Blueprint Festival Review (2009)

25 minutes from Ararat in North-West Victoria, the inaugural Blueprint Festival kicked off the 09/10 Australian festival season with headliners like Jebediah, Tim Rogers, The Panics and The Beautiful Girls. Soulshine was on site via photo and words duo Richard Wilson and Max Easton.

From the outset, it was easy to get enthusiastic about the Blueprint Festival. The main page of the official website decreed a music festival revolution; a festival of renewed vigour and corrected priorities. It declared the death of warm beer out of a can, the deaths of pill-popping lunatics, the introduction of new, quirky covered stages, a fresh line-up and, all-in-all, a flippin’ good time. Despite the raging, wet and boggy hand of God doing everything it could to work against this new festival testament and some organizational mishaps to boot, it was proven to be nothing short of three days of frolicking fun.

On arrival, driving through fossilized bog zones of trucks, we noticed that things hadn’t quite gone to plan for the organizers of Blueprint. Ararat had scored itself weeks of torrential downpour; great for the vast canola fields and sheep paddocks, not so great for hosting a music festival in a natural ampitheatre adjacent to a swamp. By 4 o’clock, with attendees waiting patiently by their tents - an hour until the timetable spoke of the beginning of the festival - there was no power. In fact, the stages weren’t quite set up and there was a hell of a lot of hurrying going down in the fenced off grounds. By 8 o’clock people were starting to get let in. By 8:30, the first hints of tunes were creeping their way up to the masses idling at camp, yet, through some colossal miscommunication, security refused to let anyone in by any other means than one at a time. Sure, that worked for Mr. Black’s Maths class, but with a couple of hundred people at the gates starved of a festival that they’d payed for, it resulted in a semi-riot as the flummoxed masses removed fencing and charged the source of the festival’s opening tunes.

From there, the laptop, drum-kit and hat-backwards man-on-a-microphone combo of the Resin Dogs kicked off the main stage followed by a sound-stage stained Epicure who struggled through their set before the arrival of universally accepted festival favourite The Beautiful Girls. With the mishaps played by bogged semi-trailers and machinery, the timetable had been drastically rearranged. Rumours flew all over the place at what was to take place and it took on a semblance of a lucky dip. It felt as though absolutely anyone could come on stage at any one time, and often, they did. There were an abundance of acts who missed out on their set, but there’s no doubt that it was out of Blueprint’s hands and into the hands of a raging cumulonimbus. The Beautiful Girls arrived to tremendous applause and played a solid mix of old and new, with a heavy feel of a new direction towards the bass and echo of dub. Followed by a reformed blast from the past in the guise of Jebediah, the first night rounded off to be a great night of tunes. Jebediah’s set was perfectly arranged, taking their hallmark tracks from ‘Slightly Oddway,’ debuting some solid new efforts and giving good coverage to their entire discography. If anything came out of Blueprint’s musical efforts, it was the eagerness that followed Jebediah’s set as to what the late 90’s legends have to offer at the end of this decade.

A seedy hangover the next morning led itself into the Saturday. Celebrating the death of warm beer from a can (with a warm, canned Melbourne Bitter hangover on the tail,) the day looked positive, with back-to-back sets from some of Australia’s favourite festival acts. Of course, in keeping with the night prior, the 11:45 am starting time skewed forward an hour or two. Highlighting the day, and arguably, the festival, Shane Nicholson mounted a stool adjacent to a lap steel and bass guitar and delivered a dosage of country inspired folk. From there, 50’s rock throwbacks, The Basics preceeded 90’s Aussie legends The Fauves and the crowd-drawing Ash Grunwald. Add Bertie Blackman to that triple-header and the day had been padded out with more great music than you could shake a wet and muddied stick at. Spirits were high, the bar was on song and everything was working out fine. All this before Tim Rogers had taken the stage.

Taking a leaf out of Bruce Springstein’s book, Rogers arrived in country inspired attire, playing with a near-bluegrass backing band over a half-sized acoustic. The positivity drawn from that set was flipped on its head as a siren indicated the arrival of the overtly political Blue King Brown; life is preachy. Summarising every clichéd activist belief in a single breath, we left at ‘save the whales’ and made the distorted guitars and indie yelps of the Fearless Vampire Killers a welcome alternative. The Panics followed, showing that every piece of their recent fame is justified with an extremely tight set played in front of one of the largest crowds of the festival.

Sunday’s hangover was in fierce competition with the Saturday prior and was declared a resounding victor. This day was arranged in accord with that, with a more chilled out list of acts and the major names ending at 5pm for anyone departing for a Monday morning’s work. The festival main stage closed down - presumably to take advantage of a two day rental fee – and the day was set for a trifecta of Triple J favourites in the form of The Boat People, Old Man River and Clare Bowditch. The latter played a bizarre set, introducing some of her rumoured German electro-pop tunes to Australian audiences. The night finished off with another timetable rearrangement, leaving many an audience confused, but pleased at the early start of Lowrider, who went down extremely well and were a fantastic way to cap off the names of the first ever Blueprint Festival.

Blueprint was a mash of the good and the bad, but for the most, you can excuse Blueprint of the mishaps. If anything, the only thing Blueprint were guilty of is failing to match walk to talk, with their front page promises playing as such: great beer – MB Cans or delicious Mountain Goat at the same price, quality bistro food: rissoles between two slices of white bread, quirky cover – a Red Bull tarp. Judging a festival on its essential qualities though, and Blueprint passes with soaring colours; attendees were good natured and in high spirits, the line-up was grand and tickets were cheap as hell. With a bit of luck, Blueprint will manage to dust the dried mud off their shoulders and swing themselves around for year two. This is a great festival set in a beautiful site with the right people running it and we’d love nothing more than to be back there again in 2010.