Good Vibrations
Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne
Sunday 13th February
Good Vibes always strikes me as something like the chilled out older brother of the festival circuit, the one who listens to music, not necessarily because it’s in keeping with the latest trend, but just because it’s good. They like it. In contrast to most other summer’s music festivals, Good Vibes seems more concerned with long-celebrated performers, artists with solid reputations. The transient ephemera of acts currently in vogue often makes up the minority, and this year’s line up is no exception.
Performers like Yolanda Be Cool, The Ting Tings and Sidney Samson aside, the bill’s main draw cards are heavyweight acts from yesteryear – musical institutions with identities primarily rooted in former, more illustrious glories. Artists like Faithless, Ludacris, Erykah Badu, Nas and Damian Marley. Often, they’re of the hip-hop soul or breaks bent, and it’s a combination of these factors that seems to facilitate the festivals bleary-eyed cool. It’s interesting then that the train platform of Flemington Racecourse is swarming with an unusually large number of police upon arrival. They’re questioning the arriving punters, to incessant, barrel chested chants of ‘here we go, here we go, here we go’, and ‘doo doo doo doooo doo doo dooooo doo doo doooooo doo’ (to the tune of Duck Sauce’s Barbra Streisand). It seems – for the time being at least – that this one time chiller has grown up and gone to law school, and started playing weekends at a suburban footy club.
Not to worry though, for a surprisingly sparse crowd means it’s easy enough to escape the shakedowns and the chanting, and Good Vibes’ endearingly lax atmosphere is immediately reinstated by a top-hatted Erykah Badu, who’s soulfully gyrating over at the unfortunately titled ‘Roots Tent’. She slinks elegantly across the stage to a live re-working of ‘Apple Tree’, years of stage experience and the confidence that comes with being top of the game for a relative eternity manifest in every movement. The song is quickened here, and bolstered by the thunderous bass of Badu tapping her ring-laden fingers around on a drum pad next to the microphone stand. The live edits continue as the band cuts seamlessly from an altered version of ‘Hey Woo’ to a cover of Whodini’s ‘Friends’, where the 808-inspired clicks and thuds of the pad seem most at home. Badu soon loses the hat in favour of a chain headband, and the psychedelic images that begin to waft hazily across the visual screens reiterate the newfound, sixties inspired aesthetic on display. Inexplicably, the image of a DNA double helix comes slithering across the monitors for what seems like several minutes. But the most entertaining visual element of this performance is in the embarrassingly sexual verve with which almost every member of the crowd swivels their hips. Badu continues to faultlessly smoulder over ‘Window Seat’, ‘Once Inna Lifetime’, ‘Back In the Day’ and ‘Bag Lady’, and the sultry spectacle of a thousands-strong crowd bumping and grinding in unison continues unwaveringly throughout the proceedings.
The sparkling, breathy dance-pop of Friendly Fires drifts out over the sun drenched main stage, and it’s disappointing to only catch their conclusion of ‘Jump In The Pool’ and ‘Paris’. (In case we'd forgotten, the bands "hit" song titles were inexplicably scrolled across the screen above the stage before the band came out.) Singer Ed Macfarlane bounces around in front of the band, shaking Yasi-esque droplets from his brow with every move. For all the salty vigour of their performance though, Friendly Fires are impressively sharp, and Macfarlane’s voice expertly weaves around anthemic choruses with the polish and dexterity of a studio take.
The Ting Tings, next out onto the main arena, maintain a similar sheen, but without the intangible core of substance that sits at the crux of more impressive acts on offer throughout the day. There’s really not much wrong with the set overall, and musically the band are almost flawless, but when the lyric ‘clap your hands if you’re working too hard’ comes bursting through the P.A., one can’t help but feel the irony of this as the band’s potential epitaph.
Bag Raiders come ambling out onto the adjacent MR J stage for both the figurative and literal moment in the sun, with singer Chris Stracey pausing for an unpretentiously charismatic greeting that befits the music of the following hour. "Hello Melbourne", he mumbles from behind a sly grin, as delay and reverb effects add a comical grandeur to the his greetings. Their set is stirring, with songs fluidly morphing from one to the next via a melange of covers, live percussively driven instrumentals that belie the group’s synth-y inclinations, and snippets of forthcoming tracks. The introductory beat of ‘Shooting Stars’ for example, receives its deserved rapture when teasingly dropped for a moment, before the duo launch into a brief cover of Run DMC’s ‘Peter Piper’. Things descend into the comparative darkness for a moment, with the exploration of an instrumental suite that sounds uncannily like something from Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy, before the guys revert powerfully back to their comfortable ground in a strong run home of shimmery, hands-in-the-air pop. The duo’s holy trinity of ‘Fun Punch’, ‘Way Back Home’ and the aforementioned ‘Shooting Stars’ form a bouncily euphoric finale.
