The Prodigy, Franz Ferdinand Blitz Future Music Festival 2010

With Empire Of The Sun, Spank Rock and more...

Monday March 8th 2010 – The Future Music Festival hits Adelaide's Rundle & Rymill Parks with The Prodigy, Franz Ferdinand, Empire of the Sun, Erick Morillo, Boys Noize and Spank Rock...

An up-and-coming hip-hop star’s album sounds more psychedelic than MGMT and Ratatat combined. An Australian discards a decade of writing classic rock ballads for electronic extravagance. Big-name trance DJs enlists Pitchfork’s finest as guest vocalists. A British indie mainstay headlines a self-confessed “rave” festival. And a rock music reviewer, complete with inappropriate attire, is meant to feel welcomed at said festival.

I say “meant” because, at the end of the (festival) day, the Future Music Festival was not the most welcoming place for what it attests to have accommodated for through its lineup. This has nothing to do with organisation or the bands, yet the atmosphere itself. If this festival is indeed indicative of the future of humanity, I do not want to be a part of it.

Any festival where a guy simply trying to leave the heaving throng of the main stage crowd is greeted with “Wat du fuk R u doin u fagget! Git ‘way frum me U Gaylord!!!” (pronounced as written) will not be seen in a positive light. Especially when the person making this call is only wearing a pair of G-Star underwear and watching David Guetta.

For the record, it is this select majority that makes festivals unbearable for many a music fan. If it were up to me, most of my word count would be used to write a scathing open letter directed bluntly at that select majority. But I have a word count, an editor, stakeholders in this content, and really much better things to do than to whine for 800 words or more about the several girls and guys who look like they’re on the set of an amateur porno and make normally danceable, fun music akin to the experience of chopping off one’s ear.

That’s not to say it was all bad. For every failed-attempt-at-avoiding-an-overhyped-superstar-DJ, there were quaint moments of brilliance. And by quaint moments of brilliance, I mean The Prodigy headlined. Everyone else phoned it in.

Or at least everyone that I saw. Operator Please were the first interesting act in a clash-heavy timetable (apologies, I did indeed miss Does It Offend You, Yeah? Booka Shade and Sven Vath). They’ve always been good with simple, twee pop, today giving a set of rehashed debut tracks that slight rave feel (read: they added synthesisers to most of songs).

The song that was once in everyone’s head, Just A Song About Ping Pong, hardly causes a ripple today but at least they’re playing well and enjoying themselves amongst paper flowers and streamers. They leave and the Aston Shuffle arrives on stage. Someone screams “Yes! Real dance music!” I leave.

I contemplated many a scenario behind Franz Ferdinand being booked for this festival, of all festivals to be booked for. Money? Stupidity? Intense risk taking? All of the above? Probably just the money, actually. And, well, they didn’t even try. They felt uncomfortable on stage in front of ravers and the ravers felt uncomfortable with a guitar pop band pulling out a greatest hits set in front of them. Sure, everyone sang along to the songs they knew, but otherwise it was a strange setting for them.

The worst facet, removing their peculiar performing environment, was that they were just plain. When Metric was faced with the same problem at last year’s Parklife, they pulled out all guns and eventually had the crowd in their hands. Alex Kapranos and company seemed content to just poke them every now and again.


If Franz Ferdinand were poking the crowd, then Empire of the Sun had built a 2ft-thick concrete wall between his audience and himself. Was he lip-synching? Was he bored? Was he too concerned with his impending UK tour? Has months of performing to the same disrespectful festival crowds with the same old lot of songs paying its toll on Luke Steele? The over-the-top performance aspects were all there (wait, there goes the LCD screen), but any sense of connection, albeit impersonal or personal, was gone. He began to warm to the crowd as he wandered around the edges of the stage singing Without You, but by that point I was already on my way out.

As so far I’ve had mediocre bands, bad sound, poor timetabling and crowd members from the seventh layer of hell. Aside from a brief run at “roller disco” and Bowie-themed face painting this festival has become akin to stress incurred when post-festival season credit card bills arrive. Then, in an act signalling a truthful plea for forgiveness, Liam Howlett, Keith Flint and Maxim Reality take the stage screaming World’s on Fire. A sea of bodies became a leaping, hypnotized chorus and the stage becomes a crucible, leaving behind the passion, testosterone and ferocity that the entire festival till this moment lacked.

Suddenly my worries were alleviated; the grandstand I am on feels like it may collapse and I may soon die amongst the same ilk that I’ve spent the past six hours detesting. But does that matter when you’re witnessing over twenty thousand punters being controlled by legends of the rave genre as they slap out Firestarter? Of fucking course not.

In what I had pictured as an escape to beat the crowds became simply a necessary departure, albeit without any sense of loss. Would I return next year to face another day of horrid conditions just for (presumably) one of the greatest live bands alive again? Knowing my spur-of-the-moment attitude, probably. Will I like it? Ask me in a year’s time, u fagget.