Pure Bliss

I just found a great webpage all about one of my favourite Adelaide bands...



Written by the extraordinarily talented and incredibly friendly Dave McCain (aka DAMC / Techione), it details the rise and unfortunate fall of this incredible band.

On top of that, Dave's got their two eps available for download!

Another year been and gone!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and all that.

My Christmas was pretty much a debacle, again.

I wanted to have Christmas with my mum and my aunt Laurine (her real sister) and my blood cousins.

On the hour long train ride to Gawler to meet my mum, who now lives in Saddleworth, my 4 year old reliable companion, my iPod, decides to die.

As an aside I also think it was stolen from my bag at the airport - but sucks to be them for getting a broken ipod!

Going on the old train line to Gawler Central brought back a load of memories - it's one I used to be intimately familiar with - but I was amazed at the amount of change that has occurred in the last 10 years too.

On the way to Ardrossan my mum tells me my cousins won't be coming... which annoys me no end as I could have caught up with my other family instead! So I had Xmas with my mum, my aunt, and my aunt's crazy friends - all about 60 years old and with whom I had nothing in common with. They were nice people, but still, I obviously would have preferred to be elsewhere.

I stayed at mums on Xmas Day eve, and the next day she went to drive me back to Gawler so I could catch the train back to Adelaide. She had little petrol, so we did the normal thing and went to the petrol station. However, the petrol station had no petrol either, and wasn't expecting the trucks to arrive until Mid morning. And the nearest petrol station was too far away to risk driving to, because there would have been a good chance it would have been closed for the boxing day holiday...

Worse still, I had to be back in the city by midday for what I consider my REAL Xmas celebrations - the ones with my friends from school, the ones we do every year with this year being even more special as one of whom was back from the USA and another over from WA...

Luckily the one bus which runs every two days from Far North SA to Adelaide just happened to be coming at the same time in the morning - If I had chosen to go any earlier or later I would have been stuck in Saddleworth.

I got on the bus, paid $20 and arrived 2 hours later in the city, then had another half hour trip to where I was staying...

Then, when I went to Stef's house for that Xmas, the Metroticket people who I had phoned earlier to enquire about buses told me the wrong number, and I had to walk for about 20 minutes from the wrong road to the right road!

Luckily, the rest of my trip to Adelaide was fucking awesome.

Renee & Paul's wedding was splendid, and I met a really nice girl there too! We went out again after that, and had heaps of fun with her and her crazy workmates. It was weird being in Adelaide and hanging out with a bunch of people I didn't know at all, but heaps of fun at the same time.

I also cuaght up with pretty much everyone I wanted to catch up with at Summer Break - lots of people I didn't expect to be there were there. It was awesome drinking, dancing and chatting with friends there.

That's my only issue with Melbourne - I don't have a regular crew here. There's a few guys from work I hang out with, but they're not as passionate as I am about music and gigs. So I always go out by myself - which I don't mind - but sometimes it would be nice to have friends here who had the same passion for music and gigs like I did in Adelaide.

A week in Adelaide

I just spent 10 days in Adelaide.

Every single day was over 38 degrees... and I didn't get burnt once! YAY!

I went over for Womad, which was very hot, very dusty, but a lot of fun. Highlights included Mojo Web, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Billy Cobham, John Buttler Trio, Soul Jazz Sound System and Nickodemus.

I caught up with most of the people I wanted to catch up with, and spent most of the time either watching TV and drinking, or at the beach and drinking, or in the park and drinking.

There's no pictures because I forgot to take my bloody camera :(

RIP James M

A friend of mine passed away in Adelaide this weekend.

"James M" as he was very affectionately known, was a funny bastard, very entertaining and always up for some fun.

He was a risk taker and it sadly caught up with him.

Really sucks being away from everyone back in Adelaide right now.

I'm hoping to get back for the funeral, even if it's just for the day.

Change For Change's Sake

"Change for change’s sake is not a good enough reason"

Why am I not surprised this opinion is held by the editors of the Adelaide Advertiser?

It's exactly this kind of attitude that drives so many people out of the State, and will help keep Adelaide the backwater it is.

It's just so conservative. In everything.

I was chatting to Cut Le Roc on Saturday night and he said he was there the night before and it was "disturbingly quiet in Adelaide". And he's right.

Adelaide is quiet. There's never any people about. In Melbourne and Sydney and even Brisbane there's always people about. There's a vitality that's felt in the city.

