Meredith Music Festival: Sunday 10 December 2006

After an ice coffee and a egg tortilla stuffed with hot yummy bacon, our posse gathers at the Pink Flamingo for one last hurrah. I’m the only one with the gall to get stuck into the Bloody Merediths, but why, they’re bloody good dammit (though not as good as last years). TNT (Tex N Tim, geddit, Orville?) are basically two megalomaniacs out to have a good time. They’re on stage with their shirts unbuttoned all the way grinning behind mirrored sunglasses. I remove my mirrored sunglasses and I’m like, staring into the lenses, ‘how could you do this?’ The act’s profoundly complacent, worthwhile only when it degenerates into corn like these kernels from Tex Perkins: “Fridays for funerals/Saturdays for brides/ I guess that leaves Sundays ARE MINE.” (CAPS indicate GROWL). “On weekends I perform miracles/ I turn whole paychecks INTO WINE.” With this tune firmly lodged in Toby's brain, he's dangerously funny, but mostly it’s Snoozefest ‘06, an invaluable addition to the Sunday lineup. “Sounds like ten minutes went into the songwriting process,” snorts De Campo. Most everyone goes home.

Before The Gift is run, Edan runs things. It’s a rap attack. “This goes out to all the heartbreaking ladies out there, what you do to us guys is fucked up,” he says over a sample of ‘Femme Fatale’. He then gets into a rhyme duel with his partner in crime and it’s glorious. He uses some obscure 60s soul samples, plays a little guitar, bends noise on a theremin, toots a kazoo and manipulates the bass by remote control. He closes the set with a short speech. “I have self-confidence and sensitivity, I am so secure I can take it out on some pretty shit,” he says. He then proceeds to play the biggest, noisiest, wildest, party track of the day.

The reason we’re still here is not to see fifty guys run naked through the dirt. Honest. Sometimes they trip up and sever their equipment. It’s difficult to watch. There are four heats. De Campo films three of them. “For posterity,” she asserts (probably would have done a fourth but the battery died).


Like the Sand Pebbles kicking it off, Spencer P. Jones and the Escape Committee took us out in style. They rubbed us raw! Now that’s what I call music!

Final thought: the toilet situation was totally fine this year. I really can’t tell you why. Perhaps a lot people were tormented by previous experience and became too scared and abstained. Bought a bottle of prune juice when they got back to Melbourne or wherever they called from.