Soundwave @ Eastern Creek Raceway, Sydney, Feb 21st 2010

My complete inability to say no to anything for fear of missing out on something means that Soundwave is my second festival of this weekend; having crashed home from Playground Weekender at 4am I’m getting up at 9 for Sydney’s best rock event. Ugh.

FUCKING HOT. Photo credit: Callixtus

Apparently every single rock kid in New South Wales has decided to gather at the Raceway today too. Fun game: count the HIM tattoos / sideways fringes / Faith No More t shirts. It can keep you going all day long.

There’s only one problem: Soundwave festival is being held in the middle of the Sahara desert this year. It’s almost literally hotter than the fucking sun down here. It’s like an every-man-for-himself disaster movie: the city has fallen down around us leaving no shade, (let me say that again: in the 40 degree heat there’s NO FUCKING SHADE) and no real sources of water, just emo kids protected only by the amount of hairspray on their heads wandering around aimlessly with no idea how to escape. Desperate teens line for miles for one piddly and ineffectual water tap, trying to catch the liquid in the few nanoseconds between it leaving the pipe and evaporating instantly into the burning atmosphere, and failing to conceal their dejection when all they get is a slighty damper forehead.

It's ok, its too fucking hot anyway. Photo credit: Callixtus

People can’t drink water quick enough, and dragging themselves from the floor they crawl to the drinks cooler to pull away the workers and grab armfuls of ice to bathe their aching skin with. You can almost see the skin cancer growing.

Apart from that it’s pretty decent. Plus the ice thing has the pleasant side effect of causing hot girls to walk around with wet shirts. No one’s complaining there.

The site is way massive, and heaps fuller than Playground Weekender. Just looking at the pit in front of the stage for Taking Back Sunday makes me feel a little ill. Last time I saw TBS the singer wasn’t the epic vocal talent I remembered him to be, and this seems to have got better but he isn’t back to his 2004 best. Their latest album has totally slipped me by and although they’re alright I’ve no compulsion to squeeze myself into a space slightly smaller than the volume of my body and wait until I actually melt into a small puddle to be nearer to the stage for them. Perhaps I will have to resign them to my emo teen-hood; they can sit next to Funeral For A Friend.

Alexisonfire are always amazing but I’m a mile away trying to buy a drink. Yeah sure, all their fans whinged about Old Cardinals… but live they’re a force to be reckoned with. I don’t think George realized though that his usual outfit of knee-length cut off jeans isn’t ironic here, its actually fashionable. As ever Dallas Green’s voice is sick as. Thankfully he doesn’t play any pussy City & Colour songs; there’s a time and a place, and this is not it.

The elusive Daryl Palumbo. Photo credit: Callixtus

Most of the bands here I’ve seen before, but Glassjaw are one of those I thought was always going to be just out of reach. Thanks to Daryl Palumbo’s ill health, they don’t often tour outside America and were on hiatus for a long long while. Even better, as they play the sun dips down behind their stage (if you place yourself correctly and refuse to move, which I did) and casts the first shadow of the day. He’s well small in real life, but hearing Ape Dos Mil and Tip Your Bartender in all their living glory wipes that realization from my mind. It seems like they were (and are) the original post-hardcore; still no one sounds like them. And I guess Head Automatica’s Popaganda already told us, but Palumbo has a sense of humour and little ego. Highlight of the weekend by far.

Reel Big Fish are Reel Big Fish; seen em once, seen em a million times. They never change, apart from the singer looking increasingly like Mark Lamaar from his Shooting Stars days, but they’re fun enough and convince me to take part in the hot hot bouncy action at the front.

I manage to avoid Placebo being cunty as usual, and catch Jane’s Addiction as the sun is going down. They play brilliantly enough, but Perry Farrell seems to have become a bit of a parody of himself these days. Everything he says is about fucking people in that slow “eeeeeeeehhhhhhhh yes dahhhhhhling I have sex with girls AND boys dahhhhling and isn’t it soooo edgaaay?” sort of voice. It doesn’t work for 3 reasons:

a) he’s not English, and you have to be English to pull off that tone,

b) this crowd isn’t Motley Crue’s crowd, it’s Paramore’s crowd

c) dude is old. It’s psychically impossible to be a sexy rock star at 50, unless you’re David Bowie, and he’s only sexy because he isn’t trying, and because obviously he can bend the laws of physics (just watch that hand full of balls in Labyrinth, double entendre very much intended).

Remember Nothing’s Shocking, Perry? You missed the boat. We grew up killing virtual people for fun and paying strippers to flash us on Duke Nukem 3D. Saying fuck isn’t what it used to be. And Dave Navarro; cover it up man.

Photo credit: Callixtus

There was more shit on but my brain melted, which is caused as much by Faith No More playing lounge music as much as the heat. As we file out of the gates they play Epic, which seems a fitting theme tune as I stagger home and finally have clothes-on sex with my bed.