Golden Plains #5 - update!

My Golden Plains experience has been amazing.

And not only because of the supernatural atmosphere in Meredith and their compost loos, the Hare Krishna feast plate for 10 dollars only or the veggie burgers in the left side of the stage... but specially because of the wonderful people I shared the Festival with, friends from the diving cruise in the Great Barrier Reef and their friends that ended up being my friends too! As a big family with babies included, a couple brought their 6 months old baby Louis, a prospective musician and heart-breaker (drummer?, bass player?), we set our tents and got ready to enjoy a weekend of music all together, taking off our shoes with every band we really liked and waving them in the air. Yes, this is the way the audience shows their like and it seems that it's a kind of communication that only works in the Golden Plains Festival, not in any other even the Meredith Music Festival that has been running for 20 years now and that takes place in the same venue around Christmas time every year.

It always have moved me to see how people from different backgrounds, countries (with their own accents), works, etc. can agree in music, the international and the emotional language beyond all border...


That's why I want to thank everybody for a unique musical experience and specially to Pete Keogh and Dan Fuller, who came to rescue me from my Nash experience sleeping surrounded by flying bugs of all kinds and that help me to recover from the drama of the hypothetical and eventual loss of my passport. Special thanks too to my favorite chica from the Festival, Julie (Super) Spice, who let me use her spare tent, chair, sleeping bag, beer holder, her cooler and her car as wardrobe... what a real lady! thank you so much!



Bands
- Os Mutantes: not for me, although I enjoyed for a few minutes.
- The Hold Steady: this band from Minesota, where part of my friends are (again Dan and Ben, son of the right hand), didn't get me into the move but also it was fun at the beginning until I started found them a bit "lyrics-full". Some of you already know what I think about this kind of "music": if you have that much to speak, then write a book... :) - no hurt feelings please!
- Joanna Newsom: I missed her!
- Belle & Sebastian: front row, girls from college all around me, screaming, crying, pushing... and me in the middle, still and cold. Mmmm no, they didn't get me either.
- Best Coast: fun, fun, fun, fun!! New dance moves inventions with Kristy and Phil.
- Architecture In Helsinki: who knew they were from Melbourne? I didn't! They played late at night and I was feeling quite exhausted but every time I tried to go back to my tent, they kept pushing me back to the crowd and making me dance with any of their big songs or just with a cover going back to the 80ies of I've been thinking about you by Londonbeat.
- Wavves: missed them
- Hawkwind: missed them
- Jamie Lidell: OMG, he rocked! he was my big band handsome man, yeah.
- The Clean: missed them
- The Middle East: great band! hope to catch them again soon since they are a big and good Aussi product... not as Vegemite, I'm afraid! "We’re from Townsville, Australia and we play music" I'm Ilu from Spain. Nice to love the music you play and it would be a pleasure to see you grow and grow!
- Boy & Bear: nice too
- Mount Kimbie: missed them
- Airbourne: oooooh ho ho ho, McKeefe forgot for a couple of seconds to use his voice of hell and it made me feel that he was a human being but apart from that... excellent!
- Robert Forster: missed him
- Pulled Apart By Horses: between the veggie burger I was eating and the band, I prefer the burguer... not my kind!
- The Besnard Lakes: rocked me!
- Cosmic Psychos: I think they were fine...
- Justin Townes Earle: missed them
- Wildbirds & Peacedrums: OMG, reminded me somehow to Florence + the Machine, but with no machine at all, just drums and other percussion instruments such as xylophones!! very good one. Shoes off!
- Imelda May (again and always!): excuse me. Imelda you were the Queen of Hearts in the Festival. All shoes off for her and her band!
- Bamboo Musik DJs: missed them
- Graveyard Train: really good, we all are gonna die. Let's live the moment. Shoes off!
- Brain Children: no idea... missed them
- World's End Press: oh, no! it looks I missed a lot of bands :(!!
- J-Wow feat. MC Kalaf (Buraka Som Sistema DJ/MC set): bit tiring, kuduru was all that I could hear from my tent in a very "cold cold night".
- Magic Kids: missed
- Sonny & The Sunsets: missed

Dig on vegan food (no, I haven't heard your band cause your guys are pretty new)

This post goes specially dedicated to my beloved mum who thought I had became “normal” and felt happy about it. Mum, I'm still vegan! But being vegan is not special in Australia (sic). Dam it!

Lately, two ideas / Chinese proverbs has have been very live in my head and they are: “knowing is the basis of appreciation” and “hearing something a hundred times is not as good as seeing it once”. The second maybe doesn't make any sense here but it has it in the post about the Great Barrier Reef and in other orders of life such us love.

I want to focus in the first one: Australian people seem to be very linked to their environment and live it in a very deep way maybe because they love doing sports in the nature (surf, kayak, trekking...). Anyway, their respect towards the animals -although they still keep them in zoos, they are a kind of “zoos in he wild”-, seems to transcend to other orders of live such as food and if there is a huge variety of meat to eat, from kangaroo to emu, there is also an important awareness of what this meat comes from and how the animals are treated in order to get it.

Being in an small airport with the exact time for a juice and something to eat or on board of a boat in the middle of the sea and nothing to do but eat, it is not a problem even when it looks like there will be few options to choose. Many fast food restaurants (www.healthyhabits.com.au) and coffees chains has an offer of vegan food enough to choose. My choice today: vegan baguette made of lettuce, pumpkin, pesto, red pepper, toffu, eggplant and a juice called the red baron made of tomato (a must for me when traveling), carrot, celery and beetroot... delicious!



Also, my first day in Cairns was a market day and I could enjoy the lively of Rusty's market, in the back door of Gilligans (a horrible backpackers hotel full of party for young drunks) where many Asian people has their own stall, children play ukulele (Carmeeeen!), organic cosmetic (Martaaaa!) is sold and rice with strange mixtures is cooked to sell. I had there a rice with something I couldn't identify but it looked as a cashew, and coco, a sambusak of vegetables and a refreshing cane juice on the rocks with lemon.



And I could write a post with my daily meal but don't want to bother you and myself with that (no worries!!)

Maybe because of the variety of fresh vegetables, maybe because they really love doing sport in the nature (surf, kayak, trekking...) what make them respect the animals, maybe because of the influence of Asian cultures where the meat is not at hand for everybody, I feel that the vegetables and fruits are much more appreciate here than in Europe. I don't really know. But people is more conscious about the existence of food with names as pumpkin, beetroot, lettuce, quinoa, etc.

An now, for a bunch of reasons: because it makes me laugh so much, because it's about a sad thing but from a witty perspective, ironic, because for me this is one of the best songs from the last decades along with its video and never get tired of it... oh yes, and because it says something about vegan food at one point and simply because this is my blog and I want to hear it and share it, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Dandy Warhols!



Are you looking so bohemiam like me? Cause I'm getting wise...