I saw The Vines on their first UK tour at ULU in April 2002 (for bragging rights it was a shame I didn’t go see them a month earlier at the Camden Barfly…) and watched a really boring show in amongst an mostly arms-folded, unexcited crowd who were not being convinced that they were worth the column inches they were garnering in the UK music press, even less so after their tepid cover of ‘Ms Jackson’. Roll on six and half years and other than the fact that too many Australian festival promoters seem to think that they are deserving of high billing and they’re playing to a larger crowd, nothing much has changed. Take the spirit and passion from rock ‘n’ roll and you’re left with The Vines; predictable and pointless rock by numbers. The NME’s apology was long overdue… 4 albums and seven years down the track, they still aren’t as good as Brisbane’s Violent Soho.
It was a hard enough job photographing whirling dervish, Tahita Bulmer in daylight when New Young Pony Club played at V Festival. It is near impossible when they’re playing in a tent at night with low lighting, what lighting there is is red, and there’s an abundance of smoke. Most of the three songs allocation is spent hoping that she’ll stop still for a second or two so that my camera can focus. The other downside with energetic performers playing in the dark is that you spend so much of your time trying to photograph them you don’t get any of the rest of the band (although they were mostly lurking in the dark as well, a shame as the drummer and keyboard player are quite photogenic young ladies…)
Sigur Ros were another of the ‘know the name, heard about them, never heard them’ bands, which is probably something of a music fan faux pas in the modern world when a significant chunk of the recorded musical history of the world is available at your fingertips every time you sit at a computer. And largely for free if you don’t have any morals concerning downloading for free… When you see nothing but superlative plaudits for a band you end up with really high expectations, but I find them disappointing based on my expectations. Instead of the usual 3 song allocation we are given songs 2 and 3 to photograph in. Listening to the 1st song from the very side of the photo pit it does sound immense, and the use of violin bows on guitars make it look like it’s going to be a good photographic experience. But when we allowed to move into the front of the stage the violin bow disappears and the second song just doesn’t have the power of the first song. The lighting is very low and the stage very cluttered, making photographing tricky. The two songs seemed to be fairly short, although I’m not sure if it was just 2 parts of the same song. Either way it’s not really happening for me musically or photographically, so I duck out of the pit. Walking around the back of the Supertop tent towards the Mix Up tent the overall view is more impressive, and you get a much better sense of the stage set-up as opposed to the limited view you get from the photo pit with its very high stage. The reviews I have seen of their Splendour set and the shows they played in Sydney and Melbourne have been nothing but overwhelming acclaim and so I can’t help but feel that I’m missing out on something really special here, which is a source of real frustration.
Over in the Mix Up tent the final act for the weekend is The Presets. We get there with plenty of time to spare so I spend a bit of time taking a few photos of the crowd.
Having first seen The Presets at The Hopetoun in December 2004 (supported by Expatriate) when I was living in Sydney, they are a band that I always enjoy seeing play live. Live they are a much better prospect than on CD, with their recently released album ‘Apocalypso’ being a real disappointment to me, with so many of the songs on it seeming half-baked ideas that needed a lot more work on them to properly realise them as songs.
Things have changed a fair bit for them in those 3½ years. Back then they looked like this:
Now, with all the worldwide success, Julian can afford to buy really nasty pink fluoro jackets like this.
After the first three songs we’ve got no chance of getting out of the photo pit through the crowd, so we end up being escorted through the back of the tent and past the proper, chandelier-adorned, VIP tent.
One band to go and its Wolfmother. You can only assume that when they were booked as the headline act there was some assumption by the festival’s organisers that they might have some new songs to play or, heavens forbid, a whole new album to promote. Boy, did they get that wrong…
Despite playing some new songs when they played at the closing night of the Andy Warhol exhibition at GoMA they manage to play just about the same set, in the same order as they’d been playing for most of the last 4 years, with nothing new on offer this time.
Whilst their set probably isn’t as ragged as the GoMA set was, the main difference between their 2008 Splendour set and previous festival sets that I’ve seen them at is the total lack of chemistry between the 3 band members and the absence of any real sense of joy at playing a large show emanating from the stage. Seeing them up close from the photo pit it’s no surprise that the band’s split is announced a few days later and even less of surprise when it turns out that they split prior to the festival and only reconvened for one last time to play. Whilst they didn’t sink to the levels that The Stone Roses sank to when I saw their last gig at Reading in 1996 (nothing could be that bad…), and whilst they are a band that consistently failed to impress me, it is a set, like the Stone Roses Show at Reading, that will probably be talked about for some time to come in a combination of hushed voices and “I was there at the bitter end’ bragging rights from those that witnessed their final show. Final until the big money reunion in a few years time that is. Remember them as they were…
It’s been a long day of a long weekend so we don’t stick around to see the rest of their set after we get out of the photo pit. It’s straight back to Ballina, where the day’s photos are downloaded and the alarm is again set for 6am for pre-deadline editing…
Plenty of Sunday Splendour photos at Yahoo Music.
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