When it was announced that this year’s Laneway Festival would be moving to the School of Contemporay Art, a resplendently historic archipelago of sandstone buildings that was once the Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane, the general consensus was one of Get Thee To A Ticket Outlet. The move was a wise one following the controversy of 2009’s festival, and the announcement came equipped with a lineup not to be scoffed at. The only discernible tension came from the timetable, with each stage’s set times paralleling one another and many, many clashes, which would make for a Choose Your Own Adventure kind of day. Hence:

Happy Festival Day, Sydney! The weather’s looking good and you’re excited except for, Oh no! Your ticket has gone missing and you arrive two hours late because you’re an idiot. Still, you get there and the site is beautiful – masses of sandstone packed in with light gravel, the hot sun beating down and a decent-sized, happy looking crowd. You have two options:
a) Hockey
b) Kid Sam

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (A)
Steph: Having seen Jonathan Boulet before, the festival opened for me with Portland’s Hockey – one of those buzz bands who I tend to pigheadedly avoid on account of they’re one of those buzz bands, and I’m pigheaded. But I’m also often disproved. Hockey couple a young, ebullient energy with a shameless bastardisation of Strokes-era indie rock, and just about every blog-hyped genre that’s pervaded the last decade. But although derivative, they do everything so well that I ended up buoyed and happy; the drink lines were small and the festival was off to a good start.

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (B)
Amelia: It was a long time coming for me to see Melbourne’s Kid Sam play. Steph’s constant raving about them had whet my appetite and I was impatient to find the stage they were playing on. The start of a new festival always involves at least ten minutes of confused orientation. I missed the start of their set but was seriously impressed with what I saw – the two Ryan brothers create a huge, full sound and were broadcasting it to a large and attentive crowd. Their complex and innovative melodies were catchy, and their sound surprisingly Radiohead-ish; quite melodic, with Kieran’s vocals angelic, caramel; smooth and soft and sweet…

Whoops! There’s another fork in the road! Would you like to stay local, or head abroad? You have three options:
a) Whitley,
b) The Middle East or
c) Frightened Rabbit

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (C)
Steph: It was maybe unfair to pit an international band of this calibre up against two local acts who gig regularly – the choice was too easy! Frightened Rabbit unfortunately eluded all creative metaphors and writerly descriptions by being Simply Wonderful… Their set was as it should be; sometimes angry, sometimes desperate, sometimes rousing, but always tinged with that constant aural and lyrical melancholy that seems to make every Scottish indie-rock band a Scottish indie-rock band. They are charismatic and mellifluous, untrying and unpretentious, and their set would have been all that and more if we could actually hear the keys. But the thing about Laneway Festivals is that you can’t expect perfect sound, so we were happy to let that one go.

It was at this point that things (read: moods) started to change. Walking out from Frightened Rabbit felt like walking into an entirely different day. The People Had Arrived. While not a small site, whatever spaciousness the SCA enjoyed seemed nulled by the layout of its festival. The food stalls, of which there were most decidedly not enough, were positioned not in the nice, relaxing square of grass opposite the Clock Tower Stage but instead in a narrow conduit through which you had to pass to get from one stage to the next. The set times for each stage were mostly matched, meaning that in the half hours between acts everyone was out in droves, aimless and hungry, hot and bottlenecked and with very sore legs from standing on gravel for hours. I missed out on last year’s much decried Lameway Festival, but had adored it the year before – the easy transition between venues, the grassy knoll to sit atop in full view of the main stage, the relative visibility of all the bands and the general camaraderie of the crowd. There were times at Laneway 2010 when all of that seemed as absent as the Laneways themselves.

It happens again! You’re faced with showing support for the locals, or sneaking off to see the Poms. Three options:
a) the Philly Jays
b) Bridezilla or
c) Wild Beasts

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (C) AND IN TRUTH SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF FOR CONTINUALLY SIDESTEPPING THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN ACTS AT THIS FESTIVAL
Stephelia: We sacrificed the last few songs of The Middle East to check out Wild Beasts, who picked up our dangling moods with aplomb. Hooray! Hayden Thorpe’s pitch-perfect falsetto was offset spectacularly by the more croony vocals of the band’s relative newbie Tom Flemming, as they threw their baroque, flamboyant chaos at the crowd with cheeky and high-cheekboned sexuality. Getting there early secured us a spot where we could actually see which, while a rarity from this point on, made Wild Beasts a definite highlight of the day. Did we mention Hooray? Because, Hooray!

