Sunday 8 July 2007

Live Earth - what a crock

I hope Live Earth crashed and burned (and release millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere in the process).

I am so over these stupidly large outdoor concerts for one cause or another. I go to see a band because I want to drink beer and listen to really loud music that I like. I spotted a poster today that told me that Magic Dirt will be playing at the Annandale later this month. How I'd like to go to that. That's my idea of seeing a band - a small, crowded pub, with pub beer prices and the band so close, you can be sweated on by the lead singer if you feel like it.

The last outdoor show that I really enjoyed would have to be the debacle out at Eastern Creek in around 1995. I can't remember the name of the tour, but it was billed as a competitor to the Big Day Out, and it just failed. It toured all the major cities, but it was a once off event. I think part of the problem is that it poured down with rain in Sydney, and that stuffed their budget. The promoters probably went bust as a result.

The reason I liked it so much is that it was anarchy. The rain came down all day, and the fields turned into mud. People were climbing a small pimple of a hill, running downhill and then jumping and belly sliding to the bottom. The mosh pit was just a huge mud fight. After a while, people tired of throwing mud at each other and started throwing it at the stage. The promoter came out with a microphone and threatened to cancel the whole show if people didn't stop chucking mud, but all that did was prompt everyone to throw mud at him. It went from say 50 kilos of mud in the air per second, being thrown around amiably, to about a tonne of mud in the air per second, all being viciously hurled at him. The result was that the entire stage ended up being about a foot deep in mud. The band playing at the time didn't seem too worried - I guess if you smash up your set every now and then, getting a bit of mud in the speakers is not such a big issue.

Yes, it was cold and wet, but that just meant that you had to jump around all the time to stay warm. During one particularly ferocious set by Faith No More, we could barely see the stage thanks to the huge clouds of steam that were coming off the people in front. We sent up enough steam to create our own clouds, and possibly more rain.

Anyway, I loved it because of the disorganisation, the lack of trying to rob everyone blind with ticket and drink prices, and the fact that we all ended up drunk, stoned and covered in mud. We had to leave early after one of the people I went with dropped too much acid and started having a bad trip involving rats during the set by Nine Inch Nails.

Ah, such is youth.

Anyway, the modern version of this sort of concert is just so saccharine and absurd. They're so bloody nice and woolly headed and dull. People in hemp shirts run around proclaiming slogans about saving this or that. Screw that. I want mud, beer, people jumping up and down relentlessly and loud, loud music without all the cant and crap that gets served up these days.

If I see Toni Collette in the street, I'll have to remember to deck her. She's partly responsible for turning these shows into the music version of "The brady bunch". The brady bunch being a particularly sickening and soppy soapie.

Hmm, methinks the thing out at Eastern Creek might have been Alternative Nation, but I am not sure about that.

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