No Sleep Til Wee Waa: They Came For The Robots

On Friday we gave you guys the full road trip to Wee Waa experience courtesy of our man Dave Dri, who was on his merry way to the country town for the Daft Punk Random Access Memories launch party.

In between the Wee Waa Showgirl contest, motorbike shows, rides, dancing and trying to keep warm, Dave got his Daft Punk on in the most random, not so accessible but very memorable way. Here's how it went down...

I look like a robot in my black helmet and motorbike gear, but the bitter cold reminds me that I'm only human after all. It's 620kms from my apartment in Brisbane, Queensland, to the town of Wee Waa, middle of nowhere. It's pre-dawn, dark, and I've just ingested so much coffee that I can see through the space-time continuum. I see a lot of road ahead. With a push of one button I start my motorbike, and with another I start my riding playlist; my engine roaring to life in time with The Chemical Brothers' Escape Velocity as an appropriate start for the very random adventure ahead.

Did I mention the cold? My handlebars have heated grips, keeping my hands at boiling point while the rest of me freezes along the stretch of highway between Brisbane and Ipswich. I soon name it “Enemy Alley”, as the dawn-shift convoy of swerve'n'speed utes reenact the Light Cycle scenes from TRON. It's too cold to battle energy drink addicts at 4am, so I set my mind for Warwick and lock into a steady rhythm, slowly pulling the sun up in my rear-vision mirrors behind me.

At the first fuel stop I throw my thermals on under my riding pants. If the city was uncomfortably chill, the plains beyond Yamanto are punishing to ride in. A curious local comes up to chat, ignoring my accent and assuming I'm from a country suitably European. He asks me where I'm going, and then proceeds to pretend I said something different, giving me tips to Birdsville, while informing me that I should have more aggressive offroad tyres on the BMW 650 GS that will be chewing up black-top highway and back roads on this interstate adventure South. I don't try to correct him; it's too early and he seems to be enjoying himself. As I pull out, he responds to my “have a good day mate” with “enjoy your stay in Australia”.

Everything 'Punk'...

The sun rises enough for me to pull over and take some photos of the misty plains beyond Boonah. In reality I drop a face scarf while pulling sunglasses out of my jacket, so use the stop as a chance for a quick snap or two. Soon enough I'm back angling up into the Main Range, an impossibly beautiful sight in the golden early-dawn light, appreciated between shivers and the mantra of “Warwick, warwick, warwick”.

But I won't lie. It's a let down. Somehow Warwick is mistier and colder than that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke climbs into the stomach of a Tauntaun. Except in my case I climb into Warwick's Famous Pie Shop. I'm not so sure that the pies are part of the namesake fame, or if the store itself was the scene of a gangland shootout, a major historic milestone, or just the discovery of the frost-bitten body of a journalist wrapped around a motorbike in the parking lot.

With Warwick thankfully in my rear view, I bustle to Inglewood, where I ascertain without any doubt that Daft Punk are not in fact playing in their house. I buy a pack of gum from a sales attendant in a local store that reminds me of a startled chicken; hair long on the sides and spiky on the top, dyed all kinds of crazy colour and with nails to match. Not for the first time I wonder where country hairdressers even get these ideas. She gives me a wink while overcharging me and makes a comment about inventive ways to get warm. I get the fuck out of Inglewood.

In fact, I get the hell out of everywhere, chewing up the miles as my playlist struggles to match the epic eight hours or pure riding time anticipated. My bike is made for a mix of roads, dirt, and touring, so I'm comfortable in between panniers full of camera gear, packed despite not having any idea exactly what on earth this gig is going to be like. Having heard the album care of the iTunes stream prior to the otherwise global launch in Wee Waa, I know the tracks now, but that's it. Will there be a Tupac-esque hologram? Will the robots maybe, just maybe, despite all accounts to the contrary, make an appearance? Will aliens appear from space, the planets align, Atlantis rise from the depths, or Justice ever release another good album? And where the hell am I? Is this worth being so damn cold for so damn long?

Montage time. Goondiwindi, Boggabilla and Moree. A roadtrain I break all kinds of road rules to get around. A Kombi van full of teenagers that give me a nod and wave a spliff at me. A service station attendant that tells me 600KMs is “a long way to fucken ride, eh?”. A nap on top of a picnic table by the side of the road. A minibus full of impossibly cool looking kids, taking photos of me on their iPhones and looking infuriatingly warm while tapping away on whatever social media is helping them kill the hours in transit. Tweet, hashtag, I'm getting pretty tired now, are we there yet?

