The Sounds of Spring
Last October, ROOT! played Brisbane’s ‘Sounds Of Spring’ festival at the Royal Showgrounds, incongruously snuck into a line-up full of the latest young things of rock. The promoter asked me to write an article for the festival program (perhaps because he feared an article written by The Getaway Plan would look something like: ‘@TEOTD DA ?4U WAN2 6 L8R’) So here’s what I wrote. For context, try to imagine it on a screwed-up page next to a port-a-loo, obscured by tomato sauce and vodka cruiser vomit stains…
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Ah, spring… apricot blossom in the air, a gossamer of wind, a friskiness in the youthful undergarment, and, as Kenny said, ‘… as soon as the sun comes out, every bastard has a festival’. He was right, you know. These days I can’t even wake the neighbours with my Masport 2-stroke on a summer Saturday because every other suburban street has been closed off for fairy floss, rides and two-bit shit bands. So, really – do we need another festival?
Well, that all depends. We don’t need another ‘Rumba’ – Austereo’s attempt in the nineties to shove the engorged member of product-placement down the throats of unsuspecting minors by pretending for a second to give the remotest of shits about music – but a REAL music festival: that’s different. Since Livid tried to ‘line-extend’ (think: Cherry Coke) and blew themselves into history, a fine Brisbane tradition has gone unobserved. You see, Brisbane were doing the music festival thing before just about everyone else (what, you mean there was something between Sunbury and Big Day Out???) and they did it better. The original Livid Festival had serious credibility, real cutting-edge bands, and wasn’t like being at a Wiggles gig with alcohol served.
Stand up, then, Sounds Of Spring! Your calling awaits!
And besides, you know who has the most fun at festivals? The bands! Festivals are GREAT when you’re in a band. You get to ponce around like you’re NOT going to be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, kick over a plastic chair, complain about your drinks rider, leave a terrible unflushed poo in the portaloo for Clare Bowditch to discover, perform drunk, and do burnouts all the way back to your luxury hotel while the bankrupt promoter jumps off Story Bridge.
Right now, as you read this, a parallel universe is unfolding behind that slim bit of fencing that separates the real stars of this festival – ie, you – from the shitheads and freeloaders backstage. It’s a feudal society back here, where the landowners are the bands with the largest dressing room, and the peasantry swarm around them in a strange kind of mutual co-dependence. There is a very careful hierarchy observed, and it’s all based on what it says on your lanyard. Like playing poker, in any backstage conversation you keep an inscrutable face as you dangle your ‘Access Stage Z between 1.30pm and 1.45pm’ pass and hope to bejesus that your new superficial acquaintance doesn’t lean over and gazump you with a royal flush.
It’s always fabulous fun to observe. Just recall your Year Nine locker bay, and that’ll give you some idea. There are certain key behavioural traits that are to be maintained. One is simply not allowed to look impressed at ANYTHING. Leaping around like you’re in the Toyota ad and shouting, ‘Yeahh!! Free piss!!’ is not de rigueur. Wearing your own band’s t-shirt? Tut tut. Star-spotting? A big no-no. You must register not the merest flicker of recognition as you walk past and…it’s Kram from Spiderbait!… Plutonic Lab!! …. Laura Imbruglia!!... a British Indian!!…’ Each of these heart-stopping moments must be navigated with a jaded expression, like you’re one of those brain-injury outpatients operating the showground rides. It’s the kind of non-recognition that people will exhibit as they walk past me, presuming I am the festival’s on-site accountant, until they are informed who I REALLY am, whereupon mutual networking kicks in and we both dance around each other’s hastily discarded underpants. ‘ROOT! ??– yeah, you guys are legends! I can’t wait to check out your set!’ – when, in fact, we both know they wouldn’t piss on me if I were aflame.
My heart always goes out to the poor, long-suffering festival organisers and backstage staff, who, every last woman and man of them, are much more worth knowing than some self-obsessed cockhead performer from whom they must tolerate a day of condescension and general low-level psychological abuse.
And let me tell you, I’ve seen what can happen when yes-men-surrounded rock stars start making demands backstage at your big festivals: I’ve seen a band have their own ROAD, for fuck’s sake. I’ve seen all the air conditioning turned off in all the dressing sheds for the entire stinking hot tropical day of a festival because the lead singer of one band had a cold. I’ve seen a band with syringes on the rider. I’ve seen the lead singer of another band stagger around backstage so debilitated by heroin addiction that he had to wear incontinence pants. (OK. I admit it. I made that rumour up myself.)
