Splendour In The Grass 2015 @ North Byron Parklands Review

Welcome to the northern NSW Bog Snorkelling Championships. Oh, hang on! Isn’t there a festival going on somewhere around here?

We’ve already been beaten to the 'Splendour in the Mud' moniker but you get the drift. Mud at festivals is de rigueur, but this year’s Splendour (24-26 July) excelled itself and slushophiles were as happy as a pig in, well… mud! Gumboots were an absolute necessity – the pontoon bridge across the ‘moat’ ditch to our campsite failed on the first night (but was quickly repaired!).

Image © Karen Hutt

But the show must go on, and on it did… Revisiting the past can sometimes be dangerous and disappointing, and a substantial risk for festival organisers. But not this time: headliners, the re-emergent Blur, produced as outstanding a show as you’d hope to see on a festival stage, anywhere. And they proved that they can still sing and out-perform many of the younger bands.

Fuelled by high-octane Byron Bay organic doughnuts, Damon Albarn overcame jetlag to leap hyperactively around the stage like a demented thug, which he clearly isn’t! Graham Coxon’s diverse guitar styles and skills brought cheers with each familiar riff, and a slight suspicion that he was working out how to change the songs while he was actually playing them.

Alex James, clearly taking the Bill Wyman approach to bass performance, smirked his way through the set, probably dreaming of cheese but rising to animation when the occasion demanded; and Dave Rowntree bashed away enthusiastically at the drums, all the while looking like he was having the time of his life!

After liberally dousing the photographers and front rows with bottled water, Albarn thrilled the audience with a bold foray in to the heaving crowd at the barrier, which set the frenetic tone for the rest of the performance.

Blur - Image © Karen Hutt

It was all fantastic stuff but the real highlights came in the middle of the set: 'Park Life' is the archetypal Brit-Pop song. Harking back to Small Faces’ ‘Lazy Sunday’, and using much of the same artifice, it’s art-school boys pretending to be Cockneys, but doing it very well. It’s not so much a song as urban poetry at its best. And there’s nothing quite like it when the whole crowd knows the words; they pumped and heaved as one, like a living, turbulent, roiling sea, matching Damon’s energy on-stage, and rising to his challenge to let rip.

And then to top that, there was ‘Song 2’: pure grunge and everyone knows the chorus – even if they didn’t a few seconds before! Blur are the self-styled architects and arch-exponents of Brit-pop, but really their range of musical styles is huge, wild and wide-rangeing, and we were taken from ballads to pure pop to rock and all the way back again in their 90-minute performance.

The band chemistry still works, they are still great performers, and the set successfully showcased old and new work, invigorating and hyping the crowd, many of who were younger than the songs driving them wild. There was no disappointment to be had here!

In between this fantastic finale and the bog snorkelling there were of course a fair few other things well worth noticing. Well-connected Californian musician, songwriter and actor Jenny Lewis entertained the Friday afternoon crowd at the GW McLennan stage with a great performance of indie rock softened occasionally by a country lilt (they probably can’t help it, they are Californian after all!), but it was 'darn good' all the same!

Jenny Lewis - Image © Karen Hutt

Hints of bluegrass gave some of the songs a ballad-like quality. Jenny herself was a crowd-pleaser, confidently strutting the stage in a sharp, white suit.

Former guitarist from The Smiths, Johnny Marr has an impressive bio and his skill as a guitarist is unquestionable. This was ably demonstrated during his set with his four-piece ‘Manchester guitar band’. Marr’s style stays true to his heritage, and in fact he is an integral part of that heritage. His excellent solos and their competent delivery along with his quirky Northern English humour cheered up a mud-spattered Friday evening audience. Just don’t turn up wearing a beard—he hates them!

Death Cab For Cutie - Image © Karen Hutt

Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men played the amphitheatre stage on Friday evening. Genre-busting is one way to carve a niche and OM&M’s sound can perhaps be best described as gothic folk – there are hints of Mumford & Sons as well as Florence And The Machine, but the overall effect is much darker and the sound bigger.

Drums play a huge role, and sometimes they threatened to drown out the rest of the sound produced by the eight musicians on stage! By the end they had the crowd singing along. And then the heavens opened again and any gains made in drying out the deluge of the previous day were literally washed away.

By morning the procession of bleary-eyed campers, doing the stiff legged, mud-sucking-your-gumboot-Zombie walk between campsite and amenities block was firmly re-established.

The Babe Rainbow provided a smooth and very cool start to proceedings early Saturday afternoon with their brand of '60s psychedelia – their retro, funky style and engaging surfer-dude persona won us and everyone else over. Having a singing drummer is not new, but is still pretty groovy, and it fits their laidback image perfectly. Seriously good fun (and cute to boot!).

The Babe Rainbow - Image © Karen Hutt

Liverpool four-piece, indie-rock band Circa Waves have only been playing since 2013 and this is already their second Splendour! Delivered with fresh-faced energy, their set put us in mind of fellow Liverpudlians Cast, which can’t be a bad thing. The cultural significance of ‘T-shirt Weather’ might be somewhat lost on an Australian audience but it’s a great tune nonetheless, and if it’s a sign of things to come, augurs well for the band.