What you do prior to losing your shit on the dancefloor.

Somewhere past Moree (where the hell is Moree?) I see a familiar bike on the side of the road. A red Cagiva belonging to a friend I rode a few thousand KMs with literally hours after my bike was first unpacked from a German crate in 2012. We nod the secret motorbike greeting and keep riding. Let's just get there. A few other cars seem to be pulling in behind us as we cruise past the unmarked and hungry police cars on the final stretch from Narra-middle-of-nowhere-bri and Wee Waa. The ride exhaustion turning into elation after a full day in the saddle, as the unofficial convey of foreigners to this friendly township spill out amongst the vanguard already established. Well-established, if the mood in the campground is anything to go by. It feels good to peel off the bike, pulling out earplugs almost ironically playing LCD Soundsystem's Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.

I'm here but I don't know where. I know why but not what it's going to look like. I know the album but not what impact it will have on either the fanbase that have driven hundreds of kilometres to hear it, or the local population that is more in-tune to ABC National than Interstallar 5555. Looking to the sky, I see giant pillars of lights aimed like a pyramid beam into space. I for-go the customary post-ride beer, grab my camera bag, and head with the milling crowd towards the final gate between us and Random Access Memories. I know I should be excited, but I'm also a little tired and hungry, and keep on coming back to a simple question. Are the pies in Wee Waa going to be better than Warwick?

I'm through the gate! I'm through the gate! It's time for... what exactly? After a day of 650KMs on the back of a motorbike, I'm in the remote New South Wales town of Wee Waa for the global launch party for Daft Punk's new album, Random Access Memories.

I'm surrounded by a curious mix of even more curious locals and expectant visitors. With the sun up, it's easy to forget that this is a mass-scale media event and not just the yearly show for a friendly rural Australian town. My schedule was to begin with the dog high jump, if only to see if it matches what I'm imagining, but I'm distracted by the showbag alleys. My pick is the wonderfully title “Guns on the run”, where a group of city kids are losing their minds at the available range of projectile-firing toy guns. Welcome to the country, city slickers.

The real news of the day - the winners/runners up of the Wee Waa Showgirl contest!

Having just pulled through a full day on a bike myself, I weave through the molasses-paced crowd to catch the motorbike show, cut short “due to incident” as we would say in the city. Or “he's rooted”, as one local points out, ambulance peeling away to a scattering of well-wishing applause. I touch wood and turn my attention to the Senator's speech that officially opens the night's proceedings (and proceeds into the announcement of the winner of the all-important Wee Waa Showgirl).

While we wait (with absolutely no idea what to expect), I'm all-but guilt tripped into eating handfuls of sausage rolls by expectant looking local teenagers tasked with waiting duties for the evening. Nice kids, and even better food. It's impossible not to begin to feel a sense of the community that underpins the interelated lives of Wee Waa's 2000-odd population. But who exactly are they?

Pronounced “Wee War”, the town is built around cotton farming and, it seems, just being nice. And enterprising. A stall outside of the main stage showcases the limited-edition Random Access Memory albums with a custom Wee Waa cover, as well as an impressive range of bespoke-printed t-shirts, stubbie coolers, and anything else the town's local tradesman could conceive of plying to the horde of cashed-up and expectant visitors.

While this is still a fully-fledged country show, it's impossible not to see Daft Punk's (marketing team's) influence everywhere you turn. Even in the last bastion of country pride, the arts and crafts pavillion, the posters, masks and makeshift sculptures dominate the prevailing theme. To quote John, a local; “Robots, mate. The kids are here for the robots.”

Future Daft Punk member in the making...

But also for the showgirl competition. Nationals Senator Fiona Nash opens the show with a natural and comfortable charm, but the biggest smiles on stage are from the eager contestants for Wee Waa Showgirl's prestigious first prize. Keeping in mind that it's cold, and that we're in the country rather than the Gold Coast, and it's not too surprising (or disappointing) to see a row of polite young ladies up on the flatbed cotton truck acting as a presentation stage. Unfortunately, the previous round of the contest took place in weeks prior, leaving tonight as only the announcement. No talent show, or swimsuits, but a reminder from the PA that “you should feel free to go up and introduce yourself to the girls”. So I get a few photos as some eager young visitors get involved, and then get ready for the fireworks that will begin the countdown. To... what?

