We haven't bothered with the heat and crowds of a festival in years, but Sisters of Mercy were only playing at Soundwave - we'd bought Soundwave Revolutions tickets on the same basis, before it got cancelled...
Annoyingly we were both feeling shithouse on the day, so decided to cut a few acts and just go later in the day. We did catch Marilyn Manson and, thanks to last-minute schedule changes, Wednesday 13 - who are heaps of fun.
Honestly though, it was all about Sisters of Mercy. Up against some big headlines on the main stages, it ended up being a pretty committed crowd that turned out for Sisters. Despite the too-short festival timeslot, they got in a good set list:
Temple of Love
Ribbons
Alice
Crash and Burn
Doctor Jeep / Detonation Boulevard
This Corrosion
Summer
Lucretia My Reflection
Vision Thing
More
Temple of Love was a great big anthem sing-along ;) While I'd have loved to see some tracks off First and Last and Always, you can't have everything. The big finish of Vision Thing and More was great - they went off!
As a massive bonus to the day, we ran into two different friends who were unexpectedly back in Sydney! Hurrah for chance meetings :)
"The Transparency Grenade": Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the
Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and
securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined
for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from
this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of
the detonation.
You know you're in for a hell of a show: it opens with a plane flying over your head, crashing into the stage in a fireball... then the fireworks kick in...
...then the glorious opening chords of The Wall pulverise the room.
I'd wanted to see The Wall live for over 20 years - ever since I saw footage of The Wall - Live In Berlin. It wasn't a hard decision to pony up and be there when it came to town:
... even if I did wonder if 20 years of expectation could possibly be met.
It was amazing. Rock and roll theatre, spectacle, opera... the story of Pink brought to life.
The Schoolmaster was creepier than I expected - fluctuations in the balloon inflation make the face gurn into the grotesque.
Comfortably Numb was a knockout. But then so were Bring The Boys Back Home, Run Like Hell, The Show Must Go On and of course Another Brick In The Wall. And every other song...
If you get the chance to go - do it. My only regret is I didn't try for the $400 tickets right up front.
Interview and portrait tips in Digital Photography magazine | Boudist Photos. If you like Australian music, you've probably seen the Boudist's work. From memory I met Dan in 2005, at the time he was still working a day job and breaking into music photography in his spare time. I remember thinking 'hard one to break into, good luck..'. Fuck good luck, Dan's got there by hard work and he's an inspiration for all of us. You should look at his photos, they're awesome.
Line 6 ToneCore developer kit - for when guitar pedal tweaking isn't enough, program your own. I know this isn't actually new, I just don't remember seeing it before.
Goths up trees... I love a site that does *exactly* what it says on the tin. Goths up trees, How could I ever top the Robert Smith up a tree...: Now I know what some purists are going to say: ‘HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MARBLES? RAMMSTEIN IS NOT A GOTH BAND!’ But I put it to you that you take yourself to a Goth club at about 3AM and ask the DJ to put on some Rammstein and watch what happens to the dancefloor and then tell me that they shouldn’t be included here. The truth of the matter is that drunk Goths love Rammstein. It's true.
We bought Kindles a while back; and while the default set of wallpapers probably appeals to someone, personally I'm not into the "slightly creepy images of dead authors" aesthetic. So, I created my own set using photos I've taken of street art in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
To use these you need to jailbreak your Kindle and then install the screensaver hack. The trickiest bit is working out precisely which version Kindle you have so you know which files to use (go by the serial number). Note that once you copy new screen saver images onto your Kindle, you need to restart the Kindle before they'll start showing up (home, menu - settings, menu - restart).
Once again I will stubbornly call it a mix tape, even though no actual tapes were harmed in the making of this entirely digital playlist.
The yearly play list is simply a set of songs which have been on high rotation or were just the song of the moment. I used to try to reorder it to make a coherent play list but frankly they're always a grab bag, so I just leave them in the order I add them. Enjoy!
Mostly for my own record, this is how these tracks came to be part of the list...
Lightbringer - Covenant (inspired simply by the release of the album)
Derezzed - Daft Punk
TRON Legacy (End Titles) - Daft Punk (because TRON Legacy redefined what cyberspace looks like, in the general psyche - it was scrolling green text for years after The Matrix; now it's blue neon. Also I listened to the sountrack constantly during an Atlassian FedEx, during which I made a Tron theme for Confluence... yes, Tronfluence! ...it's unusable for any length of time but damn it looks cool.)
Oh My Brother - Mr. Percival. Note - annoyingly not available to include in the playlist, guess you'll have to go check out the albums yourselves ;) (inspired by Mr Percival singing it during a secret gig I was lucky enough to attend)
Hell - Squirrel Nut Zippers (another track picked up along with Tiger Lou - yes, the playlist at our gatherings can vary a tad!)
Jumping Someone Else's Train - The Cure
All Cats Are Grey - The Cure (back to the Opera House! ...and while UNKLE was awesome, Reflections was a religious experience)
Somebody That I Used To Know - Gotye (this is probably on every other playlist for 2011, what a ripper of a track...)
Jilly's on Smack - Primus (I never saw Primus back in the day and only properly got into their back catalogue in the past couple of years. Anyway we saw them live and they played this ahead of the album's release.)
Insect/Suspect - Pigface (Purely random - this came up in the car with the ipod on shuffle, and became my song of the moment. Something about the rhythm, I think.)
I've no idea if anyone else will like a single track off this. Well, apart from the Gotye, which echoed over the waters as we were going to sleep in the tent on Cockatoo Island on New Year's Eve. Pretty clearly that one's going around :)
