inthemix | Event Coverage | Parklife @ Moore Park, Sydney (05/10/08)

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You couldn’t have had it any better if you’d sunken over a whole bottle of magic Jaegermeister and been granted three wishes by the ‘Fuzzy Festival Elf’. Parklife 2008 smashed it hard with a deliciously fantastic start to the summer season. Before we get down into the nitty gritty, let’s take a look at what some of those wishes for the day might have been…

Wish 1: Brilliant lineup, fun with something tasty for all sorts.
Wish 2: Delicious venue, unreal organization and first rate sound production (which was mostly delivered). Wish 3: Outdoor Climate Control….no razor-sharp sunbeams, yet absolutely not a drop of rain. Perfect.

And if that afore mentioned Elf took a shine to you, you could probably go for wish #4: To be cloned so you could be in four places at once! Standard festival expectation, but in this case just an unnecessary extra because the entire setup was so well sorted that ADD style stage-hopping was never an issue. And believe me, I test-fired that to the extreme. As for wish #5: ‘A fun and thug-muppet free crowd’, that also seemed to already be well sorted. And I have a theory about that one too: props to the our nation’s sports elite for having the foresight to organize a little NRL Grand Final on the same day! Nice.

An early start gave us the chance to check out the massive site and have a listen to Grafton Primary dropping anti-matter experiments on an already levitating crowd at the Air Stage. You had to jaw drop at the brilliant sound straight away, and marvel at the massive LCD screens. Same same but different for the Water Stage where ‘time-slider from the 80s’ Familjen was creating an early fracas, ripping out the Swedish and getting hands up to Det Snurrar I Min Skalle (Swedish for ‘It’s Spinning in my Head’). And all that whilst swinging a mic at a floating condom. True.

And god, those screens! Graphic montages, footage from the stage, crowd photos, set times and cocktail bar menus, closely followed by the first-aid tent menu. I’ll have 2 doctors, some earplugs and a slice of lime please. Funny yes, but it is good to see promoters Fuzzy taking our safety so hard-core seriously. Around the grounds, Kato was booty-dancing up his own floor-show on the Fire Stage while remote mixing using The Force. Back on the Air Stage, Bag Raiders were spicing their set with some live guitar and of course they smashed out Fun Punch right before stepping back to unleash ‘inthemix50 #1 DJ for 2 years running’ Ajax. Crowd goes spazz.

A quick stopdown at the ITM VIP Toilets (clean and shiny with deodorant, hand towels, lotions and potions) and thus smelling like Kate Moss before Ibiza (not after tho), we grooved off to check out the Bamboos funking up the Earth Stage. This was my first fully live lineup of the day and included horns and cracking vocals from Kylie Auldist. The Bamboos busted and jived through live mashups of their own material, and I gotta say some of those tracks were gagging for a drum n’ bass remix. The Earth Stage was undercover in a cavernous tent, which is great for separating the stages, but not an easy place to balance a good sound mix obviously. If this stage had sounded as crisp as the others, all would have been perfect.

Parklife was always going to be a day for the party peeps not the chinstrokers, and the Water Stage was the major party win for most of the afternoon. Van She Tech had been building it up earlier with tracks like Utah Saints’ Something Good 2008. Later on Soulwax got busy with their live act of antique keyboards, live drums, guitars, keytars and… guess you can’t wear a suit that’s as white as that and not bring the cowbell. And then Diplo pretty much stole the entire festival with a massive range of club favorites and retro samples. Everyone was there. Everyone was partying like it was 1999, 2003, 2008 and every other year in the festival goers collective memory. We couldn’t even get near the stage with the man mashing it up that hard.

Late afternoon was the ‘Ladies Hour’ with Peaches and Goldrapp hitting the 2 biggest stages at virtually the same time. I caught the start of Peaches’ manic performance, spiked with costume changes and our girl bouncing all over the speaker stacks and vying for the ‘Amy Winehouse Honorary Mega-Prize’ for getting in the face of the front row punters. I came back later to find the boys in the band stripped half naked and Peaches running even more amok in a silver glam-rocker jump suit with flashing pussy-torch. Musically, I missed the big hits Girls Wanna Be Her and 2 Guys for Every Girl, but the tracks I did catch were packed with punch, if only I could have heard vocals more clearly because Peaches’ ‘take the utter piss’ lyrics are where it’s at.

Goldfrapp must have had the Water Stage set up especially for them, as the sound was breathtaking. Surrounded by harps and acoustic guitars and a percussion setups that would amuse small violent kiddies for hours, Alison Goldfrapp floated about channeling the spirit of a psychedelic gypsy goddess from the 70s. What a sound. Voice of an angel and the tightest backing band ever. July was delicious, and the grind of Oh La La La got the entranced crowd leaping like creatures possessed. Maybe we were?

Back in the monster tent AKA The Earth Stage, Blackalicious had been slamming down the skillz hard, but were retarded by shite sound that made Gift of the Gab’s rapid-fire rhymes sound like the caller on the 5th at Randwick. Shouldn’t eager hip hop punters be terrorized by the kind of bass that has priors for assault with a deadly weapon? This wasn’t, and we weren’t.

The Plump DJs sounded better. And of course they are who they are. They pumped up a rapidly building crowd with tracks like System Addict and a mashed-up version of the Chemical Brothers’ Hey Boy Hey Girl in what was basically a warmup set for Dizzee Rascal. And here’s where I got to test my Grand Final theory. Despite prompting from the Rascally One and huge screen graphics flashing with “Dirtee Skank” (it set the scene for the whole rest of the night really) there was a noticeable lack of skankiness in da crowd. Different story on stage tho as Dizzee got the heads nodding and the hands bouncing. I was hanging for Flex or Dance Wif Me, but I missed both and I had to ask ask myself… Where da mfk’in bass? Maybe that cavernous tent was sucking up basslines like a Dizzee Ho, or maybe our Elf buddy got melted on Jaegs and sent the bass bins to the other stages. Either way, the sound quality was lacking.

And in the other corners of the festival grounds, Does It Offend You Yeah? were stoking the prevailing insanity at the Fire Stage while Martin Solveig was playing with a smaller crowd at the Water Stage, mashing the party genres and dropping favorites Hey Boy Hey Girl, Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up and his own track from a few years back Everybody. But the Parklife Finale Goldstar goes too….. 2 Many DJs! Out of 40,000 festivalgoers it felt like 39,000 were right here and ‘aving it large. A huge contingent were loose on the stage as well, and every track was awesome. They dropped the Soulwax remix of Justice’s Phantom Part II. No idea why they played Love is In the Air but we all sang along anyway. And to end the night Nirvana’s I’m So Happy, Chase the Devil and Out of Space from The Prodigy and finally House of Pain’s Jump Around slowed right down then accelerated to oblivion. You could not wish for better.

This definitely had to be one of the best Sydney festivals I’ve been to. Lasting memories? Tag team DJs with live drummers, guitars and cowbells, Roland AX-7 Keytars (everyone had at least one) and I’m pretty sure I’ll need therapy after witnessing Kato’s towel dance. If Parklife 2008 was the Harbinger of Summer, I’m up for it. A Jaeger shot for the Fuzzy Festival Elf and bring it on!