Darwin Festival

This last two weeks have been the Darwin Festival, some music, some theater, some performing arts stuff and some drivel, mostly drivel though, now I have a wide taste in music but I cannot get into Ethnic music, there have been some free concerts and even the pay concerts you can sit outside and listen for free, but the ones which were the ethnic output were beyond acceptability, listening to someone shouting tonelessly along with someone else singing OK to a racket of a useless musicians isn't my idea of easy listening music, I walked to one on the esplanade and kept walking back to the car as he was total crap, not that it was in a foreign language but because he was crap, totally toneless, completely flat, painful is the expression i would sum it up with. The this last Friday i thought there was a girl on from the USA described as the new Sheryl Crow and I like her, so i walked to the event and it started 30 minutes late and some guy came on wailing like a cat, along with some incredibly loud and not very good guitar playing, this went on for 3 songs and even though i was waiting for the girl i couldn't stand it any longer. When i got back home i read the guide and found i was on the wrong day, I was listening to some Timorese folk singer, man he was awful. So Saturday night i went along to the concert with beer in my back pack and sat outside for free in the Botanical Gardens, there were lots of drunken aboriginals wandering about in quite frighteningly large groups, I tried to look invisible, nothing happened luckily. So the music started and this Anne McCue was playing folk music to start with and it was OK, like a night in the pub with a local guitar player, then all of a sudden they leapt into soft rock and she was playing lead guitar, it was very good stuff, great rhythm and it was very pleasant. This went on for a short while then all of a sudden another concert behind me started up with some ludicrously loud bass playing to the point they drowned out poor old Anne, I couldn't hear what was going on, as i said i was sat outside the open air temporary stage built in the gardens, so i walked around the area and found a spot on the main road where i could sit down and listen OK, and when the music got better I could stand up and see over the fence and watch her on stage, I was almost dancing after about an hour, for me that is a sign she was OK. So I can say this was a success, but she will never be a Sheryl Crow, but it was only 10 minutes walk from my apartment.





On Sunday night was the closing event, this was a group of performing artists that use a 8 metre flexible pole that they stand on the top of and sway about to music, it is theater and pure entertainment, it is pretty watchable for about an hour and the kids thought it was fantastic. Far more important we all went for a curry and a beer afterwards.





So that was Darwin Festival, with the sway of some large globes it was all over again for another year. I know I don't like ethnic folk music as much as I ever did, it is worse now as they can get it played even louder.