Live Review: Splendour In The Grass, Day Three - North Byron Parklands

I have seen a lot of things happen at festivals over the years.

I’ve seen brawls, mass hugs, near-overdoses, on-stage spews, walk-offs, and, one time, a pretty serious pit whirlpool that was simultaneously one of the most terrifying and amazing things of which I have ever been a part.

But I’ve never seen someone actually scale a main-stage tent all the way to top and start climbing casually over its roof. I’m not saying it’s never happened before – in fact, I’m sure it has – I’m just saying that, until today, I’d never seen it. With hindsight, though, it feels like if there was ever going to be a day that I did, then Splendour Sunday 2014 was going to be it.

Maybe I need to explain. I’ll come back to the tent climber, I promise.

Traditionally, I have always reserved Splendour Sunday for spending a little more time appreciating everything else that the festival has to offer in conjunction with its extensive music program. Splendour is, after all, an arts and music festival, and so it feels like a bit of a disservice to come along and totally ignore that aspect, because it makes up a considerable part of the event experience.

Before bands kicked off at midday, I stopped in at the Tipi Forest to read the wisdom boards, which seem to start out with noble intent and swiftly degenerate into scrawled phone numbers with the added promise of “free pingers”, which seems shady as hell and generally an unadvisable offer to take up. I took a stroll through the Global Village, where a group of people were either learning to be rad at hula-hoop and those twirly stick things or were clear masters already. Nearby, inside a new sanctuary-like structure, another contingent was engaging in a morning yoga session.

Over at the Forum, I stopped by to briefly take in a bit of the Andrew McMillen-curated Honest Conversations About Drugs panel with Scott Owen of The Living End, MC REMi, Kingswood, Greg Fleet, Dr Greta Moon, Dan Mac of Art vs Science and Dominic Knight, which was fascinating and all, but my the Food Hall was beckoning, and I’m only human.

It seems a good time here to mention that, in my travels today, I felt I finally understood what Splendour was going for in choosing this event site. When the weather was as pristine as it was this weekend, and the festival was laid out as smartly as it was this time around (much better than last year), it really, truly works.

If you get friendly with strangers on Friday, the conversation is always about what they want to see, or happen, or do. By Sunday, they’ve seen it. It’s happened. They’ve done it. And that’s what you want to hear about.

I’ve also found that Sunday is usually the best day of the festival to talk to your fellow punters. Not to make friends – you need to get in earlier to do that – just to briefly shoot the breeze with a stranger as you traverse a dusty road to the next stage, mill around a bar, or wait in the pit for a band to start.

If you get friendly with strangers on Friday, the conversation is always about what they want to see, or happen, or do. By Sunday, they’ve seen it. It’s happened. They’ve done it. And that’s what you want to hear about.

For example, I met the triple j “Mayor” of Splendour – a bearded man in an oversize, surprisingly well crafted, Bender costume feat. crown and cloak – and the guy who almost helped him casually walk on to the Amphitheatre stage during Violent Soho’s set last night simply by moving in front of him like a shepherding guard, speaking meaningless instructions into an imaginary microphone in his jacket collar. They were apparently within spitting distance of making it before a real security guard intervened.

As well, there’s the generally brilliant… weirdness that permeates the air on Splendour Sunday, a term I (to my knowledge and refusal to Google it) coined and minted in the third paragraph, when everyone who isn’t a one-day pass-holder (and even then, some of them, too) is in the dying stages of a weekend-long bender of music and food and culture and drugs and all the alcohol ever – too messed up to still be partying, and too messed up to realise it.

So it was that, while watching fresh-to-death UK upstarts Jungle, as one does, I saw two dudes’ nekkid butts, as one tends not to do. When I arrived at the Mix-Up Tent, things were pretty packed already, and after a brief journey through the thick of the crowd, I ended up about halfway back, standing on the right edge of the tent. This is an important detail, because it turned out to be the goddamn place to be.

In front of me, one guy got on another’s shoulders, using one of the tent’s poles for added support. Not long after that, a third bro came along and squatted under them and lifted the both of them on his shoulders, once again with all three supporting the extra weight on the pole.

But, in the process of shifting the totem from a two-man to a three-man set-up, the top tier’s pants came off – not the whole way off, but suddenly a very large group of people were being directly mooned by a very visible arse several feet above us. Giggles and phone cameras were busted out. It was, after all, a very visible arse several feet above us.

And then it got better.

Out of the sea of people to my left, from among the tent crowd, a lone man – nay, a hero – sauntered past the totem pole and, without missing a beat, mercilessly dacked the guy in the middle and kept on walking, disappearing into the afternoon. There were now two butts directly in my eye line, which is exactly two more than I had expected to see today. The mortified middleman made an immediate scramble to dismantle the totem and get his pants back up (pic below; warning – butt), they dispersed, and then I remembered I was watching a band.

Out of the sea of people to my left, from among the tent crowd, a lone man – nay, a hero – sauntered past the totem pole and, without missing a beat, mercilessly dacked the guy in the middle and kept on walking, disappearing into the afternoon.

Not for long, though. About ten minutes later, my eye was drawn once more to a commotion in front of where I was, on the outside of the tent. Seeing a see of faces all looking skyward, I followed suit just in time to see a pair of muscular legs go up onto the roof of the big top. Everyone who had witnessed it and could do so craned their neck in one direction or the other – either further back, to get a better view of him up there, or inside, to see the indents of his hands and feet on the interior roof surface as he made his way to the summit.

Something must have spooked him, though, because pretty swiftly after that, we could see the indent of his backside hit the tent as he gingerly slid the fuck off the roof, grabbed one of the tent support cables like a freaking commando (dude was ripped, by the way) and effortlessly swung his way down to the ground as people stepped back to give him room to complete his (incredibly stupid but stupidly incredible) stunt while a round of applause and cheers broke out in the clear middle of a song, and everyone simultaneously thought, “oh, shit, that’s right – we were watching Jungle”.

That’s Splendour Sunday in a nutshell. Everyone struggles valiantly on to the finish line in one last desperate grasp at extending the festival dream before the reality of its end forces you off the top of the tent and back down to earth, however gracefully — or otherwise — you manage it.