2010

The 20th Meredith.

This clip gives a take on it.

Parrots in the plural as the mascot for the year.

At this point in its history, Meredith had become known for bad weather, and 2010 was no exception.

It had been a particularly wet spring, and the week prior saw some flash flooding in parts of the state.

The forecast for the weekend itself didn’t look great beforehand either, and attendees were advised that parts of Bush Camp would remain closed to camping.

Cold weather gear was also highlighted in red in the Pocket Companion, so there were a few concerns going in. You needed more than a jumper, with a bit of rain here and there, and grey skies and strong winds for a lot of it, but the weather turned out to not be too bad in the end.

As someone quipped before this one, maybe the most impressive thing about Meredith is the crowd’s ability to have fun in uncomfortable environments.

And fun you had.

On the infrastructure front, the site crew put in 4km of cabling to bring light to many campgrounds that had previously been shrouded in darkness.

Not sure how anyone got back to camp in prior years.

This was also the Year of the Helper Hut, which inspired the building of 12 of them in many parts of the site.

These places of refuge and kindness have been a key pillar of the modern history of the festival and are a wondrous example of the Meredith spirit.

Thousands if not millions must have worked or volunteered at a Helper Hut over the years and I salute each and every one of you.

THANK YOU.

We can’t talk about the 20th Meredith without talking about Neil Finn.

This one lives long in the memory of many. Just Neil, the audience as his band, a kid named Matthew who got out of the crowd to play guitar on one track, and Warren Ellis surprising everyone by walking out to play along to Don’t Dream It’s Over.

Neil Finn - live at The Meredith Music Festival 2010

neil finn - C.Moon

Organisers didn’t know Warren planned to get out there, and thought the stage must have been running behind time when he was spotted loading-in backstage. Neil had had no sleep, but ‘sometimes they’re the best gigs’, he said after. Once he got going there were tears, smiles, hugs, affirmations, sore throats, etc. Anyway, anyone who was there probably remembers the set.

One of the great moments in The Sup’.

2010 also had Kimbra with band, not too long before the song with Goyte came out and both their names became known to 7/8ths of the world’s population.

There hadn’t been a Meredith Sky Show since the first one in 2007. And we went all out, after much thinking and imagining, with the idea of a ‘spaceship’, or what some ‘journo’ described as a ‘crane-assisted UFO with air-con tubing hanging off it’.

A week before the festival, a giant crane came to the site and plotted coordinates. It then left until the Saturday night, when it returned under the cloak of darkness to the exact same spot behind the stage, raising up the ‘spaceship’ on a hidden wire, rotating its extended arm way up high over the stage, and ‘flying’ it out over the crowd.

As it was lowered back towards the crowd it sent a blast of flashing lights and smoke everywhere to a mix of astonishment and bemusement below.

The Reverend Horton Heat encouraged you to smoke ’em if you had ’em, and many did, despite it being the first year that you couldn’t sell smokes at festivals.

Checking my graphs, this was also the year that enthusiasm for glow sticks hit some kind of historical peak, right at the moment when someone launched thousands of them into the crowd during Dirty Three. Not quite the 2004 lightning display, but visually impressive nonetheless.

Likewise DJ Harvey smashing the decks (including a Bozak rotary mixer, an Alpha Recordings 5-band equalizer, two CDJs and two Technics 1200s that belonged to Andee Frost) not long after the sun came up on the Sunday morning, as the late night programming drew to a conspicuous end (for which he generously forfeited his fee to pay for all the damage).

Harvey ends his set at Meredith 2010... with a bang

Dirty Three - live at The Meredith Music Festival 2010

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble - live at The Meredith Music Festival 2010

Just a few hours later, the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (all wearing spotless gumboots) played what still remains the biggest Sunday crowd anyone has amassed.

Other notable mentions include the one and only Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, visiting The Sup’ for the second and last time; Clipse playing one of their final shows, a few weeks after Kanye’s Hawaii album came out; and Mark E. Smith and The Fall playing Saturday night in an, errmm, interesting state.

Sadly, it would be the last show played by Broadcast, with Trish Keenan passing away in January the following year.

Meredith Music Festival 2010 - walk part 1

Meredith Music Festival 2010 - walk part 2

Ecoplex highlights included a doco on the witch of Positano, Vali Myers, and the strangeness of Crispin Glover’s Rubin & Ed.

Who Played?

Dirty Three Washed Out Little Red Girls Neil Finn Clipse Custard Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings Reverend Horton Heat Pantha Du Prince C.W. Stoneking El Guincho Hypnotic Brass Ensemble The Heatwave DJ Harvey & DJ Garth Sally Seltmann Lovefingers Kimbra kyu The Dead Salesmen Duo Those Darlins The Field Broadcast Jeff The Brotherhood Hoss Rat vs Possum Cloud Control Puta Madre Brothers Combo La Revelacion City of Ballarat Municipal Brass Band The Fall DJ MuGen Special Guest MC: Angus Sampson Gift Mistresses: The Town Bikes

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