My favourite story involves the enigmatic female singer of a then hugely credible band from Ireland. She was spotted by a journalist in the catering tent sitting with her tour manager. When the journalist asked for an interview, the tour manager intervened and told him to call her manager. In Ireland. The journalist found a nearby chair and commenced the rather lengthy process of getting in touch with the manager in a completely different time zone. The manager then phoned the tour manager. In the catering tent. The journalist watched as the tour manager leaned over and asked the singer. The singer, expressionless, gave a short reply. The tour manager called the manager. In Ireland. The manager called the journalist. The answer: ‘No.’
Ah, that’s the stuff I love. It’s the chance to pretend that you’re a closeted, chemically-altered fuckwit of elephantine proportion, sheltered by the big padded cell of showbiz.
And how come I know all this? Don’t you know who I AM?
I hang out with the guys in Jet (‘s uncle.)
***
Well, that was it.
As it turns out, the sounds of spring were more like the sounds of winter, with a blustery wind and drizzling rain providing a grim backdrop for the capacity crowd of increasingly binge-drunk 20somethings. For ROOT! it was a blackly hilarious experience. The stages were crammed so close together that every time we attempted one of our little ‘dynamic shifts’ where the music collapses to pin-drop volume and I crap on in a supposedly poetic manner, all you could hear was the band playing next-door. The sounds of spring were more like the sounds of British India. Not that I know what British India is meant to sound like. Colonial oppression? Pith helmets and dysentery? (Hang on, that’s the second mention of British India. What did they ever do to deserve such harsh treatment? I don’t really mean to pick on them, actually. They’re probably nice lads, they probably sound great, and after all, they did go to the same school as Jet. I just really like their name. It conjures up all kinds of fabulous allusions. I even mention it on a song from our new album called ‘I Fought The Groove Police And The Groove Police Won’, where I predict my demise: ‘I could have Gandhi’s insight. You’d still want British India.’) Anyway, where was I?
Ah yes, the sounds of spring. As an entirely appropriate postscript, we ended the night with an ‘incident’ back at the hotel. When I say ‘hotel’, I mean the one-star backpacker across the road from the Showgrounds. After an unpleasant dinner in Fortitude Valley – which is like being dropped into the middle of a Year Nine formal just after the GBH has kicked in – we retired to our ‘hotel’, (which was selling liquor at the front desk), with a view to sitting on the front porch for a band ‘debriefing’ session. No sooner had we settled into the plastic chairs when we were involuntarily ‘joined’ by a tall, muscle-bound, baby-faced local boy, possibly, like us, a refugee from the festival, who had just recently consumed three quarters of a large bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, and was in that fabulous netherworld of paralysis-pathos-psychosis that is the calling card of the binge-drunk young male. Not that he was in a state to actually have any kind of sentient ‘intention’, but he was hell-bent on turning one of us – anyone would do – into the next David Hookes.
His method was to sit down, uninvited, introduce himself, and then latch on to the very next thing anyone said and somehow interpret it as a direct personal insult. He employed the usual lexicography of testosteronanism, vis: ‘What are you looking at?’ ‘Don’t be smart.’ ‘Did you take my whiskey?’ ‘Do you reckon you’re tough?’ and so on. We sent him away with the message, very calmly, very carefully, and not a little sympathetically, that we did not wish to have a fight with him, we did not want to take his whiskey, and we wished him all the best for the future.
It didn’t work. In fact, he returned, and attempted the same conversation, almost to the letter, on THREE further occasions. And we were the only people sitting there. It was like ‘Groundhog Day’, except for the fourth time, when he dragged along an equally hallucinating but slightly more sheepish-looking new friend, and told us that ‘this guy reckons he could smash the lot of you.’ At this point, Henri Root, my alter-ego and canasta partner, who is not a small man, became impatient, and pushed back his chair to remind our young assailant, at a distance of about one centimetre from his slightly swaying face, of his OH & S responsibilities. Surprisingly – or was that UNsurprisingly? – our pantomime villain appeared to become highly agitated, and went off complaining that he had done nothing, and why were we picking on him?
It could have been uglier. Or even uglier still, if our merchandise man, Luke, a black belt karate instructor and Police Prosecutor, had been there. The sounds of spring might have been more like the sounds of a young man being disarmed. Literally.
DC Root is the legendary frontman of garage punk poets ROOT!, whose second album, ‘Surface Paradise’, is out now. Visit the official ROOT! website.
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