Adelaide only experiences this occasionally, at times of the Festival/Fringe and Womad. Not even on New Years Eve is that sense of excitement present anymore.

And it's more than merely a "lack of population" thing.

The future is so exciting and opportunities abound, but when you're living in Adelaide it's like there's a fog and you can't see anything.

When Ratbag closed down I was at loss as what to do. Totally and utterly. I was rejected from both Team Bondi and Pandemic, and if Krome hadn't started I would still probably be on the dole.

I've been in Melbourne two weeks and have seen opportunities in case this job somehow goes sour - opportunities that would work for me in Adelaide but stuff I just didn't see or consider because of Adelaide is so conservative that it suppresses that kind of thinking.

I admit it was also me and my thinking that held me back, but it's more than just that... I've only been living out of the state two weeks, and even though I love the people back there, I honestly can't see myself returning for a while...

Zombie Walk

News Flash:

Headline: Hordes of Zombies roam city streets

Dateline: Adelaide Sat 26 May

Hordes of the undead rose from the Adelaide Parklands to traverse the streets of Adelaide.

Whilst most were docile, some moved incredible fast and demonstrated rudimentary motor skills suchs as operating cameras and other technological devices.


No one is sure what their purpose was, but as the shambolic mass stumbled down Rundle Street, Rundle Mall and Hindley Street, the chant of brains could be heard continually, making this reporter suspect they were protesting the lack of intellectual stimulation that Adelaide has to offer the denizens of the underworld. (or the populous at large - Ed.)

As far as we know, no one was injured or turned into a Zombie during the walk, although there was one weird zombie preaching the word of the Lord to the others in an apocalyptic manner.

Unfortunately that zombie was obviously more braindead than the others, as he kept trying to cite the scriptures but clearly had no proper understanding of them. One choice quote was "Jesus died on the Cross for our Sins, that should have been you" which is a clear misrepresentation of the meaning of the Cruxifiction.

Unfortunately this reporter was too busy staring at the raver zombie's cute ass and considering if sex with the undead would be considered necrophilia to take a photo of preacher zombie.

Video footage of the event follows, where you can hear a little of the preaching of the braindead zombie ...



More Photos and Videos at Ringo.com

As Promised... Hilltop Hood & the ASO Photos!

Pressure

Suffa

Debris

7000 people going off!

More at Ringo

Hilltop Hoods with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

I just saw the Hilltop Hoods with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Simply amazing!

They've always been top performers - I played at a gig with them about 7 years ago and even back then they were awesome, but to a home crowd of over 7000 people (which is some kind of record for a home crowd at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre) and with a 32 piece orchestra they were something else.

Also, as far as anyone is aware, hiphop has never been attempted with an orchestra outside of Springfield during the Lollapalooza tour

I did an interview with them the other week, and took some great pictures tonight, which I'll put online later.

I seriously reckon these guys are one of Australia's greatest bands, up there with AC/DC, Chisel, Midnight Oil, INXS, Crowded House...

Sure, it's totally different music, but the impact these guys are having on Australia is just as great as those other bands; they're selling shitloads of records, they're doing wonders for live music, they're inspiring so many others, and made Australian hiphop a legitimate art form.

If only they can make it overseas... They will do ok in Europe and the UK, but the US is really hard to break into, especially with hiphop...

The Advertiser Editors have some bloody nerve!

I had to laugh at the editorial entitled “Free people must be allowed a free press” that was on the AdelaideNow website on April 28, 2007.

The gall of the Advertiser editors to claim that they are some kind of bastion of democracy is phenomenal. If they actually think that they need to stop smoking the crack they are obviously are on and come down from their ivory tower and actually participate in the local community, because it's obvious they have an over inflated perception of them selves and their newspaper.

I couldn't help myself - I had to write in:

You claim that “A free media, the freedom of speech and expression of opinion, is the heartland of any democracy”.

The moment News.Corp appropriated all of Adelaide's papers into one was the moment the “press” ceased to resemble anything remotely associated with the word “free”. Murdoch's constant and consistent meddling in political affairs in Australia, the UK and USA stripped his media of any claim to the democratic process. Add to that the Federal Government's recent relaxing of media ownership laws to allow Murdoch more control and your entire diatribe at the government and lawmakers becomes fallacious at best, diabolical at worse.

You claim that parliaments are “the epitome of half-truth and obfuscation” yet in the last few months the Advertiser has shown itself to be more than equal to that task.

You claim that we are “fed a diet of misleading and shrewdly crafted press releases” but who publishes these releases? Who constantly publishes unresearched feeds from PR people and foreign newspapers?

