Meredith

The obvious question after any music festival is, “Who had the best t-shirt?” While the mock varsity top for Nimbin University came close, the winner for me at this year’s Meredith Music Festival featured a cropped Beatles photo featuring Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney with the tagline, “DRUM & BASS”.

This was my first time at Meredith and I cannot praise the organisers enough for the way they run the festival. Assisted by perfect weather, it was a breeze to get in and out of the festival grounds and the famous “no dickheads” policy was followed to the T.

I guess the main reason you go to these things is the music, and that was a treat as well.

After sitting in the outside chairs at the Pink Flamingo Bar drinking Melbourne Bitters we decided it was time to rug up for the night and fill our pockets with cans of Stella, so we left the Supernatural Ampitheatre in time to make it back for Akron/Family. What we returned for was a thoroughly enjoyable beardy jam with plenty of audience participation; a most satisfactory festival performance.

Sia jumped up on stage next and kicked off proceedings with ‘Buttons’, setting the tone for a fun, poppy and technically adept performance. Her band is excellent, of particular note being her touring cellist whose presence is essential to most arrangements.

Royal Crown Revue have come full circle and are now seasoned and relaxed swing entertainers in their forties - much, perhaps, like the ones that inspired them when the band began in 1989. RCR delivered an excellent live show with top players, only slightly dampened by some douche throwing an esky on stage in the final third of the set. Singer Eddie Nichols, ever the professional, kicked it into a monitor and didn’t miss a beat.

Once we’d shrugged off our hangovers from the night before we returned to the Supernatural Amphitheatre on Saturday for Kitty, Daisy and Lewis, the English instrument-swapping revivalist rock’n’roll Durham siblings. Their parents joined them on stage, with mum Ingrid Weiss (drummer post-debut record for The Raincoats) on double bass and recording engineer dad Graeme Durham on banjo and acoustic guitar. This set was a rollicking good time, with a particular highlight being the infectiously joyful Jamaican trumpeter Eddie 'Tan Tan' Thornton joining the band on stage for a couple of songs.

Later in the day, Combo La Revelacion got the group pumping to their salsa grooves. During their set, a makeshift skipping rope made out of a flag rope was being jumped by punters in the crowd. A dude in a gold hooded leotard upstaged the band by his energetic leaping and backflipping over the rope.

Heavy Trash features Jon Spencer basically doing what he's done for the last 25 years, but his new band does have a renewed vigour missing from the later Blues Explosion work. Matt Verta-Ray took the lead on a couple of songs, which kept the set mixed up. You gotta mix it up. I was expecting a two-piece, but four guys were up on stage, with the line up filled out by a double bass player and a drummer.

Paul Kelly played a set of his most popular songs, and featured Vika Bull's amazing pipes on a couple of pieces. Ash Naylor took guitar duties. 'To Her Door' was met with the obligatory shoe salute, and throughout the set various people climbed a large tree close to the stage to be waved down in a firm but friendly manner by the sole bouncer.

On early Saturday night Animal Collective demonstrated that their live show is not worthy of anyone’s money or attention.

Thankfully, Jarvis Cocker followed. Opening with ‘Angela’, he spent the next hour restoring the crowd’s faith in popular song. Before ‘Homewrecker!’ from his most recent album Further Complications, Jarvis said the line immediately immortalised for twenty minutes on Twitter: “This song is about destroying things. It's not clever, and it's not intelligent - but it is very, very pleasurable."

Eddy Current Suppression Ring closed out guitar-based proceedings on Saturday night with a cracker of a set that translated very well to the festival environment. It is, of course, best to see them at The Tote but they can slay any venue from 200-people pubs, to Festival Hall, to the Supernatural Amphitheatre. A joy.

Willing to pass on the DJ sets that followed, we instead decided to grab some food and return to camp. Krishna food stalls have a well earned reputation for serving healthy and yum food at festivals. At Meredith this year I learnt something new about them. At the end of each day, you can get a lot of food for almost nothing. Two dollars gets you a big plate piled with rice and curry - normally $10 worth of food - so the three in my party at that point got one each. Well, Parko got the plate first and then even though Rich and I had eaten other stuff we thought that it made too much financial sense to pass up the opportunity.

As we stood around eating, a bloke called Adam came up and asked for some of our curry. He seemed like an okay dude so we told him to go and grab a fork from the Krishnas.

About a minute later he returned to us holding a plate full of curry with a perplexed face, exclaiming, ‘I asked for a fork and they gave me this!’

After Saturday night festivities - and, perhaps, all the food I just ingested - I had to take a shit, so I went to one of the composting toilet blocks. Some bloke called Sam was in a cubicle nearby. An obvious question is, “How did you know his name was Sam?” This is a sensible question, and it is one that is based on the social convention that friends, being your friends, let you shit in peace. Sam’s mates did not extend this courtesy to the poor chap. He was in the toilet for four or five minutes and every thirty seconds or so another friend would come and hurry him along.

“Sam! Sam! How long?”

“Two minutes!”

“You said two minutes five minutes ago.”

However, the best push by far was, “Oi, Sam. Stop shitting and come and chill out and smoke bongs and shit.” If that doesn’t get you out of a toilet, I don’t know what will.

Late on Sunday morning Wagons did as Wagons does, with all the usual trimmings plus a killer rendition of the Christmas carol ‘We Three Kings’, which will feature on the 2009 Christmas episode of Spicks and Specks on ABC1. Jarvis Cocker is one of the guests this year, so it is shaping up to be a night of unmissable low budget music quiz comedy.

The last band we caught was The Middle East, whose Recordings of The Middle East recently won the Unearthed J Award. Undeniably beautiful, it will be interesting to see how the band develops. I saw both Henry Wagons and The Middle Wast open for Bill Callahan in January at the Thornbury Theatre, and both bands have definitely had an excellent year. Since January The Middle East have expanded from a trio to a seven piece band, which brings a new power to their music and much needed competence to their drumming.

After all this, we packed up the tents, I had a free breath test from the good people at TAC’s Vanessa (BAC 0.00), we glided through the T-intersection back onto the Midland Highway with ease due to excellent traffic control and were on the way home.