drum kit to percussion from song to song, flanked by two multi-instrumentalists up to the task to transforming his layered music to a live setting; !!! got a spirited punk-funk groove going on the Clock Tower stage and Cut Copy had the night's biggest set (complete with a giant door-cum-video screen) and were uncharacteristically lively on stage, but the occasional drizzle and fierce winds meant that it wasn't long before it was out on the road to find a way out of Rozelle (and a word of advice, Laneway: maybe shuttle buses are in order next year? Taxis were non-existent and buses packed to the gills). Overall it was a great day, but staggering the bands and not putting acts on after the indisputably best band on the festival would have made it a hands-down triumph.