Falls Festival - Part 1
Lorne, Victoria
30th of December 2010
Music festivals in Australia can be hard work for punters: they’re long days, the sound is rarely great, we almost always have to deal with bipolar weather conditions, there’s usually at least a handful of knobs in the crowd and the toilets are ALWAYS an ordeal. This Falls Festival was no exception to any of those rules. And yet for me, it was totally worth it.
I arrived a bit later than I had planned on doing, and after doing some laps of the festival grounds, getting my bearings and discovering that they were using a woodchip system for their toilets (yep, people would go to the toilet and then cover their stuff with a cup of woodchips! There were signs up saying how it's good for the environment. And I’m sure it is, but I don’t think it’s healthy to spend two days holding it in for fear of using the woodchips), I wandered over to watch Hot Hot Heat.
When
Hot Hot Heat’s album
Make Up the Breakdown came out in 2002, I absolutely loved it. I have no idea what the song ‘Bandages’ is about, but I still think it’s one of the greatest indie songs to dance and pantomime to. In fact I have lots of great memories of hand-dancing to that whole album at various points. This was the third time I had seen Hot Hot Heat – and I think I would’ve remembered them more fondly if I hadn’t. They were OK, they didn’t do anything wrong. But their indie, punky and whiney tunes sounded a bit dated, and certainly didn’t spark my interest in returning to their last few albums. To their credit, Steve Bays (Hot Hot Heat’s singer) jumps around on stage and
performs. Which is something that was distinctly lacking elsewhere at the festival.
Generally speaking, there wasn’t a whole lot of showmanship at Falls. I really missed the token festival oddball, the acts that you could watch happily without knowing any of their songs. All the performers I found quite tame this year, and I longed for the days when TISM or Machine Gun Fellatio or Gerling or Regurgitator were festival regulars. No band that I saw at this Falls did much other than play their instruments and chat a little; there were no on-stage antics that I’ll be talking about in a year’s time (unlike the 2002 Falls Festival when Roman Tucker from Rocket Science fell off his seat and performed a song from under his keyboard). A bit of colour and movement wouldn’t have gone astray this year. I digress…
Click for bigger image.
Next up were Australia’s favourite folk darlings,
Angus and Julia Stone. They were accompanied with some hot air balloons on stage. I found it hard to focus on anything other than just how much hair Angus has now – his whole face is covered. When reading in the program that someone called “Beardyman” would be performing later, I was expecting it to be the Angus Stone Solo Show, it wasn’t. (And in case you’re wondering, Beardyman aka the human beatbox, who was quite fabulous in his own right, was nowhere near as Beardy as Angus.)
During ‘Big Jet Plane’, the hot air balloons were released and we could see signs in the crowd saying “MARRY ME ANGUS”. Cute. I don’t have much to say about Angus and Julia: they’re good at what they do. They seem lovely. They’re not my thing, but...good on ‘em for existing. I thoroughly enjoyed eavesdropping on a conversation nearby where people were speculating on whether Angus and Julia had ever “fiddled with each other”.
(I actually heard a female fan running towards the stage saying, "Angus! I want him in and around my mouth". Never realised they inspire such hirsute lust. - Ed).
Following Angus & Julia came US hip-hop legends
Public Enemy. I hope someone high-fived someone after the decision was made to put those two acts on back to back. Public Enemy played their 1990 LP
Fear of a Black Planet to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Flavour Flav wore his trademark big clock around his neck and their military style dancers, the S1W's, accompanied them - cool, but they didn’t really do much, merely hung around the back of the stage. I left after Flav did an extended plug of all of his Social Media channels, and their website and how we could all follow him and tweet at him and visit their site and subscribe to this and blah blah…enough! And from a band that was once so
against the mainstream.
Over to Sydney's
Richard In Your Mind, who were the highlight of the day for me. Finally a band that was a bit left of centre and seemed excited to be there! For those who aren’t familiar with RIYM, the best comparison I could make is with Ween. (Which is a huge compliment coming from me: I’ll be talking about the time I saw Ween in Adelaide until the day I die.) I’m not going that far with RIYM yet, but I’m really keen to see what these guys do next. I don’t love what I’ve heard of their album, but this is the second time I’ve seen them live and they’re a great band to watch.
As I mentioned earlier, the sound at festivals is never great, but on the 30th at Falls it seemed especially bad to me, on both stages. During Richard in Your mind, I struggled to hear the vocals at all. Despite this, frontman Richard Cartwright looked like he was having a ball, and so did the rest of the band. There wasn’t a huge crowd watching them, but everyone there was dancing and having a doozy of a time. At the end of the set, they brought on some geishas who were backstage serving sake. The geishas (who totally matched the aesthetic of RIYM) politely gave each band member a drink on stage and then moseyed off. Cute.
Click for bigger image.
Next up, I headed back to the main stage for Australia’s most loved songwriter,
Paul Kelly who was playing with some of Australia’s most loved (or at least utilised) musos, with Ashley Naylor on guitar, Cameron Bruce on keys, Pete Luscombe on drums and Vika and Linda Bull on backing vocals). The crowd at Paul Kelly amazed me: thousands and thousands of people under the age of 25 had flocked to the stage to watch him, and they all knew every word! I don’t know how that happens. Do Triple J play Paul Kelly? Have Pitchfork somehow found him and written nice words about him? How do the 18 year olds know who he is, and how do they know every word?
(A: Paul Kelly's words (and music) have been on the VCE required reading syllabus for the last 5 years. - Ed)
Mr Kelly and his band of merry men gave the crowd what they wanted: HITS! I’m a bit funny about Paul Kelly, I think he’s really great but I don’t think its fair that he is constantly referred to as Australia’s greatest singer-songwriter. I love a good lyric, but I spent a lot of my time at Paul Kelly wondering why people think he’s better than a whole host of others. Until he played ‘Before too Long’. At which point I got excited and sung along at the top of my voice. OK then.
Next on the main stage was
Interpol. I’m not a fan of Interpol, and I’ve always thought they seemed like they’d be a dull live band. BUT I had heard otherwise and I was determined to give them a go. I was with a friend who was very excited to watch them so went close to the front to have a good view. I hated it. The view didn’t matter: they didn’t really do anything, so there was nothing to see. I don’t think frontman Paul Banks spoke at all, there was no banter in between songs, and all of them sounded exactly the same. If I’d only ever heard ‘Slow Hands’ and ‘Evil’, I would’ve one day wondered “Whatever happened to them? Why didn’t they do more?”. But I now know that it would’ve been because they only had two songs. I should point out here that my friend who is the Interpol Fan had the time of her life. Her only criticism was that they played too many new songs and not enough old songs. I don’t know how she can tell them apart. The best thing about them was the suits that they were wearing. They were beautiful.
Interpol harshed my buzz, and by the time they finished (they also played for longer than they were meant to, which I find rude, especially at festivals), I wanted out. It was cold, I’d been too scared to go back to the toilets all day to face the woodchips, and I was mad that a band as boring as Interpol had somehow become superstars. Richard in Your Mind were on a smaller stage in front of barely anyone, yet Interpol were on a huge stage in front of thousands and thousands of people. I kept thinking that was the biggest travesty in the world.
Anthea Cohen
(Pics: Callum Ponton)
FALLS FESTIVAL - REVIEW AND PHOTOS - PART 2