What happens when you spend 12 days at a festival? Something horrible surely – if not to your body then certainly to your brain.
It’s not just all the music and the lights and how your body trembles and thrums with a phantom bass running through it – even hours after the gigs. It’s navigating all the people pushing past you who are off their heads, all the 15-year-olds and all the 50-year-olds who are wild-eyed, wrecked, munted, lurching around looking for somewhere to charge their phone.
It’s all the portaloos, all the queues for drinks. All the drinks. All the queues. Then there are the afterparties when the music proper finishes. They are designed to disorientate. In a laneway. In an old cinema. On a car park roof. On floors two to six of an abandoned government building. At an Italian restaurant where they are serving pasta Genovese at 2am and people are dancing on tables. The stamp on your arm reads BRUTAL. You dance in your overcoat on the freezing dancefloor. You lose your credit card but you don’t really care. Your phone is on 4% and it’s raining and you’ve lost your friends. You text them: “Where u? I’m on the metal platform near the cross.”
Big, sprawling festivals – like Glastonbury and Burning Man ... and we can add Hobart’s Dark Mofo to the list – appear chaotic and things are left to chance. But they are carefully designed and curated to bend our minds.
So it was for the last two weeks in Tasmania’s capital. Take for example last Friday, when one friend is trying to explain a performance he saw last weekend that really grossed him out (“There was a woman on stage and she had a tin of dog food and she was putting the dog food in her vagina then taking it out and throwing it at the audience, then putting it back in her vagina and spraying it in the front row”). In another context he might have been explaining a particularly pervy dream, or a porno but we knew it was real. Or almost real. Or real to him.
The next day, I run into one of the party’s organisers and ask about the act.
“She wasn’t spraying the dog food out of her vagina,” she clarified. “She sprayed it out her arse.”
Dark Mofo’s afterparties are called Night Mass and are the hottest ticket of the festival. They are where the really crazy stuff happens. One year my friend Marcus got kidnapped, blindfolded, driven around Hobart in the back of a van and taken to an abandoned gym where he was photographed tied to a chair. He showed me the picture on his phone. He looked unsettlingly vulnerable tied up under the strobe lights.
Another year, a fake hens night picked up random revellers off the street and took them out to a suburban field where the Glenorchy women’s football team performed some sort of weird dance on the oval and were then tackled by the fake hens who had taken off their clothes in homage to sporting arena streakers.
That is what you hear about the early years. But it’s different this year. Popular.
This year there was a lot of queuing in the rain, and hearing the next day about some unmissable DJ that was playing in the Bang Bang Bar and your friends would have taken you “but your phone was dead dude”.
The parties are where the real Fomo happens.
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Flying in from Melbourne to Hobart and the first thing I felt was the weather: 7C but the app tells me it feels like 1C or 0C. Locked out of my Airbnb (the owners had hidden the key too well), stashing my luggage in bushes and creeping around someone’s suburban garden in the 5pm pitch darkness felt like a chaotic arrival and therefore a portent for the 12 days ahead.
The first act was Tanya Tagaq at the Odeon, doing an Inuit throat singing thing in a performance where the song was unbroken and lasted for one hour and 15 minutes. It was entirely improvised and there was a choir behind her who made orgasmic, primitive and vaguely warlike sounds that reminded me of the boys in Lord of the Flies. Except this choir was much older and, I later found out, wasn’t even a choir.
After that I went to see 73-year-old Mike Parr being buried under the road. A group of us watched from the old Mercury building, drinking red wine out of plastic cups, as the road was cut and a slab of bitumen lifted and Parr took a ladder down (the top of his head disappearing like a letter being dropped into a postbox) and was then sealed in. For all the good times of the festival, this was the cloud that drifted across the bright moon. You’d be having fun – at the winter feast, drinking a hot toddy – and you’d suddenly remember: Mike Parr is still buried under the road.
The next night at the official opening drinks three or four people had repeated the same horrific rumour – one that you couldn’t help visualising in your mind. Mike Parr was going to kill himself in the box under the road. It was all part of his performance; “his final performance” they intoned with emphasis on the word final.