The XX, Mumford & Sons and the Very Best all clash! They’re all international! And brilliant! OMG WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE, WHY DO THEY KEEP DOING THIS TO YOU, YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST GIVE UP AND GO HOME. You have three options:
a) the XX
b) Mumford & Sons
c) the Very Best

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (A)
Amelia: After watching Wild Beasts, I stayed up the front to wait for the XX while Steph headed to Mumford. With XX on heavy rotation in my house, I was braced for boredom but hopeful that their stage show would offer something different. Big  branded black and white banners grounded the tableaux of the stage in an effective exercise in suspense, and when the three members came on to the opening chords of ‘Intro’, they communicated intensity and confidence. The bassist did most of the chit chat but there wasn’t much of that; the emotional gunshot to the head that each song delivered kind of made it a little awkward to break into hilarious banter. I was wary that an album like theirs could quite easily be replicated verbatim when translated live, but they did more than that – tempo changes, build-ups and climaxes that broke away from the mould and shook things up. The enormous sound of the crowd singing every word to every song made the band smile, which mirrored down to the audience and reminded me how singular the shared experience of a festival can be.

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (B)
Steph: Leaving the XX to head to Mumford & Sons ended up being a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad move – which is saying something for the band responsible for one of my favourite albums of the year. I’d left it all too late and ended up jammed about a kilometer from the stage, buttressed between three of the largest, sweatiest and hairiest men I’ve ever accidentally touched with my face. Playing ‘Little Lion Man’ early into their set thankfully dispersed a surprisingly large portion of their crowd and I tried to move forward into the freed space, but ended up winning only the view of somebody else’s fat sweaty head. I gave up and elbowed my way right to the back where I could sort of watch some adorable pinpricks and teensy guitars deliver a jaunty up-tempo hoe-down, with all the exciteable energy and basically-all-we-have-here-is-our-album-but-at-least-you-guys-know-all-the-words setlist that one expects from a band that rocketed so quickly and toured immediately. So basically, it would have been the funnest set ever if I’d been able to see it and/or hear it. Disappointed Face.

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (C)
You’re one of the luckies who opted out of the obvious two and saw The Very Best, and you spend the rest of the festival gloating about it. By the end of the day you are far more envied and loathed than you were at its onset, and none of your friends offer you a lift home.

Daniel Johnston is clashing with the Black Lips! You have four options, none of which is Radioclit because we’re not that sort of blog:
a) Daniel Johnston,
b) The Black Lips,
c) Head to Daniel Johnston out of some peculiar and insincere sense of shame over the idea of Missing Daniel Johnston, but then change your mind and rush to the Black Lips
d) Get food because you are Amelia and subsequently hungry, and eat it while watching Sarah Blasko, who is nice and good and pretty.

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (C)
Steph: I tried, okay? I really, really tried. I loved the film, the story was devastating and so is his music – but I get so irked by the amount of insincerity that’s thrown around Daniel Johnston that it’s almost impossible for me to enjoy what he does. So here’s goes: I don’t identify with the music of Daniel Johnston. A lot of people do, but I don’t. I stayed for four solo songs, but it was all too exposed and uncomfortable to make me feel anything but awkward, so as soon as Old Man River’s band headed on stage to accompany the rest of his set I headed to watch the Black Lips. Good move.  They were as brutal, meaty and dense as they should have been, maybe the only act I saw all day that felt like they were giving me something I could actually grab hold to with my teeth. Garage punk, psych-rock, a whole lot of screaming and a whole lot of jumping, and also it was the first time in maybe ten years I’ve seen people crowd surfing. What happened to crowd surfing?! BRING BACK CROWD SURFING.

