A Decade On, Australia’s 2010/2011 Summer Festival Season Holds Up As Our Best Ever
Take us back.
It might be hard to remember as we enter our sleepiest summer on record, but there was a time when people wondered if Australia had too many live events.
In those early, school’s-out days of December 2010, music fans faced some hard choices. Big Day Out or Soundwave? Stereosonic or Future Music Festival? Laneway or, err, the Linkin Park tour? Maybe this, at last, would be the Christmas with a ticket inside the Dymocks voucher.
The 2010-into-2011 period was truly overstuffed. Mega-festivals still ruled the summer, with one for every niche. Music press at the time declared it one of the busiest touring seasons ever, from cult acts in theatres to superstars in stadiums. Club nights were plentiful for your festival kick-on. In short, it was not a good time to start a savings plan.
Looking back a decade later, the summer of 2010/2011 represents the bloat before a necessary correction. Mega-festivals started dropping off around 2012, leading to the boutique line-up era of the latter 2010s. This was also peak time for the Australian dance festival wars, right before the EDM explosion in the US sent DJ fees (and DJ self-congratulations) sky-high.
From the dull grey of present day, all that action in one season feels impossibly fun. Here are ten reasons why, in the summer of 2010/2011, “What a time to be alive” could be uttered without irony.
#1. A Mega-Festival On Every Weekend
Through the ‘90s and a good part of the 2000s, Big Day Out was the all-in-one summer festival to beat, catering for beery rockers and teenaged ravers alike.
By 2010, the landscape had shifted. Now we had a glut of genre-targeted blowouts: Stereosonic and Future Music Festival for dance fans (plus city-specific events like Field Day, Summadayze and Summafieldayze), Soundwave for metal and punk purists and an upsized Laneway Festival for, well, the Laneway demographic.
While boutique affairs like Meredith and Golden Plains carried on with as much charm as ever, mega-festivals dominated. This generated fierce competition between the country’s top promoters to book internationals, resulting in a lot of expensive line-ups and industry mudslinging. It’s telling that Sydney’s all-local Homebake festival quietly took the year off in 2010 to let the big egos duke it out.
#2. Justice Served On New Year’s Day
At 9:30pm on day one of 2011, two shadowy Frenchmen stepped up behind a DJ table in Sydney’s leafy Domain. Their name: Justice. Their vibe: very lit.
Justice’s closing set at NYD institution Field Day was part of a whirlwind trip for the duo, who also fit in Melbourne’s Summadayze and the Gold Coast’s Summafieldayze.
Later that year, Justice released a barnstorming second album, Audio, Video, Disco. When they returned to Field Day in 2012, it was with a full stage show featuring a neon cross and a wall of Marshall speaker stacks. That 2011 set, with its standard-issue DJ table and monitors, seemed quaint by comparison.
#3. Big Day Out at its Most Bombastic
Despite the escalating competition, Big Day Out was still riding high in 2011. For the second year in a row, Sydney got two identical shows to meet the demand for tickets. (At least, that was the idea – after sales stalled for the second day, ticket buyers were told they could bring a friend for free.)
Big Day Out’s 2011 line-up took testosterone to orgiastic levels with headliners Tool and Rammstein. (During the latter’s performance of ‘Pussy’, frontman Till Lindemann rode a foam-shooting penis cannon.) The Black Keys — newly saddled with major stardom following their 2010 album, Brothers — pulled out of the tour, citing exhaustion. That left the likes of Iggy and The Stooges, M.I.A., Grinderman and LCD Soundsystem to pick up the slack.
This was also a rare Australian festival tour for Sia right before she decided to focus only on writing for other pop stars — a plan that went awry as soon as David Guetta surprise dropped their mega-hit ‘Titanium’ that August.
#4. Laneway Festival Without The Sweaty Laneways
A decade back, even the boutique festivals were subtly upsizing. In January 2010, Laneway Festival left its authentic-but-overcrowded venues in Melbourne and Sydney for the greener pastures of Footscray and Rozelle.
That year ironed out some issues (and featured a knockout headline set by Florence & The Machine) so that 2011’s edition could shine. Cut Copy and Gotye got the prime closing spots, while the likes of Foals, Two Door Cinema Club and Yeasayer captured a very right-then indie moment.
