Summer Festival Guide: The Classics
They're classics for a damn good reason.
Every year it seems like the festival list gets bigger, the line-ups more star-studded and the FOMO more all-consuming. Like most of life's problems, the solution is knowledge. Achieving the perfect summer season takes diligent research. You gotta weigh the pros and face the cons. Sharpen pencils. Make a graph. But the sun's out, and there's tins to be crack — so maybe skip all that and just read our handy guide instead. Here's our pick of the classic festivals you should be visiting…
Tamworth Country Music Festival have compartmentalised their ticketing for their 46th year, since there aren't too many people capable of getting out to 2,800 events over ten days (it's literally the largest festival in the southern hemisphere). Options include the free Toyota Park Concert series, The Toyota Golden Guitar Awards and more country music than you could possibly hoot and holler at. Apart from headline drawcards Troy Cassar-Daley, Lee Kernaghan, The McClymonts, Sara Storer, Adam Eckersley Band and John Williamson, there are also buzz acts like Hurricane Fall, Cruisin' Deuces and Fanny Lumsden to check out. Plus, Toyota Star Maker regularly brings Australia's best and brightest up-and-comers out of the woodwork.
It's almost been around as long as Tamworth Country Music Festival, Port Fairy Folk Festival is a BYO-chair festival (yep, there's specific seated sections in the performance areas and punters even use bike locks to chain their chairs to fences overnight to save having to carry them back and forth). This festival takes over the entire coastal town for its 42nd year in 2018. You'll see bands performing on flatbed trucks, in churches and halls, and there's free entertainment on Fiddlers' Green and the Railway Stage. There's an Irish-themed Shebeen tent where separate 'shopfronts' such as Scruffy Duffys also serve snacks including Savoy crackers, cheese cubes and sliced cabana on a paper plate. And a lollie trolley circulates for all your sugar-rush needs. Here's a taste of the sweet line-up: Steve Poltz, Mental As Anything, Jack Broadbent, Breabach, Black Sorrows and Tex, Don & Charlie.
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Further up the east coast and held in Amamoor Creek State Forest, Gympie Music Muster sounds like a hoot and we've heard the punters go to a great deal of effort when setting up their campsites, with regulars aiming to set up in exactly the same spot year after year and sometimes even arriving weeks before the event in order to do so. Next year will be the 37th Gympie Music Muster and gone are the days of making do with showers that were actually jam tins with holes punched into them. It's now a four-day country music festival and from all the pictures we've checked out you'd stand out like dog's balls if you didn't wear a hat. Once you go, you're hooked we've been told.
still looking for tips for the summer season? we've got the guides for you…
Another Queensland festival highlight, Woodford Folk Festival is heading into its 31st year and Woodfordia, the festival's location, hosted Splendour In The Grass for two years so we can attest it is a magnificent site. Held over six days and six nights over New Year, Woodford Folk Festival boasts a crazy amount of performance spaces to choose from (35 in total) so you'll be spoilt for choice. As well as a kickass musical line-up including The East Pointers, Kate Miller-Heidke, Sampa The Great, Pow! Negro, John Butler and The Babe Rainbow, there are also heaps of circus/cabaret acts plus activities and workshops galore to keep the kids occupied. We checked out the sizzle reel and The Fire Event Closing Ceremony looks spectacular beyond belief!
It's Bluesfest's 29th year in existence! This whopping five-day festival billed as "Australia's Premier Music Festival" always boasts a line-up with off-tap wow factor and this year is no exception. Lionel Richie, Robert Plant, Seal, The New Power Generation, Jackson Browne, Gomez, Chic feat Nile Rodgers and our very own Tash Sultana - we can't even! Punters return to this festival, which takes place just north of Byron Bay at Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm over the Easter weekend, year after year and it's fun for the whole family. Boomerang Festival, an "indigenous festival for all Australians", is also held within Bluesfest. "This is one of the world class, great festivals of all time!" Bonnie Raitt is quoted as saying (on the festival's website). From those lucky enough to have been in attendance, we hear Bluesfest's a life-changing experience.
A deadset highlight on the annual festival calendar with its celebrated "no dickheads" policy, Meredith Music Festival's subscriber ballot always becomes a talking point as punters scramble to get their hands on a ticket. And with a festival site called Supernatural Amphitheatre it's pretty bloody easy to see why. Held on the Nolan family farm, this will be the first Meredith Music Festival since Jack Nolan sadly passed in February this year. The festival turns 27 in 2017 and we can't wait to prep our custom doof sticks and pack our trippy outfits. We're also looking forward to pulling shapes to the likes of Todd Terje, ESG, Chk Chk Chk, Warpaint, Aldous Harding (probably more swaying in awe, actually), RVG and Amyl & The Sniffers. It's also high time you start training for the Meredith Gift, which is a massive nudie-run race, but The Golden Jocks trophy actually belongs in our cabinet this year.
Now a multi-state touring festival, Falls Festival is celebrating 25 years of creating life memories while celebrating New Year in 2017/2018. Our noodles smoke when we think about the organisation that goes into coordinating schedules and booking all of the bands' flights and accommodation as they fly up and down the east coast to perform at all four events. You know how some hangovers just won't budge unless you plunge head first into the ocean? Well, the good news is that two Falls Festival sites (Marion Bay and Fremantle) are a short stroll from the beach while there are regular shuttle buses in and out of town, where there are beaches, from the other two locations (Lorne and Byron Bay). Flume and Glass Animals are exclusive to Falls Festival (no sideshows) so if you wanna catch those acts you'll have to snap up tickets to Marion Bay or Fremantle, 'cause Lorne and Byron Bay are already sold out.
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