Mmmm mmm I loves me some Fuzzy. Seriously. You see rarely a bad move or an improper tactic employed by the once-were breaks crew and it creates a level of professionalism that carries through to their events, and their growing popularity is testament to that. And as with their experience grows, their festivals are also getting bigger and better. Having said that, I’m pretty sure some people will agree and some will disagree with that assertion. Festivals are what you make of them, and if you spent all your time traversing between stages and jostling past people, then you will only remember it being dusty and crowded. Dudes, it’s a 35,000 people festival, you are eventually going to have to line up for toilets or drinks and bump into someone on the dance floor. You might even decide to be that one idiot who always thinks it’s a good idea to swim into the pond, and then wonder why you get kicked out. However, covering a large event like Parklife I only have so much room to rant, so here it goes…

Compared to other Fuzzy events in previous years, there didn’t seem to be a lot of time wasted on saying hello to ex-flatmates, co-workers and other people you haven’t seen all year; trying to corral groups of people to ‘meet you by the pond’ and catch up. People seemed less concerned with checking out what everyone else was doing or wearing and more focussed on actually having a good time. And compared for instance to Good Vibrations in terms of sheer size, Parklife seemed even bigger; but there was less time spent in between stages, and more time in front of them. There were ample amount of water stages, the beer seemed colder and more plentiful than any other Fuzzy event in memory and the food seemed surprisingly well picked and cleverly placed, which meant no manky Kwik-e-Mart style $8 hot dogs at three in the afternoon. I won’t go on about the toilet situation, because chances are you if you haven’t already had a bitch on the Sydney forums about it then you got with the program and had an ITM-VIP membership.

Musically, Fuzzy hit the nail right on the head, and although having M.I.A. and Justice on at the same time was annoying, the rest of the music was evenly spread out throughout the day and stages without alienating any one particular act or its respective supporters. Starting with the beginning here are a few of my musical observations.

Firstly, for a Fuzzy festival not to have Kid Kenobi or Bang Gang anywhere on the line up was a little disorientating, but for a mostly electro festival it was better to see the disco-don Ajax flying solo. Proving again why he was voted Australia’s #1 inthemix50 DJ, he played another great main-stage set, save for that same Rage Against The Machine track that everyone plays when they are up there. But Bang Gang cohorts Jamie Doom & Gus da Hoodrat were ahead of their game with Josh Wink’s Higher State Of Consciousness.

Weaving together rock songs and electro/hip-hop bootlegs in the way the Scratch Perverts did early in the afternoon went down extremely well, but when you can’t do it properly then don’t do it at all. Case in point, Adam Freeland. Pick a genre, guy, and stick with it. And stop making classic rock songs into shameless bootlegs. Play the originals and do it well. Speaking of which, those Purple Sneaker cats can really fucking mix, especially since they’re playing songs without the obligatory thirty-two bar intros and not just drop-mixing like other mashup-style crews do. Goose were really really good, a massive perfectly constructed wall of sound that was complimented by actual instruments. I didn’t even know people did that anymore. Followed by MSTRKRFT, that large wall of sound carried through to most of the rest of the day then haunted me in my sleep later.

DJ Craze’ current Miami sound influence was interesting. I mean shit, what do you do when you’re the first guy to get banned from DMC, do you join the Beastie Boys? No you break out some Miami Bass, some Booty and you work that shit. Speaking of which, Freq Nasty had his usual evil vibe, perched up three metres above the stage with a towering pile of dreads dropping filthy breaks tracks, but with all his weirdness nothing was going to impress me after he was accompanied on stage by MC Shaun Barry dressed in tight white jeans who looked like he fell straight out of a Abercrombie & Fitch commercial. Did anyone else see the subliminal Prada/Gucci adverts in the Freq visuals?

Busy P seemed placed in his slot purely to warm up for Justice, which is fair enough. If I were managing Justice I wouldn’t want some half-rate DJ opening for them. I thought he was a little boring playing tired crowd pleasers, especially for someone with such a ground-breaking label, but Justice on the other hand were good. They were damn good. Dare I say it? Daft Punk good. They did drop the pace a few times, but who cares? Anyone who has heard/seen a Daft Punk Live bootleg from ’97 will agree, the more you practice the better you get, the amazing thing was that they were there. Those Never Be Alone guys.

I heard good things about Derrick Carter and M.I.A., and they would have been great to see, but the gamble with festivals is you really only get to choose one headliner. Trying to see all of them means you rarely see any of them, and for the most part I think people made the right decisions choosing their respective stages. Speaking of people making their own decisions, everyone at Parklife seemed to have a problem with fluoro. It’s getting a little ridiculous. ‘Fuck Fluoro’ t-shirts? Do you remember your faux-hawks and aviator stage? Stop being so old, and actually have fun at these things. That’s the whole point. Who cares if someone is wearing a funny colour shirt, ask the guy wearing the banana suit. You know who he was.

In the end, festivals are about what you take from them, and as I mentioned before, it’s really easy to pick the flaws with such an event. Think about last year’s toilet situation or when stages got blown over from wind, or when there was even worse mobile reception, or when John Wall used to do closing sets (just kidding, John). Instead, focus on the good times. Like when your friends got too wasted too early and couldn’t remember where they were, or at 9:30PM when people begin to ask you when Justice are going to start playing, or the people who hear Harder Better Faster Stronger and quiz you on why Kanye West wasn’t advertised.

Things wound up at 10pm and the messy masses dispersed from Moore Park: some to kick on nearby at Afterlife, some to get all deep and minimal at Mad Classic Fuss and even more to descend in a sea of filthy festival clothes on Kings Cross to get down and get trashy. All up, it’s one of the biggest party weekends that Sydney sees all year and Parklife was bigger than even this year. Who knows what the October long weekend will hold in 2008?