Thousands of hands are similarly raised back up at the Roots tent, but most with their middle fingers passionately extended toward the sky. Nas is on stage, imposing in a puffy ‘Queensbridge’ emblazoned letterman jacket and dark glasses, vehemently spurring the crowd into chants of ‘FUCK THE RADIO’ throughout his rapid-fire introduction of ‘Na Mean’, ‘Nas Is Like’, and ‘Represent’. Further zeal is reserved for the anti-commercialist anthem ‘Hip Hop Is Dead’, before Erykah Badu reemerges from the side-stage darkness. She brings some respite from the rage, breezing over ‘Street Dreams’ and ‘If I Ruled The World’, but the revolving door of vocalists is quickly spun again, and a suitably unperturbed Damian Marley shuffles out into view.
He’s accompanied by a similarly dread-locked associate who proceeds to maniacally wave the regional flag of Kingston, maintaining this fanaticism for the entirety of the 90-minute set. It seems like a pretty sweet gig. Marley is accompanied by a pair of noticeably bloodshot eyes when he first takes to the stage, but it’s a wonder if you’d really want it any other way. He proceeds to expertly shrug his shoulders to the staccato guitar stabs of ‘War/No More Trouble’, and tribal pulse of ‘Move’.
Until this point, the set has been more of a tag-team display than one of entwined fluidity, but the two performers lock horns with symbiotic dynamism for what proves to be the most inspired moments of the set. Marley is shaken from his supine cool by the jarringly vengeful ‘Hate Me Now’ (it’s interesting to note here how sleekly he can move from championing the rhetoric of peace and equality to playing the role of Nas’s ‘fuck the world’ hype man), a free-style over KRS-One’s booming raga ‘Step Into A World’, and the gun shot riddled ‘Made You Look’. Idealism bubbles back to the fore with the collaborative ‘Road To Zion’, and winds up a set that could’ve only been enhanced by a cover of one of dad’s infamous tunes.
Back down the hill toward the Main area, and a crowd is swelling in anticipation of Faithless, whose stage set up is fittingly bejewelled with symbols of grandeur and expanse. Ridiculously comprehensive percussion rig? Check. Dry ice clouds that make the stage look like it’s part of the set from horror movie The Mist? Check. Over head floodlights that bathe everything in a slowly flashing, alien glow? Check. Keyboards that are so plentiful they almost form a staircase up to said lights? Check. It sounds ridiculous on paper, but from the moment Maxi Jazz steps forth, and raises his outstretched hands, Christ-like, for ‘Sun To Me’, the atmospheric clout of this initially comical concoction becomes obvious. All Jazz has to do is stand and nod his head whilst breathy chords stab holes in the menacing low end buzz, and he casts the shadow of a messiah. The crowd goes ape shit.
His voice is like a Trojan horse: an effortless cadence that is hugely powerful in spite of its blasé delivery. Even standing to one side of the stage playing a tiny cowbell with ridiculously austere seriousness cast upon his face, he is commanding. Said cowbell duty provides the space for long time collaborator Harry Collier to come out for a couple of tracks, but the substitution is fleeting, as Jazz is again the nexus of the festival for the long-awaited ‘Insomnia’. Red lights flash down upon the stage as he commences his celebrated verse, and expectedly, it’s incredible. When the key line eventually kicks in, it’s simply the sort of moment that should provide a tick on every attendee's musical bucket list.
There’s an instrumental cooling down that follows immediately, and it’s indicative of Faithless’ set as a whole. Their 80 minutes is full of peaks and valleys, but everything is executed with a deftness and dexterity that means that any moment of atmospheric recession is accompanied by continuous claps and rapturous applause, rather than vacant stares into the distance or quick glances at wristwatches. ‘I Want More’ comes next, followed by the exhilarating ‘Salva Mea’. The band then launches into a fleeting cover of ‘Back In Black’. I suppose it’s cool, and it’s well appreciated by the crowd, but in the midst of the moment’s context, it strikes as being ridiculous. With that, they depart for literally no more than one minute, before returning for an encore performance of ‘We Come One’ that is as equally, if not more mind-blowing, than ‘Insomnia’. More furious ticking of that bucket list.
With those famous synth lines still ringing out through the night, thousands turn and head back towards the platforms, and the ardours of a post-Sunday-festival train ride home. After witnessing such a spectacle – just as Jazz had coolly recited only moments prior - it doesn’t seem as though anyone present at the Good Vibes main stage will be getting much sleep.
Elliott Grigg
(Pics: CC Hua)