Weatherwise, it was a shit day for a festival. The rain, dark clouds and cold weather made it hard to drum up the energy to even get there. But mighty Zeus couldn’t keep those crazy dance music folk away if he tried and their devotion allowed me to conclude the following:

1. Future Music punters love dance music. A lot.
2. They say the darndest things when under the influence.
3. Most have short attention spans for anything non-dance related.
4. They take too long to decide what they want to drink resulting in some of the longest queues I have ever been in. Ever.

Arriving at the Garden of Unearthly Delights and heading straight to the “indie” stage (or as indie as a stage can get at a dance festival) Adelaide DJ duo Def Starr pulled out the big guns with a bunch of dance floor fillers. The crowd’s love of all things dance music became apparent when a remix of Puttin’ on the Ritz was played and the kids loved it.

When the guys from Operator Please followed straight after they appeared tired and bored. Going through the motions of their new tracks and at one point even thanking the crowd for “being patient”, they did manage to get people semi-fired up with their tracks Get What You Want, Logic and Just A Song About Ping Pong. Although it was their take on a Beyoncé /No Doubt medley that got everybody singing along, which allowed singer Amandah Wilkinson to step away from the guitar and focus on entertaining the crowd, even if it was for only a couple of minutes.
Classic punter quote: “Do the song about playing pong!” – Intoxicated patron, Future Music Festival (2010).

While Erick Morillo satisfied the crankers with fail remixes of Heads Will Roll and Are You Gonna Go My Way, many flocked to Does It Offend You, Yeah? where what occurred was surely the set of the day. After being unable to perform in Melbourne (strangely due to their set being declared a wash out), it was as if the guys saved it all up for Adelaide. Lead singer James Rushent walked on stage and the first words out of his mouth were “wakey fucking wakey”, before starting straight into With A Heavy Heart (I Regret To Inform You). Their guitar heavy electronica vibes had the ability to not only get people jumping about, but to throw their jackets, shoes and hats in the air. Shit, at one stage a small tree was uprooted and somebody decided to wave it around. The crowd’s reaction to Battle Royale was amazing and it cements DIOYY as a superior Art Vs. Science – they’re louder, catchier and put on one hell of a live show.
Classic punter moment: David Letterman and Kid Rock (or two people with a serious case of doppelgangeritis) smashing it up to We Are Rockstars. Ironic and hilarious.

As mentioned previously Future Music patrons have short attention spans. If only Franz Ferdinand knew this. With an hour to fill Franz came out of the blocks hard and decided to get their commercially recognisable tracks out of the way (Do You Want To, No You Girls and Take Me Out). Once the latter was over, girls climbed down from shoulders, people spoke loudly amongst themselves and everyone flocked to the bar. It’s safe to say that the majority of their tracks were definitely wasted on the crowd there.
Classic punter moment: During the performance of Auf Achse, one bloke remarked that he didn’t think much of “this Frank Ferdinand DJ”.

Not lost on the crowd was anything David Guetta dished up who easily drew the biggest crowd of the day. He churned out all his hits (When Love Takes Over, Memories, Delirious, Sexy Bitch) and although the sound itself was a bit soft the dance crowd lapped it up.
Classic punter quote: “So do ya reckon T-Pain will be here to perform Sexy Bitch with him?” – Intoxicated Patron, Future Music Festival (2010).

As night fell a few people left Guetta early to catch the start of Empire of the Sun. This however proved unnecessary as the crowd were left waiting almost an hour whilst the guys apparently prepped themselves backstage. When they finally did take the stage they looked spectacular in a combination of spiky headgear, blue metallic bodysuits and what appeared to be aluminium foil, but in hindsight it probably wasn’t worth the wait. Surely most would’ve preferred a performance in a tweed jacket and jeans if it meant they could’ve scored a closer position for The Prodigy. After hearing a few tracks, namely We Are The People, Standing On The Shore and half of Walking On A Dream, the epic band on the next stage over started up and many were faced with a difficult choice.

The atmosphere for The Prodigy was almost breathtaking; a great mix of deep red lighting, thumping bass, pouring rain and a massive crowd. To be amongst it all while those English lads smashed out great tracks such as Omen, Poison and Out of Space was something extraordinary. But it was always going to be their classics (Firestarter, Smack My Bitch Up and Breathe) that got everyone stomping about in the mud.

