Lost Picnic - Live Review

The Australian market is currently overflowing with too many festivals, so creating a new festival is a bold move. Lost Picnic tried many things to distinguish itself from the rest, most prominent being giving almost equal billing to the chefs (who designed hampers) and the bands.

Just about every group shelled out for the fancy food - the two different $69 hampers on sale containing a wide selection of gourmet delicacies to appeal to everyone. The general vibe of the day reminded me of a combination of the relaxed nature of Golden Plains Festival and the sophistication of big name concerts in the Hunter Valley wineries.

It was such a happy and placid crowd that they didn’t seem to really bother employing many police and security, as they really weren’t needed. The weather happened to be about as perfect as you could hope for, with the sky predominantly clear blue, with with a small amount of cloud present to obscure the heat of the sun. A fairly large crowd were present early in the day to enjoy the first band, local act, Sons Of The East. Indie-folk acts are currently in season thanks to bands such as Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers, so their in vogue style went over a treat with the crowd. The audience seemed largely unaware who they were, though that didn’t stop a majority of the crowd from politely clapping after every song and loosely paying attention. It was a nice way to start the day. The demographic make-up of Lost Picnic was a strange one. There were so many happy upper-middle class nuclear families, where mum, dad, and the 2 small children decided to spend their large disposable income on family tickets and $69 gourmet hampers. There were also large numbers tall lanky lightly tanned girl groups in sun hats sun hats with Tupperware from home, and some people in their 40’s who seemed like they would know the top 3 billed artists from SBS’s RockWiz. I have never been to a festival with such a strange slice of society before and I don't think I'll see it anywhere else. I get the feeling that I would have been the only person at the festival that also went to Future Music Festival. Dustin Tebbutt, current pride of Triple J Unearthed was next act - playing a chilling and intimate version of indie-folk based around his falsetto capacity, he played through a mix of songs off his EP and new unreleased tracks. I came into Dustin Tebbutt with great execrations as I enjoyed his songs when I would hear them constantly on Triple J without ever paying that much attention. Unfortunately, live, he came across rather underwhelmingly. In many ways he reminded me of Skrillex, whereby each song used rather forgettable padding to built to a point where he abruptly starts singing in falsetto (or in the case of Skrillex, drops the bass). It was like he figured out to write one really good song, and then repeated it several times to write several other songs that were just “good”. By no means was he bad, but he just didn’t leave me feeling as excited as I felt he should.

Much to my surprise, nobody in the audience seemed to respond when he played The Breech. His set was the first time the struggling speakers became apparent. The venue was huge and the sole source seemed to suffer trying to reach the entire audience. It was painfully loud up the front and too quiet at the back. While it did slightly improve over the course of the day, at times the wobbling would cause the people I was sitting with to turn to each other and wince.

Emma walked out androgynously dressed as per usual in a pink suit with short hair, before launching into “17 Hours”. At this point the sun was just starting to go down and daytime was starting to transition into twilight. The ethereality of Emma’s unique self-punishing angst music greatly suited the atmosphere. Her banter before each song gave a lovely slice of insight into her music. The set, which felt like it should have gone longer, ended on her biggest song, “Jungle”. Right from the first note, the amount of people standing up the front suddenly doubled as everyone sang along. On the conclusion of her set, a crowd of 100 16 y.o. girls abruptly appeared out of nowhere. I hadn’t seen any of them all day before that, and they disappeared immediately after The Rubens finished. They would be great at hide and seek.

By the time The Rubens arrived, the intense group of fans had compacted to a small size and started squealing together in one universal high-pitched tone whenever anything vaguely exciting happened. The Rubens smashed through their set, playing all the bigger songs that you would come to expect such as Lay It Down, My Gun, The Best We Got, as well as a fair number of new unreleased songs. They announced that this would be their last show for quite a while as after this concert they were going into the studio to record their second album, which was met by a mix of boos and cheers from the crowd. Despite having never listened to The Rubens more than their couple of biggest singles, it was my 5th time seeing them perform. They always seem to play at festivals when there is nobody on so I watch them when I eat lunch. I found that as usual, they were good but not great. The songs I knew I enjoyed as they were capable of reproducing the studio version note-for-note perfectly, however if I didn’t know the song I found their stage presence on stage rather boring.

The fans in the audience seemed to have an amazing time and loved every second of the whole set, with one stating “this is the best I have ever seen them perform. That was a really good set”.

Centennial Park has a large population of bats that cover all of central Sydney, and while waiting for Megan Washington to come out (and during her own set) this population started to make itself apparent. From dusk onwards, there was a constant non-stop stream of tens of thousands of these mammals overhead as they made their way out for a night-out on the town.

The half light greatly complimented Washington's backdrop, consisting of dozens and dozens of reflective silver helium balloons that would change colour as the lights on them changed. Megan and her backing band swaggered out to their first proper show in over two years, uniformly dressed in all black with silver face paint to match the balloons. The set was the first of many to promote her new album coming out (Look up the name of it??) and thus prominently played through many unreleased tracks of the new album.

The new material sounded great and has made me really excited to hear her new album! However, the highlight of the set for me (and what seemed like most of the crowd) was her acoustic cover of Sunday Best. It was pure perfection, and caused an obnoxiously large and long applause from the crowd, to which she said, “We still have half a set. You don’t have to cheer for an encore yet”. The songs were a great mix of happy and sad songs, and the band were enthralling enough that the audience followed her gleeful and sombre emotions respectively. A reoccurring theme I noticed during her set was that duos in their 40’s would walk up to the edge of the crowd at the front and attempt what is probably the first selfie they have ever taken in their life to show that they are close to Megan Washington. One couple spent literally 4 minutes trying repeatedly to line up the photo correctly and just couldn’t, so I ended up offering to take the photo for them. Megan spent a reasonable amount of time before each song talking about anything and everything as she had a really natural rapport with the audience. It is easy to see why she is a regular on many talk shows. Unfortunately this seemed to cause her set to take longer and she eventually went “wow, I am really over time right now. This is our last song” before launching into Rich Kids.

As every up and coming newly festival has, there were many minor teething problems that I noticed quite prominently. The festival does need more toilets; I went to go during The Rubens expecting for them to be deserted and discovered that there were 200+ people lined up to use 20 cubicles. There were activities to do around the site, such as giant chess, and a giant beach ball (that just sat there, even though the festival was picnic themed, not beach themed). I was personally hoping for there to be much more to do around the place such as stalls, sporting activities like badminton, or installation art, as I quickly became bored when I went to look around the site and returned to my picnic rug. The long waits between each act meant that I imagine the crowd would really respond to And while Hampers are amazing for picnics, my personal belief that adding some gourmet food stalls similar to Big Day Out’s Chow Town from 2012 would be a great addition as it would fill people’s craving for hot food that currently the festival doesn’t have. Overall though, these are very minor criticisms when compared to how much the festival did right. They did achieve their goal, as it felt like they did sell much more than just the festival, they sold a whole day out with the family. It was a great experience and I would more than happily go back again in 2015

Review by Matthew Turner

Photos by Geneva Valek see more here

#lostpicnic #meganwashington #therubens #sonsoftheeast #dustintebbutt