What We Learnt At Splendour 2016 Day Three
"The day is also routinely one of the event’s most enjoyable."
I always love the last day of Splendour.
OK, there was that one year that I woke up and my tent was totally surrounded by a mini-moat that had formed overnight, and another time when I stubbed my toe really badly on the way to watch Holly Throsby back in, like, 2009, I want to say? So both of those were kind of shit. But other than that.
It always seems like it should be the hardest day to get through, given the exuberance and exhaustion of the past few days’ experiences, but it’s not; on the contrary, it’s actually one of the easiest, or at least most easy-going. The festival’s people, at this stage, are usually operating on reserve power, storing whatever energy they have left for the remaining bands on the bill for whom they want to totally cut loose while keeping things pretty sedate for the rest of the time. As a result, the day is also routinely one of the event’s most enjoyable.
This proves true again for me in 2016, with Day 3 starting off in fittingly breezy style, given the light wind and notably cooler temperature today, only adding to the overall comfort and allure of the atmosphere in the grounds. We check out some of the day’s first acts – Jess Kent is whipping up a frenzied storm at the Mix Up Stage, playing to an impressively large crowd given how deep in to the fest and how early in the day we are. After a spell, we sprint across to catch what we can of the truly excellent Gold Class at the GW McLennan Stage, where we enjoy a brief exchange with a delightfully sauced gentleman who asks us about the band before telling us he’d just been wandering past before being drawn in by the commanding vocals of frontman Adam Curley.
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We leave the GW tent thoroughly sated – it’s barely lunchtime – so spend a little while exploring the grounds on the way to our next act. In the Global Village – a world unto its own, this entire weekend – several people are unsuccessfully having a go at slackline-walking while the nearby World Stage emanates its appropriately earthy sounds, while at the Forum, Dr Karl has amassed such a sizeable audience to his Splendour session that onlookers don’t even fit in the tent. Splendour In The Craft, too, is bustling, with Brisbane’s Southside Tea Room (Morningside represent!) doing a booming trade in ginger-and-limeade while the adjacent bus-cum-beauty salon touches up a rotating cast of punters.
We can’t dally for too long, though, because the Melbourne Ska Orchestra is about to start their set at the Amphitheatre. Before we get there, I see a friend and tell her that I am going to see the MSO; she scoffs because they have the word ‘ska’ in their name, but the joke’s on her, because this set is fucking unbelievable amounts of fun. Bandleader Nicky Bomba is a national treasure and consummate showman, and his gargantuan ensemble is an insanely entertaining group of performers. There’s no too-cool-for-everything pretense here; just super-dorky, eminently loveable musicians and their impossibly positive vibes. How can you not love that?
An hour with the MSO proves thoroughly exhausting (in the best way possible), so we grab a bite to eat and head over to see what’s happening with Urthboy at the Mix Up tent. As it turns out, it’s a wise choice, not only because his set is genuinely excellent, canvassing topics from the sentimental to the political, but it also proves star-studded: both Kira Puru and Bertie Blackman make appearances during his set, ultimately returning to the stage alongside Joyride and Hermitude for a massive cover of Meg Mac’s Roll Up Your Sleevesto close out the set. Also, over the past three days, I have become acutely aware of the inordinate number of small children at this year’s Splendour – and I’m not the only one who has said as much. Yes, Little Splendour has been a thing for a while, but it genuinely feels like there are more littlies getting about this year, which is pure and sweet but also tremendously annoying (those baby/toddler wagons are a blessing for parents, I’m sure, but take up a lot of space, which is already kind of going at a premium). Additionally, a frightening number of them don’t have earmuffs, which is honestly just irresponsible, he says after three days of surviving on basically donuts and coffee.
It also proves a frequently inappropriate environment for kids; for just one example, on our way across to the Amphitheatre to watch a bit of City Calm Down, we spy a bizarre scene unfolding near the fake Amish people’s fake Amish barn, where a wooden sign advertises “SPANKING” and a steady flow of people keep taking a nearby group of players up on their offer to literally be tied to a fence, have their pants pulled down and have their ass paddled in front of whichever onlookers happened to be in the vicinity. Fair play if you’re into it, but after a couple of people underwent the process I started to feel a bit like a creep and forced myself to move on. It wouldn’t be the last I’d see of the Amish performers, though, as they would later march through the grounds in a mini-parade, waving chequered flags and playing banjos and carrying that “SPANKING” sign and I guess I’m just trying to say that, even after all these years, this feature of the festival still makes absolutely no goddamn sense to me and I’d be hugely appreciative if someone could explain it to me because at this stage I’m just starting to feel dense for not getting it.
What I do get is the music side of things, so I decide to return to that territory by heading to see how stalwart Brisbane indie kids The Jungle Giants are doing these days. As it turns out, the answer is “exceedingly well”, as they play to an utterly jammed tent at the GW McLennan Stage. Also completely, dangerously overflowing is Golden Features, at the Mix Up Stage, where people are standing on bins (booo), climbing poles, ducking under the tent's sides and generally just falling all over each other in order to get the best possible vantage point from which to get their groove on – not that there’s really the room to do so. Mild panic sets in and it proves too hectic to endure, so we leave and suddenly find ourselves outside the Tent Of Miracles, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is the festival’s unofficial hub of total fucking weirdness. I kind of love it, except that guy last year who was DJing dressed as a racist terrorist stereotype. That was in objectively poor taste – but I thankfully don’t see anything of the sort this year.
We make our way back to The Amphitheatre for a hillside sit and a bit of a serenade from Boy & Bear, who – despite whatever accusations of being the musical equivalent of beige you want to throw at them – a) still draw the numbers in a big way, and b) are really quite pleasant, and certainly undemanding on the mind, body or ears. It’s a good call, and leaves us feeling regenerated enough to head back out into the larger mass of the festival. We pass The Preatures’ set on the way to and from grabbing dinner, their crowd having noticeably grown in the time between our passing by to the point that, just like at Golden Features, people are having to climb on things to be able to see anything as punters flock in to farewell guitarist/vocalist Gideon Benson, who is playing his last show with the band. Although I am mildly panicked by the mass around me, it’s an inescapably heartwarming vibe.
I ride those emanations all the way back to the Mix Up Stage to await my final act of the day – and the band I’ve been waiting for all festival – Sigur Ros. The Icelandic post-rockers do not disappoint in the slightest, offering up a transcendent display of dynamic-fuelled musicianship from which I can’t bear to pull myself away, even as I catch wind of the growing hysteria over at the Amphitheatre for Flume. Yes, the set almost puts me to sleep – this really should have been on the first night, so I could have enjoyed it when I still had the will to live – but Jesus, it’s beautiful, and I’m really more a substance-over-style kind of person anyway, so I muster the energy to stay with them right down to the dying gasp of their last note.
After an hour-and-a-quarter of having my mind blown square out the back of my skull by the band in front of me, I practically float in a dreamlike state back to my campsite, marvelling at the fact that, once again, even in its 16th year, Splendour In The Grass has managed to provide an unforgettable experience for everyone who has passed through its gates, catering to so many different groups of people from countless walks of life possessed of uncountable tastes and opinions and ideas and histories – and yet, somehow, always managing to feel like one giant family reunion. At the start of this year’s festival, I actually had the audacity to think that I might take next year off. After the experience I just had these past few days, I honestly don’t know that I could bear to.
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