Good Vibrations Sydney 2010

I won two tickets to Good vibrations 2010 in a 25 words or less competition. ( I wrote a very clever line which I shall keep secret ). Matty made me enter the competition, so I gave the second ticket to him as reward. It was pretty hot midday so we bought some sombreros and awesome hologram sunnies at Market City and suddenly we were ready – so here we go!

Good Vibrations Festival @ Centennial Park

Assessment Time: 16:00 – 22:00 (closing time)
Website: http://www.gvf.com.au
Address: Centennial Park Sydney
Dress Code / Door Policy: anything goes, no dress code.
Entry Fee / Cover Charge: Prepaid tickets were $145 each. I won tickets to the show today.
Inside: There were 5 official big areas for the acts to appear. There were also 2 smaller sponsored areas for dancing as well.
Cloak Room: $5 per item
Bar: $8 light beers, $10 smirnoffs. Thanks to the cool weather, there weren’t so many people lining up for a bar, and we had some booze in our hands within 3 minutes of lining up.
Bathroom Line: Appalling at about 20 minutes
Acts: Salt-N-Pepa, Armand Van Helden, DJ Crazee, Aston Shuffle were the main acts we visited today. Other acts included Busta Rhymes, Naughty by Nature. The Killers and Friendly Fires (I was dying to see Friendly Fires) had pulled out of the Sydney show.
Music: A mix of Indie Rock, Hip Hop, and House
Atmosphere: Despite the pullouts, the atmosphere was buzzing throughout the whole day. People are everywhere and its quite good. Later in the early evening it starts to rain but not too hard, but it rains enough for people to get out their ponchos. Instead of being a downer, people embrace the rain and keep dancing and singing along. The rain is also a huge welcome as earlier it was pretty stinking hot earlier in the afternoon.

Videos:

Salt-N-Pepa : Let’s talka bout Sex + Man Dancing on Tent

Everyone is cheering for this guy more than Salt N Pepa – hilarious – The poor guy was most likely kicked out, but for immortal fame in the eyes of thousands? Sure, why not.

Salt-N-Pepa : Push It

I was disappointed with the Salt N Pepa set – didnt know they were doing a DJ set. They were playing house music for crying out loud!

DJ Crazee: Playing Daft Punk’s “Alive”

DJ Crazee’s set was aweseome.. very well mixed and kept everyone going. Not a dull beat. Was very happy with this set

Armand Van Helden Good Vibrations: Bonkers

Armand Van Helden (Duck sauce): aNYway

I enjoyed Armand’s set. The rain gave a bit more of a wet atmosphere, but really prevented me from doing some epic dancing – I was just standing around singing along to the songs like everybody else. It would have definitely been more epic if his set was originally set in the Laundry tent where the surface was dancable.

The Aston Shuffle: Play the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “heads will roll”

Timeline: So we got in without problems, cloak room no dramas – plenty of people on hand to help out, but when we went to Good Vibrations Stage.. we couldn’t even get close. There were just so many people!

Timeline

Big Sombrero Syndrome
We dig deep into the Good Vibrations crowd, but in every spot we stood, the people behind us would tell us to take off our Sombreros. HELL NO! We moved on and kept running into people who wanted us to “TAKE IT OFF!”. No. NO. nuuuuuuuuuuu!!! We finally found a little spot where there was a 1 metre gap behind us, an we happily stood there and watched the festivities.

Long toilet lines
These are a feature of every event for the people who purchased General tickets. Even so, there is only one VIP set of toilets – if you were at the back at the Star Bar area or the Roots tent, you would have to trek across to the other side of centennial park in order to get into the VIP tent and then there would probably be another line inside as well. anyway we met a friend lining up for the toilets which was pretty funky dory!

We met them in the toilet line

Toilet competitions
Not sure if it was the sunnies, the sombreros or just our presence as men but we somehow are talking to all these girls in line! We made a challenge to see who would be quicker in the bathroom. I put down the gauntlet and declared I could be in an out in 1 minute. I barely scraped by – in and out of the toilet in 55 seconds. Oh yeahhh… Im the man! I can only thank god for giving me good muscular control over my bladder. I won the competition, but no prize to be had. Thats a relief.

Man with a suspicious backpack
There’s a man who has a backpack with a huge tube coming out of it and he’s sucking on it. How on earth did he sneak that in??!!

His girlfriend offers us a sip.. sure. It’s just water!! BOOO.

It's only water from the backpack 🙁

2 girls tonging each other like theres no tomorrow
We go inside the green room – its very relaxed here, but of course theres a DJ and we dance. The music is surprisingly easy to dance to and I enjoy it. I can’t remember exactly what type of house it was. There’s also a very high ratio of women in here, probably because this room was sponsored by SportsGirl. In a matter of moments I am dancing with a girl, woo! But then a friend of hers steps up behind her and grinds her bum. Ok fair enough, we keep on dancing, a sandwich of sorts. But this second girl.. she was totally grinding her friend really really rough, like dry humping. Suddenly a girl takes my sombrero and they start making out hardcore under my awesome hat!! Matty is laughing his ass off. I imagine myself under my hat, and I feel sad.

Last act (and women) of the night
So for the last act we went to The Aston Shuffle. I had already seen Basement Jaxx at Future Music Last year, so it was some proper dance time! I’m not familiar at all with the Aston Songs, but everyone under the tent here were dancing and cheering. I especially went all out with my socks being wet, and we get lots of awesome attention. We dance and a hot asian girl joins in our circle. I once again did something stupid and TALKED TO HER. She ran off.

But hey, another girl came along, gave me a random pash. I tried to talk to her but she, too, ran off. I REALLY HAVE AN UGLY VOICE!

Look! It's a girl in a punctured ball used as a poncho, lol.

Recommendation
It rained today and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Everybody else was going through the same experience and it became a kind of a comraderie. It just wasn’t fun walking out of the venue. Speaking of walking out, it was THE LONGEST walk out to the bus stop, and having wet socks really sucks. At least I wasn’t muddy like some of the others that were spotted.

Apparently the Naughty By Nature set was epic. I could see their entire tent was packed with no moving room. anyhow, without the Killers, it was still an awesome day for us. Having free tickets really helped.

Good Vibrations Sydney – 8/10