WAITlife (Parklife 2008)

It had been a long while between festivals for your humble narrator and I was looking forward to the annual (and my first) Waitlife event. How stupid I was. I even opted to buy a ticket rather than risk the jump-in, as the caliber of acts were enough to justify the fairly expensive asking price of $139. I was considerably amped for the week prior to Waitlife, as I'm an avid Peaches and Dizzee fan, and not adverse to a slice of Soulwax or Paper Scissors or even a little Fake Blood. Suffice to say I was anticipating a good day, drug free and carefree to boot.
What a fucking hoax of a day I had.
We arrived at 1pm, and after last week's bust of 30 odd people at the Transmission rave thingy I think everyone had varying degrees of sniffer dog paranoia. I only saw one dog the entire day. Two entry points made for a hard sneak in, but that didn't stop my mate who slipped through undetected. The dude at the bag check-in barely even glanced at my shit, I could've been carrying chemical weapons quite comfortably into the park. Oh well. Once inside I got quite a shock. Fuck. Are you aware people are still wearing fluoro? And they're mostly wearing it on their feet, in the form of those slip on, reef-walker like synthetic numbers. Where do all these fucks come from? Do they hibernate in caves together, only emerging to attend dance festivals, subsequently lowering any steeze credibility Sydney might have? If that is their game then they are doing a thorough job of it. To ease my pain and embarassment I lined up to get some grogs. Waitlife had begun. It was early, like I said, and still I waited 20 minutes for drinks, which cost $40 for myself and my lady friends. Okay, I thought, I'm here to have fun and fun is what I'll have, but I need some alcohol to do so. There's no point in spilling tears over drink prices. We wandered around looking for a suitable spot to plonk our crimsons. Hmmm ... the lake stinks like fishy turds, the ground is coated in pointy, pointy bindies here, it's wet over there ... where the fuck were we going to chill? Eventually we found some green (soon to be trampled repeatedly to a brown death) grass and took five. Then five became 60 minutes, 60 minutes became an hour-and-a-half. We checked the timetable. Who was the first act we wanted to viddy? Paper Scissors, and they started at 4.55. Sick. Only 2 hours to go then. We drank as we waited and therefore had to piss intermittently. More Waitlife. There were two main sets of toilets and a twenty minute lag for use of the cunts. No point in trying to piss against the fences, I saw the security dudes shaking people as they tried to sneak in a quick tinkle thus spilling urine all over themselves. It was pretty funny. I also saw a chick (and not a rough-ass skanky bitch, either) pull down her undies near a tree (in broad daylight mind you) and piss as she sat down. She didn't even lift her rig off the grass! She pissed and like sat in it, so it looked as though she was just chilling. When she stood up her cut-off jean shorts were wet with piss. Gross!
It was case in point of how poorly organised Waitlife seemed to be. Had they anticipated less people? Surely not, they could gauge that shit from ticket sales and it didn't seem like a great number of peeps jumped the fences. I only saw three separate mad-dashes and all the dudes got caught. Security were onto it.
Finally the clock struck 4.45 and we cruised over to the small yellow (musical appreciation) stage to catch Paper Scissors. After opening with Yamanote Line to a less than enthusiastic crowd, they proceeded to go through the motions occasionally letting us know we were 'brilliant' and 'great'. Sarcasm? Why not. Why they were booked at a fucking house music dominated festival escapes me. I felt slightly sorry for them, and guilty that i wasn't singing along with the (apparently) necessary enthusiasm. We bailed from that scene as saxophone part of the Bandit stung my ears quite hectically. Ouch.
Soulwax started at 5.30 but I had to piss again. Fuck you sunlight! I couldn't find any darkened corners to expel yellow so again I lined up with the twitchy, impatient throng in front of the toilet. Why didn't I push in? I don't really know. Maybe cause I wasn't high. Maybe I was bored and needed to do something, anything, even stand in a queue. Fuck, I don't know.
I watched approximately ten minutes of Soulwax until I realised I didn't like them. Back to the grass between the two large stages at the front. Great spot. The minimal techno from the left stage and the dance funk from Soulwax bounced right where we sat and began causing mild psychosis in my weary brain. Errrhhh ... fuck this. How was I going to survive this day? Peaches was how. She was the sleazy light at the end of the tunnel, and I only had an hour to go now. After drinking, smoking and waiting we walked over to the blue (air) stage to catch my bitch doing her thing. We were positioned front-right and the sound was horrible. There was basically no low-end to Peaches' set, and her electroclash numbers seemed to blow away with the slight breeze. The set structure was almost identical to her Big Day Out performance two years ago, except for some new tunes from her yet-to-be-released latest album. Fuck! Her one saving grace, for me, was the live version of Set It Off, a fast-paced punk thrash out of a basic electro tune. Eeewww! Highlight of the day right there. I wanted to watch Fake Blood but Peaches ran till 8.15 and Dizzee Dizz was slated for a 8.30 start. I wasn't missing the rude boy, that's 50% of why I was there so I brushed Fake Blood (It didn't seem to matter, I heard Fake Blood's Mars tune four times that day, the original three times, once as a remix). Over to the tent on the hill for Dizzee we went. By now the hill was basically a mud slippery dip, and people (particularly girls) were falling down it like bowling pins. Haha! Mates told me later that they spent a good portion of their day watching punters eat shit down it.
We squashed into the sweaty, manic tent to take in Grime's greatest. Opening with
I Love You had a drastic effect as more and more people piled in. They were like flies to a fucking bug zapper and we were getting squashed so dramatically it reached a point of an inability to enjoy Dizzee. We weathered the gnarly crush for two tunes, and then I gave up. I couldn't deal with it anymore. I led us out of the frothing, bug-eyed, four pills deep crowd and we plonked our defeated selves down next to the lake.
2manydj's were doing their thing on the blue (air) stage in the background, but they were mixing shitloads of minimal and driving house numbers. What the fuck? They did drop an obligatory Nirvana tune towards the end, and some fucking early 90's hip hop tune. By this stage I had stopped listening or caring what was going on so I can't recall how they ended their set.
The day, for me, was nine hours long. In that nine hours I saw probably two hours of music. I heard a shitload of minimal techno, even if I tried not to. I waited around two hours total for a piss (that's only six toilet trips at a 20 minute wait each, I'm sure there were more) and an hour, give or take, for beers etc. I waited four hours to see anyone relevant to my enjoyment. That's a grand, sad total of seven hours of nothingness. I saw one girl OD'd or something, and hundreds more that looked like they were one pill away from doing the same. I smoked 20 or more cigarettes and spent (after buying a ticket) $300 on a shitty, disappointing day.
But this is just my experience. All my friends had an awesome day, as I was enthusiastically told. I think the thing was, and I've realised this afterwards, I am now too old for this shit. I can't ignore sweaty arms and elbows, expensive prices, a lack of facilities anymore. I can't let go, basically. I wont attend another electronic music dominated festival, nor will I let myself get my hopes up for live acts. Next time I do something remotely similar to attending a music event I'm going without any pretence or expectations, and I will never, never go to Waitlife again.
-Venes