“He wouldn’t,” we said, aghast. And he didn’t. But there was the spectre. In this jaded age, looking for a genuine shock, this was performance art brought to its extreme conclusion.
The drinks where I heard the Parr rumours were at Dark Park, a place I never saw during the day, but in the seemingly constant dark had the vibe of a satanic hunting lodge. There, amid low, long couches and bearskin rugs and drums of fire, you had to be about two inches away from anyone before you could recognise their faces.
Outside, fires in the shape of a large cross burned.
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Week one turns into week two. Midweek, there weren’t the big parties but there were gigs and art to see.
Tim Minchin played to a packed house on Monday and his songs about Los Angeles were melancholy and seemed to be from a sunny, sad place – very far away from here.
On Wednesday Laura Jean, ice blond like Laura Palmer, played at the Avalon, a beautiful theatre from the 1930s, long closed but resurrected for the festival. It was both so new and so old that it wasn’t on Google maps and Uber drivers did confused laps in the rain.
From the Airbnb, I moved to a hotel in town where no one ever went to breakfast, and at the bar at night women in business attire were neatly sick in the pot plants. In the morning, eastern European heavy metal bands who hadn’t been to bed yet would sit in the lobby in black leather trousers drinking the last quarter of their tequila, complaining about jet lag.
I became nocturnal and started skipping breakfast too.
Week two and I was beginning to feel I’d crossed a border into an entirely different country. In this country it is dark all the time, and everywhere there are crosses and the city smells like fire. Every night you go out and before each band the same playlist is on a loop – Echo and the Bunnymen, Jesus & Mary Chain, Johnny Cash, Depeche Mode, Toto’s Africa and the lush orchestral arrangements of the Cure’s Disintegration album.
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On the shortest day of the year, we go to Mona, and in the late afternoon at the darkened tennis courts a woman in a fluffy white costume (like the bunny in Donnie Darko) beckons a small group of us down a path, past an empty rowboat along the water’s edge.
We come to a small courtyard and look up. A heavy metal band plays down into our void – and on the other side the blade of light, Spectra – the giant 15km beam. This could be a dream, I think.
When I do go to sleep my dreams are horrible, full of violence, blood and death. I wake up with a ringing in the ears and the stamps up my arm. BRUTAL.
Later I run into the festival director, Leigh Carmichael, and tell him about the dreams. The uneven surfaces, the lack of street light, the red crosses, the loud music and the lasers and lights at the gigs, the sonic bass, the darkness, all overload the mind, he says. The festival has an effect on the subconscious which feeds into dreams.
In the botanical gardens I go to an abandoned house that is very cold – colder than it is outside (It goes dark/ It goes darker still) – where I strap on some VR glasses and watch a Laurie Anderson-designed world, that is a black mirror to the already Dark city, and in the game I feel both trapped and free, as I fly between dark skyscrapers and the rain hits me on the face.
The second weekend rolls around and those of us who have been there for a long time have sunken eyes, dirty clothes that stink of fire and have started sleeping during the day and forgetting about homes, jobs, families and friends back on the mainland. We had been here forever and would never leave. We were entombed here with Mike Parr.
Our compadre – the heavy metal bands, Melbourne music reviewers and even the sunny PR people who had flown down from Sydney – were beginning to look waxy and vampiric. We had all gotten used to this perpetual night and dark clothes and the reflection on the black water of the red crosses and the reverberations of the bass that travelled up your spine, and the queues and the rain and the hot whisky and the strange bruises and constant uneasy feeling of low-level illness.
By night 11, when just before midnight I entered the Odeon and hundreds of people were wearing sinister-looking bags on their heads and the balloons released from the ceiling were not the soft kind but hurt when they hit you in the face and when through the crowd walked a dozen identical drag queens whose sequinned images was also shown on a large screen on stage, creating a nightmarish double vision and the people that slammed into me when dancing had dead eyes and cold bodies and when someone I was with murmured, maybe with irony “this is Australia’s Burning Man”, I knew I had been too long at the fair.
It was time to go home.