By the end of it all most were tired and covered in dirt, with our beer buzz long since gone but to be entertained by at least a couple of class acts made it all worthwhile. Besides, it’s not everyday that you get to see Letterman and the debut of DJ Frank Ferdinand.

Sophie Siciliano

THE BIG PINK
TONIGHT (ALEX DROMGOOLE MIX)
(REMOTE CONTROL)
New Kids On The Block’s 1990 single Tonight never even made it to the top 10 in Australia, but it’s actually one of their more redeeming pop tunes. Despite not having cornered the tween market in pencil cases, sticker books and fully poseable Hasbro figurines, UK duo The Big Pink are making waves with a completely different tune of the same name two decades on from NKOTB. With a Happy Mondays lope and a nod to The Clash’s Train In Vain, the A Brief History Of Love version of Tonight has now been slightly tweaked by Alex Dromgoole (Bjork, Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp). A few of the industrial tassles have been removed (there’s less of a the meat-grinding abattoir ambience and the bass no longer sounds like an explosive bowel accident is imminent), but it’s still a ferocious pop tune. It’s like there’s an orgy in my ears and they’re giving my cochlea a reach-around.

THIS WEEK’S SINGLES PICKS INCLUDE:

HOLE
SKINNY LITTLE BITCH
(UMA)
At Sydney’s Big Day Out in 1999, Courtney Love invited Hoodoo Gurus guitarist Brad Shepherd on stage and stumbled through a cover of the Australian rock band’s Bittersweet. A decade later and with her career as patchy as Dave Faulkner’s hairline, Courtney Love now sounds like she’s plundering The Right Time for her demented Hole comeback single Skinny Little Bitch. It’s a feeble appropriation of her past glories, the former Miss World now broken and burnt. I was going to make a cheap joke as a parting shot, but having just listened to the power of Live Through This the comedy of Love’s new release turns to tragedy. Beyond fake.

EVERMORE
UNDERGROUND
(WARNER)
Even if this tune contained the secret code to getting in Katy Perry’s pants, you couldn’t get me to listen to it again. It’s like Evermore unearthed a Noiseworks B-side on their descent into pop limbo. Enjoy your stay, boys!

BRITISH INDIA
BENEATH THE SATELLITES
(SHOCK)
When they were young, they shone like the sun… I don’t even know what vim is, but when British India burst out of the Melbourne scene a few years back they had buckets of it. The cocky confidence was warranted – Black And White Radio and Tie Up My Hands were two of the finest indie releases of 2007 and often got by on nothing more than sheer energy. After tempering their spittle and venom with just the right amount of self-doubt and intrigue on their albums Thieves and Guillotine, suddenly British India have made a monstrous miscalculation with Beneath The Satellites. They’ve delighted in lifting from Blur and The Who in the past, but the chorus of Satellites is a career-stalling rip-off of polly wolly crappy Mavis’s tune Cry. The kids are all trite.

British India play Clipsal 500’s Jim Beam Track Sounds concert with Eskimo Joe and Galleon on Thu Mar 11.

His Two Cents: Yet another offering from director Tim Burton based upon material from another source (don’t you long for the far-off days of the wildly original Edward Scissorhands and Beetle Juice?), this is also one of his most flawed and frustrating, falling prey to the irksome notion that a fabulous star cast, major money and lots of technology (plus 3D innovations) will unfailingly create something brilliant. Cherry-picking beloved figures and situations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, we watch the improbably free-thinking and now-19-year-old Alice (Aussie Mia Wasikowska), escaping a marriage proposal and again falling down a rabbit burrow, banging her head and entering the realms of apparent fantasy, although this time there’s darker trouble afoot as a slightly Wizard Of Oz-tinged struggle between good and evil is afoot between the glam White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and the bizarrely-stunted and large-headed Red Queen (Burton’s offscreen partner Helena Bonham Carter, spiritedly stealing it). The Red Queen has control of the Jabberwock, the Bandersnatch and the Jubjub Bird and is preparing for a battle set to take place on the Frabjous Day, while the noble denizens of Wonderland (including Johnny Depp’s oddly unimpressive ginger-Scots Mad Hatter, Matt Lucas’ FX Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Stephen Fry-voiced Cheshire Cat and many others) are counting on Alice to help them, even if, in a rather tiresome but very Burtonesque conceit, she’s so estranged from her childhood dreams and fancies she initially can’t work out if she’s dreaming or (in a safely Disney fashion) losing it.
Although the original Alice stories are certainly episodic and stop-start (meaning that the many previous filmings have sprawled all over the place), this director’s shot takes too many liberties with the source, and wastes so much time making the Mad Hatter, the Tweedles and all the rest something more than mere caricatures (which they are) that everything winds up feeling lethargic and over-cluttered. And while the cast is undoubtedly amazing (other voicers include Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Barbara Windsor, just for starters), almost none of them are quite as amusing, grotesque or, ahem, three-dimensional as they really should be. And small Wonder.