Circa Waves - Image © Karen Hutt

The Church, still going strong after 35 years, played to an enthusiastic and expectant crowd in the GW McLennan stage on Saturday evening. Great musicianship, with a lean and energetic style and a good mix of familiar and new songs lead the way.

However, a significant disappointment to us, and apparently also much of the audience, is Steve Kilbey’s continued refusal to play ‘The Unguarded Moment’. This is an ongoing issue. ‘The Unguarded Moment’ is an Australian classic, a seminal, new-wave rock masterpiece, and it may no longer mean anything to creator Kilbey, but to a generation of Australians who grew up in the '80s, the song has huge meaning and resonance.

The Church - Image © Karen Hutt

Having promised two final songs in the set, and played ‘Under The Milky Way’ as the first, half the audience left as soon as they realised that the last song was not ‘The Unguarded Moment’. This is surely an indicator to Kilbey that it is time to ‘get over it’, because losing half the audience in the last song took the shine off what was an otherwise great set, which showcased the talents of one of Australia’s finest and longest lasting bands.

Sticking with the McLennan stage, Boy & Bear played there later on Saturday evening. They’re a big band of likeable, good-looking guys, who you wouldn’t be afraid to take home to meet your mother! The off-centre drummer position at front of stage was interesting. It changed the dynamic of the band compared to a traditional mid-stage setting, and sat well with their folk-rock sound. The big crowd were certainly pleased with the performance.

Boy & Bear - Image © Karen Hutt

Florence and the Machine headlined Saturday night at the Amphitheatre. A romantic vision in white, wearing yards of flounced and ruched muslin, showing inviting glimpses of bare midriff, Florence floated and skipped around the stage with a tambourine like a woodland sprite.

Florence and the Machine - Image © Karen Hutt

Florence’s trademark soaring vocals have lost none of their power, and with her expressive hands, flamboyant gestures, dramatic poses and balletic leaps, she was reminiscent of a young Kate Bush. This was a huge, energetic performance, and a masterclass in working the audience: “I couldn’t bring my choir from England. Will you be my choir?” she asked. And the audience repaid her faith in both word and deed with a resounding “Yes”.

Splendour Saturday night - Image © Karen Hutt

It didn’t rain on Saturday night! It did it on Sunday morning instead! By the way, just to show you don’t need expensive equipment to make a really great sound, a busker in the mud at the festival entrance ably entertained passers-by with two old tins and a plastic jerry can! Amazing!

Wolf Alice are a four-piece band from London. Ellie Rowsell, her face shyly hidden behind an enigmatic cascade of blonde hair, plays guitar and sings. A pretty, blonde girl with a strong voice fronting a guitar band draws inevitable comparisons with Blondie, and there’s some strength in that observation.

Wolf Alice are moving away from their folksy roots and becoming heavier as they mature, but on stage they’re way better when they slow down and really play their instruments, rather than thrash at them. This is a band with a lot of potential. If they can get it right you can’t help feeling that this is a band who are good fun now, but may well be great in a few years’ time.

Wolf Alice - Image © Karen Hutt

White suit, bow-tie, slicked-back short hair and what sounds very much like a southern drawl: surely this is a man born and raised in the back blocks of Louisiana? But no! Believe it or not he’s actually from Katherine in the Northern Territory. Enter the strange but fantastical time-warp world of CW Stoneking!

There is nothing on earth quite like his blues-jazz fusion, which goes back to the very roots of the blues, before rock & roll was even invented. There’s Stoneking on guitar and vocals, a bassist and a drummer, and two ladies belting out the most amazing backing vocals.

In a world where the globalisation tends to make everything the same, this was a fascinating and welcome festival addition.

However, just because things tend to become the same, doesn’t mean they can’t be good, and The Vaccines showed us why. Yes, they’re another four-piece London indie-rock band (and by the way, on the strength of this year’s Splendour, it’s clear that London is fast becoming the new Manchester from a musical point of view), and yes, they’re an agreeable looking bunch of lads.

But they also punched out a great sound delivered with dynamic energy, and showed us exactly why ‘What Did You Expect From The Vaccines’ was the best-selling debut album of 2011.

And last but certainly not least: Palma Violets. They’ve been seriously overhyped in the past, then accused of not delivering on their potential, then they seem to have almost imploded under the pressure and a heavy touring schedule, before taking time out to regroup.

Palma Violets - Image © Karen Hutt

They are still very young, and they are very, very good – the quality of their performance here had you wondering what they were doing playing second stage on a Saturday afternoon in Byron Bay.

Lanky, sexy bassist Chilli Jesson ricocheted around on stage like a cross between Joe Strummer and Angus Young, in brilliant contrast to the measured delivery and deep powerful voice of Sam Fryer.

Comparisons with The Clash are inescapable, but they have a fuller sound, a sort of post-punk stadium rock feel that had everyone in the tent dancing. If they can hold it together, and they can harness some of the huge energy they deliver on stage into their studio work, they will be headlining within ten years, and filling stadiums in less than twenty! You read it here first folks!

The Dandy Warhols - Image © Karen Hutt