Future Music Festival

The Future Music Festival was held at the Royal Randwick Racecourse, a giant, immaculate horse racing venue. Horse racing appears to be reasonably big in Australia, as this facility glistened.

Unlike the previous day, today's weather was beautiful -- sunny, around 80 degrees without a cloud in the sky. I made my way to the venue around 2:30pm in the hopes of seeing part of Ke$sha's set that started at 3pm. What a cluster...Since I owned a VIP ticket, I had to go to a special line to pickup my badge, and then another line to actually enter the venue. The place was crazy packed, so ridiculous lines taunted me everywhere.  With only one VIP gate, I entered the venue around 4pm -- which only gave me enough time to grab a drink and head to Mark Ronson.

The configuration for the stages initially seemed a bit odd, but it worked. Upon walking in, VIP ticketholders could access the racecourse's VIP main lounge, which is the air conditioned box seating viewing area for the races. I thought that I'd hang there for a bit, but I noticed that the main stages were probably 300 yards away, so this didn't do much for viewing the stages ;p The good thing was that there was food (some sort of ham concoction -- I passed; earlier, I ate a turkish pita) and really short drink lines. I grabbed the maximum allowable two drinks per ordering customer, paid my $20, and was on my way.

Walking through the hordes, I instantly realized two things about the festival. First, this was definitely a festival -- there were some stages that were indoors; another DJ stage complete with foam bubbles spraying on the crowds; a DJ stage with a roller skating rink in front of it;

a bungee ball thingy that shot people 50 or so yards in the air;

a "disco" ride that consisted on getting about 20 people on the ride, locking them in place, and then spinning the crap outta them; several food and merchandise areas; plus the actual show stages.

Secondly, I realized that the scale of this event was like nothing I have ever seen. I've been to Lollapolooza (never to ACL, which I've heard is roughly the same size), but the amount of people plus the venue's size substantially dwarfed anything that I've seen at Lollapolooza by at least a factor of two (granted this show was only one day, but still).

The main stages were placed almost next to one another, but since the place was so freakin' big and there were so many people, no noise bled from one stage to the other. In fact, in a cool touch, they put up "street" signs that listed the times and stages and directions to each stage.

I gratefully made it on time to Mark Ronson. I stood off to a side, in the main area, probably 100 yards away. They delivered a solid show, the crowd was really into it, and all and all, it was good times. A nice dance party starter. People weren't totally wasted at this point, so there wasn't much yahoo / ding dong action (to quote Tim).

During the show, I noticed that on either side of the stage, there were bleachers. One set was really nice; complete with a roof and chairs, while the other was more traditional bleachers. After the show, and prior to MGMT, I tried to access the nicer place, but to no avail -- that was for the super-duper VIP people (who paid $300 a ticket). I was a mere VIP, so I headed to the more traditional bleacher area. Yep -- this was the VIP section.

It was a "brillant" setup. They restricted access to the VIP folks and we had our own bath rooms (without a line; it literally took about 1 minute to go -- well, except for the women's -- ladies, I will never understand what the hell you do in there that takes so long, but I digress), our own bar, and bleachers.

On to my second round of drinks, and MGMT. Before the show began, I was chilling, and chatting it up with a couple of people. For some reason, everyone thinks I have an accent here ;p To my chagrin, one of the girls that I was talking to decided that she would befriend the one guy in the entire venue that was dressed in a bright red body suit (complete with mask -- sorry, no picture). The guy didn't say a word, and gave me the willies, so I quickly moved away and closer to the stage during "Electric Feel." El Diablo wouldn't have stood for that nonsense.

The show itself reminded me of the crappy Radiohead show at in Chicago. Basically, they played their hits, which was good, but everything else was really mellow and slow. People started leaving early, and I was talking to someone else that told me that I had to go see "Dizzy Rascal." I grabbed another round of drinks, and headed to the other stage -- this stage had the same VIP section setup, so I grabbed a place on the bleachers and chilled.

Wow -- what a dreadfully awful show. Words don't describe how bad his show was. He's a generic rapper that's apparently really big here. Oh.my.god did this show suck. At one point, he did the "everybody throw your hands in the air, and wave them around like you just don't care" bit. Absolutely brutal.  I guess this is high entertainment to Australians ;p  I will give him one thing -- he had this crazy head thing on the screen that kept spinning.  It almost put into a trance to where I thought the music was enjoyable.  Almost.

I left about 15 minutes after the show began and headed back to the MGMT stage to hear Pendulum.  In the interim, a decent DJ was performing.  At this point, the sun had pretty much gone down. While I sat on the bleachers, I met a guy from Sydney and his 10 friends. We chatted it up for quite awhile -- he was really interested in my trip as he hadn't done much traveling outside Australia -- though his "sweetie" [not sure if that's just his word, or the Australian word for "girlfriend"] was going to South America next month. Not surprisingly, everyone in the group started calling me "Texas." When I asked what I should do in Sydney, he told me, "go to Bondi beach." I told him that was my next destination, and he said that I'd really love it there. I asked him if I should go anywhere else, and he gave me a quizzical look and asked why I would want to leave the beach. hehe

Pendulum came on, and their stage show was bad arse. I liked their music, but they were clearly a Prodigy rip-off. At one point, they essentially sampled an entire Prodigy song. Their set overlapped with the Chemical Brothers, so I bid my friends a farewell, and headed over to the Chemical Brothers stage.

Holy crap!! Their set alone was worth the cost of the ticket. I met some more people, and we had a crazy dance party. Between the music, the show, and the crowd, this was by far the best dance party since Daft Punk. If Daft Punk was an A+, this was an A.

[Note:  I took a couple of videos, but they didn't turn out so well]

The show ended around midnight, and I made my way back home. I chose a perfect location, as it took me only about 30 minutes to make it from the venue back to the house. The owner of the house, who had thus far been out of town my entire stay, had returned. I didn't really want to introduce myself in an exahusted, drunken stupor, so I quitely entered through the side door, and went to bed. Around 3:45am, I heard several doors slamming, and people scurrying about. This went on until about 4:30am. Ugh.

The show was an all around a great time. Of course, it would've been better had my friends been there, but there was something liberating about hanging out with tens of thousands of strangers and wondering around, doing my own thing. Judging by the accents that I heard, I'm fairly certain that there were no more than a handful of non-Australians there (I met one girl from Iowa while I was waiting in the main entrance line).

[Yep; that's the VIP Main Lounge in the background to the left -- this place was huge]

In the morning, I awoke around 8am to yet another installation of door slamming bingo. With a checkout scheduled for noon, I figured I might as well get up. After showering, I met the homeowner -- an 50+ year old "actress" (my guess is that she has very little work nowadays) from Sydney. She made me breakfast, and we had a chat about Australia and the United States. I had my suspicions about this (and more about this later), but she mentioned that she felt that Australia was the 51st state, and had lost most of its cultural identity. When I asked her what I should do in Sydney, she turned into the next in a line of people to give me a puzzled look and said, "there's not much to do here that you probably haven't already done in the States, other than go to the beach."

As we were discussing similarities and differences (there ain't much) about the two countries, she mentioned an interesting tidbit -- she once had a role as a madam in a play, and she learned that all of the brothels (yes, to my surprise, prostitution is Sydney - the only place in Australia where it's legal) are controlled by a very aristocratic and very Catholic family. Oiy.

I finished my meal (poached eggs over toast), said my goodbye and left. Onward and upward to Bondi!  FYI -- it's pronounced "bond-I" as I learned when I mispronounced it as "bond-ee and was corrected...Stupid American...