Mad Dog

Her Two Cents: It's the film that knocked Avatar out of the top spot at the US box office, based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks (Nights In Rodanthe) starring two of Hollywood's rising romantic leads. It should be a slam-dunk success, but somehow in spite of such promise, it still manages to fall flat.
Home on leave for two weeks, conveniently named army man John (Channing Tatum) meets good-girl Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) and love ensues at Hollywood speed. Parting ways for the 12-month remainder of John's contract, long letters keep the pair together across the distance until everything is changed by the fall of the Twin Towers. John re-enlists, and the letters continue, but they become ever fewer until one final 'Dear John' letter officially bursts their bubble.
Punched from Sparks' form card of strained family dynamics and doomed holiday romance between the well-off nice girl and the working class boy with history (see also The Notebook, A Walk To Remember and The Last Song, out soon), pasts are hinted at but never explored while the future is tragically predictable, even when it wants to be a surprise. Wide-eyed Seyfried and stone-faced Tatum look the part but have zero chemistry and every awkward scene between the supposed lovers seems painfully forced.
There is an earnest and moving story buried somewhere under the banal prettiness, particularly the relationships around John's father and Savannah's friend Tim, but so many liberties have been taken with Jamie Linden's adaptation, the dig is barely worth it and once again the integrity of a foundation story has been tainted in favour of Hollywood romance.
Pretty and tragic, but also quite dull, the hopeless romantics may find something salvageable, but they might want to wait for the DVD.
Kat McCarthy

Jonathan Boulet is full of surprises. He has literally come out of nowhere, releasing his debut album at the end of last year with only a previous single release to his name. That single, A Community Service Announcement, has gone on to make big waves in the underground and mainstream communities alike. Heck, even Kanye West likes it! So it probably should have come as no surprise that on his debut headline tour of Australia, he would be rather good. And while he was rather good indeed, his first visit to Adelaide produced no great shocks.

At this point I must apologise to supporting acts Sooki and Jimmy & The Mirrors. I would have been there early enough to give you guys a write-up, but thanks to a new club night starting downstairs, venue priorities were focussed elsewhere and the media door list was running late at Rocket Bar. Que sera sera.

For a 21-year-old who hasn’t played many shows outside his native Sydney, Boulet exudes confidence on stage. After quickly introducing himself and his backing band, they launch into non-album noise ballad I Will Soldier On. An appreciative Boulet then thanked members of the crowd for the large turnout (it must have been close to capacity), and two audience members in particular for bringing their own maracas to the show.

For what started out as a project in his bedroom, Boulet’s solo material translates well to the stage. His fast-paced skiffle pop, in particular songs like 321 Ready Or Not and Continue Calling, get the crowd shuffling their feet and nodding their heads balancing well balanced with his slower stuff like 10 Billion Years.

In between songs he and his band jam together for what seems like an eternity, and this is the one big criticism of Boulet’s show tonight. Just after an energetic rendition of Ones Who Fly Twos Who Die, it’s a good few minutes before the next song starts and all momentum has been lost.  It’s clear he needs to tighten things up in this department.

Predictably, the band closed with A Community Service Announcement, complete with hand-clapping and sing-a-longs from the audience. A quite polished song on record, it comes alive when played in the raw and capped off an altogether solid performance.

It was perhaps unsurprising that Boulet’s live show would need a bit of ironing out, given that he’s only been on the road a short while. But you really can’t fault the lad too much. It’ll be interesting to see what he pulls out of the hat next.

Jimmy Bollard

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