In all fairness by this stage of the festival we were a little too exhausted to be challenged. We wanted to watch a band we’d seen and loved before. We wanted to watch a band we could sing along to. We wanted to watch a band dressed in matching gold sparkly onesies so tight we could almost see their unmentionables. So we forwent Radioclit and Echo & The Bunnymen and watched Dappled Cities deliver again with a tight, fun set that saw them (and their unmentionables) running all over the stage; jaunty, cheeky, talented and as fun as ever. Sarah Blasko made a surprise appearance for a wonderful version of ‘Vision Bell’ – and if you overlooked the sheet of lyrics she had at her feet, the song could have been written by her.

Home stretch, but a final clash! Florence and the Machine, N.A.S.A or Eddy Current Suppression Ring? Actually you’re not really into Baille-Funk though, so you have only two options:
a) you are a girl, or a boy with a girlfriend, or a boy with a boyfriend into girl music
b) you love Eddy Current

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (A)
Stephelia: There was a good 30 minutes before the last bands were scheduled to go on stage, and we figured that In Front Of The Florence Stage was as good a place as any to spend it. Not being huge fans of Florence or her Machine, we were there on recommendation but with hopes to dash out half way through to catch Eddie Current. This was a laughable idea even before she made it to the stage – by the end of the wait, there were so many people wedging their way through and packing us in that we flirted with maybe four all-out fistfights, especially surprising considering the general lack of testosterone. From what we could see on the very tippiest of our toes, Florence had red hair, no pants and blue flowing wings. We were actually relatively close but still the sound couldn’t do her massive lungs justice, and the crowd was Just Too Big to make the wait worthwhile. Florence and the Machine is a huge act to bill for one of Sydney’s only boutique festivals, and we ended up trapped there with poor vision, strained ears and sore legs.

YOU CHOOSE OPTION (B)
Our Friend Ross: Peering through a gap to see a distant fleck of Florence and The Machine, it took half a song to realise the better option was to race to the Inner Sanctum stage where Eddy Current Suppression Ring were already plowing through a no-nonsense set of ‘hits’ from Primary Colours, littered with yet-to-be-heard songs from their new album. No wings or sequins in sight here. Mid-way through, the amp stack acted as the perfect step-up to the nearby roof awning and, while sprayed with a strobe light and the high sandstone wall awash in colour, Brendan Huntley did his awkward, anti-star twitch to a smallish but enraptured crowd who couldn’t have asked for a better ending to their Laneway day.

–

A FEW FINAL WORDS
–

Escaping from Balmain is hard enough at the best of times, but at close to midnight on a Sunday it’s nearly impossible. There are few buses, our phones were flat and it was lucky we found our friends – perhaps some shuttle-buses or at least transport advice could be offered next time to save us from watching sadly as the last bus burst at the britches and rolled past us, leaving no taxis and a whole lot of disoriented people in its wake.

And we’re talking a Whole Lot Of People. Laneway is billed as a ’boutique’ festival which aims to cater for a smaller subgroup of music lovers than the major festies like Parklife or the Big Day Out. But each year our favourite festival has expanded its audience a little more and then a little more in order to sell more tickets, which is probably fair enough financially but lead to the festival’s almost-failure in 2009 and this year’s move to the SCA. Booking a headline as huge as Florence and The Machine, even if they exploded on the radios after the fact, may have been a mistake. Conversely, we felt that Daniel Johnston is out of place if he isn’t in an intimate venue full of quiet, dedicated fans to whom his music means so much.

All that said, we weren’t assaulted, no one had a Southern Cross tattoo, it was a mostly great lineup, a mostly great crowd and a very pretty site. Hopefully the teething issues will be worked out before next year – and even if they’re not, we’ll probably end up braving it again. Because even if we don’t have Laneways, we only have one Laneway Festival.

Posted by steph in Music, Reviews

Tags: Balmain, Daniel Johnston, Dappled Cities, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Florence and The Machine, frightened rabbit, hockey, Kid Sam, Laneway Festival, Mumford & Sons, Old Man River, Sarah Blasko, SCA, The Black Lips, the very best, The XX, Wild Beasts