#5. Black Band T-Shirts In Baking Heat
Back in simpler times, we’d scroll Twitter less for news about vaccines and more for the chance of a line-up leak. In August 2010, the poster for that summer’s Soundwave festival leaked a day early on the Soundwave forum (!) after a user tracked down an ad sent to a local street press (!!).
AJ Maddah, the festival’s mouthy founder, begrudgingly tweeted to confirm that he had indeed booked the likes of Iron Maiden, Queens Of The Stone Age, Slayer, Primus and, why not, ‘Semi-Charmed Life’ dudes Third Eye Blind for his Stereosonic of rock music. See? Simpler times.
#6. The ‘Modular Sound’ In Full Effect
Fans of shimmering synths, springy basslines and New Order-indebted melodies had a great season.
Sydney-based tastemakers Modular Records, for one, was still flying high at the turn of the decade. Modular highlights of the 2010/2011 summer included Cut Copy’s third album, Zonoscope, released alongside the band’s 2011 Laneway headline spot, and the festival success of the Bag Raiders following their self-titled debut. (Listen now to ‘Sunlight’ and you can practically taste the clammy paper cup of vodka and Red Bull.)
Then of course there was Tame Impala’s 2010 debut album, Innerspeaker, which cruised into summer as a perfect beachside soundtrack. (On the 2011 Future Music Festival tour, frontman Kevin Parker got friendly with super-producer Mark Ronson, who became his mentor.)
While Tame Impala occupied their own lane, the sleek ‘Modular sound’ and the rowdier electro of French label Ed Banger had Australia’s heart. Take, for example, the Parklife festival that preceded that summer with blog-house all-stars like Busy P, Soulwax, Uffie, Kele, Brodinski and, yes, Cut Copy and Bag Raiders. Honestly, can we have that party right now?
#7. A Very Dependable Falls Weekender
Amidst all the sharp-elbowed competition of the overblown 2010/2011 summer, it’s easy to overlook the low-key consistency of Falls Festival. For its New Year’s celebrations in Lorne and Marion Bay, Falls booked a US-heavy line-up led by Interpol, The National, Joan Jett, Public Enemy and The Rapture.
On the whole, dancier acts fared better than subdued ones, but national hero Paul Kelly emerged as a unanimous highlight. The Living End played the hits, Tame Impala brought the magic hour chills and Interpol took time for intimate sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne (ah, the things we took for granted).
#8. Future Music Festival Bringing Peak 2011
By the time March 2011 rolled around, we apparently needed one more mega-festival to flush out the serotonin supply. Enter Future Music Festival, as mega and festival-y as they came.
This year had techno, EDM, misplaced guitar bands like MGMT, and a pummelling finale from the Chemical Brothers. It also had a ‘Tik Tok’-era Ke$ha and hipster photographer The Cobra Snake on the line-up, in case you forgot it was, in fact, not the future.
#9. A Pre-‘We Found Love’ Calvin Harris At Stereosonic
After a few years of steady growth, Stereosonic blew up in 2010. The festival hit five cities in early summer with a line-up of top-to-bottom dance music. With new, larger venues in Brisbane and Sydney and an expanded set-up in Melbourne, Stereosonic drew big numbers.
In addition to a strong techno contingent (including Jeff Mills, Carl Cox and the elusive Ricardo Villalobos), the main stage featured Calvin Harris right on the cusp of superstardom. At the time, his big singles were ‘Ready For The Weekend’ and ‘You Used To Hold Me’, with the likes of ‘Feel So Close’ and Rihanna supernova ‘We Found Love’ still in the future.
Having just quit his live show, Harris was billed on the poster with a clarifying ‘DJ set’ beside his name. As it turned out, that decision signed his huge cheques for the decade to come.
#10. Shows On Shows On Shows
Even if you swore off festivals, this summer had other ways to overdo it. If you liked your shows expensive and impersonal, there was the U2 360° Tour (featuring Jay-Z as support), Linkin Park, Gorillaz, Bon Jovi, Muse and Guns N’ Roses — all in December 2010 alone.
The first months of 2011 brought rap legend MF DOOM’s first Australian tour, Sia playing theatre shows and most big-name festival acts doing sideshows. If the summer of 2010/2011 has anything to teach us for the return of live music, it’s to try and have it all.
Jack Tregoning is a freelance writer based in Sydney — he was formerly the Editorial Director at Beatport and an editor of inthemix. Find him on Twitter.