The story about Knut the polar bear still has not been corrected in ANY news corporation publications, although the ABC's mediawatch showed that elements of the story were completely false and the animal rights activists involved now fear for their life because you “copy and pasted” the article from AP's news feed.

Examples of this sloppy journalism on corrections has increased phenomenally in recent years and yet your responses to such places as mediawatch when queried on it are unapologetic in most cases, and downright rude in others.

I have a challenge for you – you research and report the truth properly according to the MEAA's code of ethics, and when you do screw up the truth of the story you print a prominently positioned apology, and we, the public, will help to fight to stop your freedoms being eroded.

But until that time to ask that we support you would be laughable if it wasn't such a disturbing and disingenuous use of the Advertiser's editorial.

Future Music Festival

I must admit I was a bit dubious when I first heard about the Future Music Festival. Dance music festivals organised by out-of-towners tend not to do as well as our home grown shows like Enchanted and Stardust. People not from Adelaide tend not to recognise Adelaide’s fickle musical nature.

There were quite a few attractive women

Sure, the line up was huge, but other events, Two Tribes for example, had impressive line ups and yet never attracted too many people in Adelaide. Add the fact that it was on the same weekend as the Fringe Opening and Womad, and one could be excused for thinking that it might not do as well as it would in other states.

However, I am more than happy to report that Future Music Festival was an absolute success. The set up at the Garden of Unearthly delights was excellent, one of the best set ups I’ve experienced in Adelaide. I’ve heard varying reports about the numbers, from between 4 and 6,000 people, but the place was busy and bumping from the moment I got there. There was even a line up to get media passes!

MC Conrad

First up was dnb maestro LTJ Bukem, and there is nothing better than listening to MC Conrad’s dulcet tones wax poetically over Bukem’s cruisy dnb on a nice, sunny day. Although Bukem’s label Good Looking Records hasn’t released an album in years, Bukem plays new stuff unlike any other dnb DJ on the scene today. The crowd were really enjoying it, with most dancing on the slight incline of the park, and a few kicking back under the shade.

MPK & Patch

Being a breaks lover, I spent the rest of my time in the So Co Cargo area. Patch and MPK played a wicked set of harder dancefloor dnb to an eager home crowd, playing Pendulum and other crowd favourites; although I thought it was unfortunate that the only 2 dnb acts on for the day clashed.

Ali B

Ali B stepped up, and started playing some bass heavy breaks. He had some sound problems, apparently his monitor wasn’t working too well, but that had little effect on his mixing. I didn’t know many of the tunes, although I spotted some Stanton Warriors, Bassbin Twins and Drumattical Twins in there. Towards the end of his set he got a little funky, playing Slyde amongst others, and this seemed to fill the room a little more.

JDS

JDS stepped up next, and I didn’t know what to expect. I’m not a fan of his signature tune ‘Purple Funky Monkey’, but his set consisted of much harder, more dancefloor breaks orientated tracks that just grooved along. If I knew only a few of Ali B’s tracks, I knew even less of JDS, but that doesn’t bother me and didn’t seem to bother the crowd either. I’d much rather hear new music and find out what it is after the fact.

Princess Superstar

During this time I wandered about, and caught a bit of Princess Superstar on another stage. I actually enjoyed what I heard her play, but I’m sure I heard one of the tunes she played at least 3 times on that stage during the entire day as I wandered past. Maybe I’m just getting old and it’s all starting to sound the same to me.

Rex The Dog

Much to my disappointment, Rex The Dog wasn’t a synthesizer playing German shepherd, but instead a rather first-class (but merely human) performer playing on synths and turntables. He played lots of really cool, techno-electro breakbeat driven stuff which the crowd really got behind. Chris Lake followed and there was barely breathing space in the small So Co Cargo area, but that made Chris’s bump and grind techno funk even more enjoyable.

Chris Lake

But if there was a crowd for Chris Lake, there was a horde for Carl Cox! One of the biggest names in dance music for the last 10 years, Cox always goes off in Adelaide and this was no different. Playing off a Mac notebook on what I assume was either Serato or Final Scratch, the big man of the music scene simply smashed it!

Carl Cox

I was simply too smashed to continue the night (I had been at Womad all weekend too) but the Future Music Festival was a huge success, and the promoters did an amazing job. The sound was clear and crisp wherever you were, and although there were many people, it never felt claustrophobic. I look forward to next years event!

More cuties

More photos at inthemix.com.au