Mad Men, Sufjan, And The Best Of The Rest: Our Picks For Vivid Sydney 2015

If you live in our nation’s biggest city, yesterday was an excellent day: Vivid Sydney released its full program of events.

From May 22 – June 8, your beautiful harbour-filled oasis will gloriously shimmer with dozens of unique light installations and be full with some of the best music and creative minds from at home and abroad. Now, in its seventh year, the festival has once again brought the goods, promising you more than two weeks of blissful entertainment and inspiration as you roam around its big, bright streets.

If you do not live in our nation’s biggest city, yesterday was a shit day: Sydney’s being a giant obnoxious jerk yet again.

Regardless, here’s a look at the best of what the program holds. You can either use it as a guide to pre-plan your nights out, a justification to buy the airfare and make the trip, or fodder to fuel your unhealthy jealousy of all the douchebags who will get to go in your place.

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Everything Is Illuminated

As always, the main focus of the festival will be the light installations and projection works; this year will see more than 60 pieces scattered all around the city. Seriously. They’ll be everywhere.

The Sydney Opera House will be lit up once more with projections from Universal Everything, and the Light Walk will be extended inside the building for the first time. Customs House will be transformed into a giant David Attenborough documentary with pictures of local flora and fauna. The MCA be the canvas for what is basically a huge abstract painting by some excellent French artists. You’ll be able to control light works on the city’s skyscrapers, and new precincts will be set up at Chatswood, Central Park and Sydney Uni.

Here’s an actual picture of you in two months time:

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Morrissey Wants To Spend The Night With You

Though it was announced a couple of weeks ago, it’s still pretty exciting. One of the major headliners for Vivid Live — the music portion of the festival program — will be Morrissey AKA The Guy Who Taught The Angsty Teen Version Of Yourself How To FEEL.

The UK icon will play four meat-free shows at the Opera House sensuously titled An Evening With Morrissey. Since these will be his only performances in the country, tickets are in hot demand and have already been allocated via ballot.

So… I guess I’ll just leave this here:

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Party Like It’s 2005 With Sufjan Stevens and TV On The Radio

Other headliners who haven’t sold out before the goddamned program release include adorable folk hero Sufjan Stevens and enduring indie rockers TV On The Radio, as well as Australian acts like Daniel Johns and The Drones.

Basically, anyone you were into in the mid-2000s.

Of course, these shows aren’t just here to serve your nostalgia. They may be somewhat different from the Cookie Mountain days, but TV On The Radio are still as strong as ever, releasing their latest album Seeds at the end of last year. Likewise, Sufjan is releasing his new album Carrie and Lowell at the end of the month and we’ve already heard the first few singles come out this week.

To celebrate his arrival here’s the entire Illinois album because shut up, I don’t even care, it’s the best.

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Or You Could Hang Out With People Your Own Age

While those guys were already hitting their stride in the mid-noughties, Future Classic was busy becoming the legendary music label it is today. Now, to celebrate their 10th anniversary, they’re throwing you a big party over two nights at Vivid Live with Flume, Flight Facilities, Seekae, George Maple, Hayden James, Touch Sensitive, Wave Racer and Charles Murdoch.

It’ll all be taking place under the incredible lit-up sails of the Opera House and it will also be Flume’s only Australian show of the year.

Similarly, there are a bunch of smaller club nights and exciting new shows going down at Carriageworks, Goodgod Small Club, Freda’s and Marrickville’s Factory Theatre.

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Get A Little Closer To Tony Soprano and Don Draper

If you’ve ever cared about The Sopranos or Mad Men or television or writing or anything good at all, you should do everything in your power to get along to this talk with Matthew Weiner.

As Weiner is one of the executive producers and writers of both those shows and has won a big ol’ bunch of Emmys for both, his insight would always be interesting. But this talk should be particularly exciting given the fact it will be directly after the series finale of Mad Men. Here, he’ll be sharing his “insights into creating iconic characters and telling unforgettable stories”.

Weiner will be one of the headliners of the Vivid Ideas program as part of a series called “Game Changers”. This will also feature talks with Tyler Brûlè, founder of Monocle and Wallpaper magazines as well as Stefan Sagmeister, the world-renowned designer who’s worked with Rolling Stone and HBO.

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Some Actually Helpful Stuff For The Real World

The Vivid Ideas program is packed full of Very Important Professional Things.

Carriageworks are hosting a full day of talks with some major tech startups to unpack the idea of the Silicon Valley; the guys behind Cool Hunting are filling you in on how to “connect creatively with your consumers”; those in the publishing and screen industries can get together and figure out how books get made into films; or you can just hang out at bars and straight-up “network”.

But, if the brief use of that word as a verb has already tempted you to throw your phone against a wall, rip off your buttoned shirt, and run screaming onto the street quickly shedding clothing, hair and all social conventions until you’re left living a peaceful life in the wilderness, then you should probably just come hang out with us instead!

Junkee will be hosting our own event at Vivid that will ask a bunch of questions: How secure are you in your career? Is it okay to keep changing jobs? What even is a job? Is it normal to openly weep while scrolling through listings that only want interns? Will you give me some money?

Or more, accurately, we’ll be looking at things like freelancing and the sharing economy, trying to understand how the job market’s changing.

After all, you’ll need some cash to start throwing at the middle-aged women who have all the Morrissey tickets sometime soon.

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Vivid Sydney will run from May 22 – June 8.