Garden Music Festival

This review can be found in 3D World.

Garden Music Festival
Government House
Sunday, October 19

Walking past the gates of Government House on Sunday towards Garden Music, I felt compelled to turn to my lover and ask: “Are we in the right place?” For sure enough, the short glimpses of the perfectly manicured grounds gave way to babies, kites and women with wide-brimmed hats.

Things were only slightly different once we were inside the grounds—sure enough, Entropic were there on centre stage, cruising through one of their jazzy percussive melodies and trying to will the crowds away from the coffee stand, but the clientele of Garden Music had remained relatively unchanged: families galore, interspersed with the occasional young couple. It’s true, the sunny day and lazy beats made for a perfect pairing, but I couldn’t help feeling a little out of place. This feeling was only heightened as we walked past a herd of elderly citizens, grouped together under the shade of a tree in large sun chairs, raving about pensions and what not.

The 1940s vibe continued well into the Government House grounds, where the croquet and badminton were in full swing. After a moment or two of excited anticipation at living out my Alice In Wonderland fantasies (I’ve wanted to play croquet ever since reading that book), my lover and I descended into the field where we amused ourselves for about two minutes playing badminton, before the huffy game attendants told us, rather sternly, that we could just walk onto the field and start playing, we had to get in a line. Fuck that, thought we. So it was on to croquet, which turned out rather disappointing, given the weight of the mallets and the surprising difficulty of coordination.

By that stage we were content to simply lie down on the lawns with some garlic prawns and a glass of wine and listen to Hermitude as they took to the stage with their Cuban-based rhythms, jazz and hip-hop, while watching the small crowd that had formed in front of the stage, dancing along, waving their arms in some sort of ritualistic, rain-dance kind of way.

And so the afternoon slipped away, until the excited screams of children got too much for us and so we said goodbye to one of the most confusing, yet delightfully fun music festivals we’d ever been to.