Climate Festival @ Luna Park, Sydney (06/04/08)

In the last few years the issue of climate change has gone from obscurity and being dismissed by skeptics, to rise to become what’s arguably considered the most important issue facing our generation. To help raise funds towards this cause, an Australian promoter decided to throw a national festival, with all the proceeds going towards helping prevent climate change. Upon being tasked with reviewing the event, I put on my thinking cap and did a little bit of research…

Featuring names like DJ T, Junkie XL, Richard Dinsdale and the entertaining wildcard that is Tommy Lee, the lineup was surprisingly good. But while they were apparently expecting a capacity upwards of 5,000 people at the event, when my friend and I arrived we couldn’t help but notice how eerily quiet it was as we walked through Luna Park. You felt a little out of place as I was you were gawked at by 5-year olds. Entering shortly after 2pm we made our way in without any dramas, and the purveyor of fine beats that is Johnny Gleason was playing some great tech house: but looking around there must’ve been about 20 people in the room. Not to worry I thought, I’m sure they’ll all be at the Global Stage. Upon entering the big top I was amazed to see about 50 people in front of me dancing. Never in my life have I seen a venue so empty.

Next up I tried to find out who was playing, but was shocked to find that there were no timetables anywhere at all. Finally I found a printout at the cloak room desk which we were able to look at, but it meant we had nothing to keep on us to help us plan what we would listen to throughout the day. I can see the logic in not wanting to chop down any more trees for such a reason, but surely there was some environmentally friendly solution the organisers could have looked into, or simply a few recycled posters here and there: it was ridiculous not having any idea of who was playing, or where.

When 2.30pm rolled around we went to check out Supafly, who was rolling out some trendy Baltimore sounds that I really enjoyed. He made for a great hypeman, it was just a shame that no one was there to see him. An act like this would go down great for an afternoon at Sounds on Sunday. Next I headed over to the 3D World stage to hear Mark Mendes playing some big, heavy tech house. Sitting down for a while just listen to the music, I saw people walking in at various stages, only just to walk straight back out again. A few people I spoke to said they’d gotten free tickets to the event, so I couldn’t help but wonder how many people actually paid to go to the Climate Festival.

Watching Eric Laville’s didn’t really grab me, it was a little too monotonous for my tastes but it was good to hear Alter Ego’s Why Not get an outing. Ian Carey on the other hand was playing a set mostly consisting of piano house, which didn’t really grab me either. After that I was hoping for something that was a little bit better matched with my personal preferences, but it just went form bad to worse… Seany B. I actually though ol’ Seany made for a great hype man back when he was in Dirty Laundry (as opposed to actually being a talented rapper), but I can’t say the same thing about his solo career. Luckily I could barely even hear his lackluster rapping due to poor sound quality, which was probably a blessing in disguise.

Next was Richard Drinsdale, it was 6pm by now and the numbers in the venue had swelled (and I use that term loosely) to I’d say was around 300 people. I couldn’t stop thinking throughout the day how much money the promoters must have lost: if you consider all the costs involved with putting on a festival, they’d clearly be monumental. They most definitely would’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. Anyway, Richard played some great minimal techno for the first half of his set but after that he seemed more interested in flirting with one of the females on stage. When he drifted into dated tracks like the MSTRKRFT mix of Justice’s D.A.N.C.E., I lost interest.

Tommy Lee was someone who I was looking forward to: but I have to say that when it comes to delivering a DJ set, he’s a man of no talent whatsoever. His set was hilariously bad, and I’d say that I felt sorry for him but I’ll abstain because I’m sure he got payed an obscene amount of money to be there. His offsider DJ Aero did everything, while Tommy just nodded his head like he was playing but it was obvious that he was doing nothing much at all. He’d occasionally hit what I thought might have been a digital drum machine, but who knows. Musically though, the set wasn’t too bad: full of tough electro sounds and head-caving synths, it sounded very ‘now’. It was just clear that Tommy Lee had very little to do with it.

Just after 8pm, the man who I really wanted to see stepped up to the decks: none other than DJ T from Germany’s renowned Get Physical label. But at this stage there were literally 5 people in the room. He threw his arms up in the air as if to say, “Are you serious?” While he played what was technically a brilliant techno set, I felt sorry for him that he had to be embarrassed like that. Flying all the way in from Berlin to play to a crowd of 5 people? Disappointed, I headed back over to see Junkie XL who was playing an excellent live set of his most recent electro-sounding tunes, throwing typically huge amounts of energy into things in spite of there being so few people there to appreciate it. Of note, Tommy Lee also had a parade of skanky girls on stage during the set, which was interesting to watch to say the least. There must’ve been 50 people in the room at this stage.

I headed back over to see DJ T where there was now four of us in the room. We stuck it out till the end, but I had had just about enough with half an hour to go. I left thinking what a spectacular failure this festival was. I felt embarrassed for the DJs who had flown over to play, and I felt even sorrier for anyone who had actually paid $80 for a ticket to the event. To the promoters, an ‘inconvenient truth’ that you need to hear: if you thought that the event would simply sell itself on account of it being a ‘festival’, or simply down to the fact that people are now more conscious than ever about the impact they leave on the environment, then this was proved wrong on Sunday afternoon. While there were quite a few good acts on the lineup that led to a few good musical highlights, this was otherwise the worst festival or musical event that I’ve ever been to. I strongly urge any promoters out there thinking of putting on a festival to really plan it properly, because whilst the amount of large-scale events in happening in this country might be growing at a rapid pace, that doesn’t mean that people are willing to fork out money for poorly organised events such as this.