The question is evident in the expectant energy of the 1800-odd party people assembled on a giant bespoke danceflood set amid a ring of lighting towers that are currently beaming directly into the heavens. Is it a landing pad for the disco-loving French robots? Is there any truth to the rumour going around the visiting journalists that a VIP charter plane has landed in the late afternoon? According to a local, “nah mate, that's bullshit. Just more of you lot.”

No robots, maybe, but a fireworks show that belies Wee Waa's otherwise little population, effectively doubled overnight to bask under the searchlights and a lengthy run of explosions in the sky. I start to notice lag times as I attempt to tweet on theMusic.com.au's Twitter feed, and I see at any given time a barrage of mobile phones in near-constant use by the assembled audience. It occurs to me; is this 70's inspired giant disco dancefloor the site for a Close Encounters of the Third Kind contact, or a brilliant mechanism to beam not inward, but outward, from an audience of social-connected digital natives as early adopters of an incredibly well-executed marketing campaign?

Before working out an answer, it begins. By now, the introductory track Give Life Back To Music is familiar to most of the fans, and this giant disco dancefloor begins to move in time to what some early reviewers have called “exceptional elevator music”. To these fans and locals, the debates and discussions onand offline are for later. For now it's new and it's exciting and it's cold. It's far easier to dance than to think, although there's always a wall of mobile phone screens wherever you peer through the thick crowd.

As The Game Of Love begins to play, I move through the glowing dancefloor, all but entirely obscured by a capacity of shuffling feet and dancing bodies, and then begin to run to the scissor lift as I remembered that Giorgio by Moroder is the following track. I want to get airborne before the album highlight smashes into it's incredible crescendo of cool. This is, after all, the producer that inspired even stadium techno pioneers Underworld, where Donna Summer's I Feel Love begat their absolute epic, King of Snake.

As the lift rises into the sky, the full effect of this highlight track becomes evident. I sneak out a tweet as the phone network begins to crumble. I wonder how many times this summer I'm going to hear Giorgio's vocal monologue sampled in every damn festival set or obvious bootleg, but it's impossible to be cynical. It didn't take the birds-eye view to know that there's a fully fledged party here.

Time to party and get lucky!

By the time Pharell's familiar falsetto instructs us to Lose Yourself to Dance, the dancefloor dynamics have shifted enough for the fringes to be seen to be self-consciously asking themselves “is this it?” and “are we having fun yet?” Meanwhile, further into the crowd, it's just full-time party time. If Touch brings things down a notch, leading single Get Lucky picks it back up again, with even the newer country converts to electronica in familiar territory here. Not for the first time do I wonder what the more conservative of the old locals think of the lyrics.

The inescapable groove gives me the ideal time to get back amongst the crowd, and learn just who the hell comes all this way for what should amount only to a group attending what is already available as an iTunes stream. Which is a question easier to ask in isolation, rather than amid a few thousand incredibly happy people in an incredibly friendly town. It's definitely random, Wee Waa is not particularly accessible, but it's a pretty unique memory for those in attendance. But is a game of album title wordplay enough to describe what is still a very curious choice of events? It would be as easy to go overboard in the moment as it is to snipe from a keyboard at home, but it occurs quickly that that's hardly the point.

Thousands of people road-tripping to have a genuinely good time in an almost artfully abstract location amounts to a very unique experience. The absence of convenience means an absence of chin-strokers, and the abundance of genuinely friendly locals up for the novelty of it all adds another unique element. It's pretty much exactly what it is, and nothing more. At least, until the album closing Contact takes a sledgehammer to the collective minds on the dancefloor, resulting in a last-ditch dancefloor frenzy that leads to security closing off at least one small section of staging. I'm again up in the sky, shooting and filming down and collecting my own random memories. From this birds-eye view I can appreciate the design of the incredible stage and surrounding audio rig, spinning into an overwhelming spiral of light and smoke as Contact closes out the album on another high.

It's done, the countdown has counted down and the launchpad for Daft Punk's newest album has officially launched Random Access Memories into the world. What critics and fans will think of it over time is to be decided, but all around me is a genuine party. There's “shirtless guy”, “bad breakdancing kid”, “dubious double-dropper” and about a billion onesies and novelty hats (including a few share of DIY Daft Punk outfits in various states of disorderly and disrepair). With the album done, a DJ set kicks in, and the familiar sound of Da Funk's drum breaks earns a loud cheer from the crowd. With just a few rungs to climb out of the descended viewing platform, I go and get amongst it. After all, we're up all night...

Check out all the snaps from Wee Waa...