tooth soup

Last Monday I had the opportunity to attend Parklife, a festival dedicated to dance and dance-inducing music. Now, I’ve never been to a Parklife event before, but I have been to the Big Day Out and Southbound festivals and thoroughly enjoyed myself at them, so I know how a day of music and atmosphere can be a great occasion. I can also definitely appreciate the dance genre, having been an addict in high school, even if I can’t actually dance very well.

Which is why I feel somewhat qualified to say that Parklife this year was pretty good. It certainly had its high points–the day was amazing, the atmosphere was upbeat, and the acts were varied and many. However, there was one feature of the day that blew me away with its ridiculous nature. Let me walk you through the gut wrenching terror of…

“The Line!”

If you want people to be pumped for a gig, you generally want to build some sort of anticipation for it. Usually this is done by ticket sales a few weeks or months before the event, coupled with a bit of media saturation; interviews, magazine spots, that sort of thing. That’s enough to place a mental barrier that’ll have the fans jumping up and down like Jack Russel fucking terriers (5 points for reference) on crack when the day comes. What you don’t need to do is translate that mental barrier into a physical barrier preventing people from entering the event. I should qualify this by saying that I’m not certain that this is what the Parklife staff were trying to do when they didn’t bother making sure the single entrance to the event was regulated for easy passage. I do dearly hope there was some reasoning behind it, otherwise we’d have to come to the conclusion that the staff are just Plain Fucking Stupid. The Line is actually a misnomer, as the complex arrangement of punters waiting outside the entrance would probably be represented a bit better by something a bit less linear, vis:

That’s right, a mandelbrot fractal that curls ever inward son itself, without losing complexity, complete with the psychadelic colours that 90% of the people in the line were experiencing the world through. Essentially there was no line, just a mass of people blocking the entrance with tendrils of what might have been orderly lines sweeping out to coil in fernlike fractal arrangements that confounded and amazed the poor sods that rutned up more than an hour late. There are probably still people stuck in the imaginary plane created by the entrance arragnements as I type this.

It took us a full hour to worm our way through the gates, which I spent the majority of attempting to ignore the pair of tits that were rubbing up against my elbow belonging to one in a group of four incredibly small, incredibly irritating girls. The Big Day Out does not have this problem, even with its participation swelling to almost triple that of Parklife. Southbound doesn’t have this problem, and it’s run with a full campsite chocked with attendees right next door. If the biggest drawcard to your event is the ability for people to get fucked off their chops on the white stuff and dance, you should probably assume they have the mentality of a bored heffer and adjust your herding techniques accordingly.

Anyway, once past that, like I said, the day was great. We saw Grafton Primary, Soulwax, Goldfrapp, bits of Blackalicious, Van She Tech, and Does It Offend You Yeah?, so no slouch on a strong lineup. I’m not sure I’ll be visiting again; the Mullet Per Capita ratio was slightly too high for my liking and cashed up bogans without t-shirts sporting shit-house tattoos aren’t exactly my kind of people. But it was worth checking out.

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