Despite the threats of an afternoon thunderstorm, and the storms engulfing the Australian music festival landscape, Wildlands in Adelaide was wilder than ever.
While recent years have seen a severe contraction of the post-pandemic music festival boom, as high airfares and the strong Australian dollar rendered touring uneconomic, Gippsland’s NYE camping festival Beyond the Valley and its Wildlands offshoots have remained strong. Queensland’s leg of the tour drew headlines because of the tardy arrival on stage of orange maned headliner Ice Spice, but the Billboard chart-topping rapper delivered a spicy set as she twerked upon inflatable platforms while dedicating hit ‘Baddie’ to her haters.
Some media commentators predicted Ice Spice might not be invited back to Australia for a while following her two track performance in Queensland, but as she rapped on ‘Baddie’, “she a baddie, she know she a ten”. Judging by the audience’s reaction to her set, where grown men were hoisted onto shoulders wielding pink American flags with her face on them, raps new Ice will keep coming back as long as she continues dropping the rhymes and killer lines like “you ain’t shit, you ain’t even a fart”.
Strong women with attitude was a feature of this year’s Wildlands. First Nations rapper Barkaa inspired a dance circle in the early afternoon on “Big Tidda”; there were back flips on the dry parkland grass as punters one-upped each other. Barkaa delivered searing set of tracks on deaths in custody, smoking bongs in 40-degree sheds, and her new and likely to be controversial new NWA-inspired cop killing track “Red Rum”.
With a blonde and black mullet, thigh high black boots and Amy Winehouse attitude, Lola Young has the sass and the pipes to own a festival stage. Lola’s teenage angst single ‘Messy’ from last year has 123 million Spotify streams and counting; her lament about wanting to be herself but questioning whether this is allowed struck a chord with the all-ages audience. So much so that she played it twice: first acoustically and then with her tight full band.
Like Ice Spice, fellow American star Tinashe came with a back-up dancer entourage. Looking like Beyonce but without Jay-Z, the child-actress turned R’n’B star is on her ‘Nasty’ world tour. Seven albums into her career, Nasty is her biggest hit in years. Unlike her ex-boyfriend, beleaguered NBA player Ben Simmons, Tinashe doesn’t miss her shots. She resolved for 2025 to involve “No Broke Boys”.
The indie portion of the line-up was represented by Royel Otis who, with their understated stage presence, let their songs do the talking. Alongside their biggest hit, ‘Oysters In My Pocket’, it was the cover versions of Cranberries classic ‘Linger’ and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder On the Dancefloor’ which lit up the crowd,
For the electronic music fans, the late afternoon and evening featured turntables and heavy bass, as Fisher, Marlon Hoffstadt and Chase & Status got the feet stomping in the grass. Fire cannons burst into the grey summer skies to mark the conclusion of Adelaide’s second-biggest summer music fixture. With the demise of rival festivals, you can only see Wildlands getting bigger and better again next year.
No Comments