An Epic Fail, or was it?
The only bad thing about this line up was having to choose which stage to prioritise!
I’ve been to a number of concerts and festivals over the years, but I’ve rarely organized them. Usually when I see tickets to a band I like, I procrastinate and don’t end up booking. It might be I just forget to come back to it, or I think I can’t spare the money at that time, or it would be impractical or selfish in some way for me to go along. Luckily I’ve had good mates over the years who find a reason to go and have invited me along and, no surprise, I’ve always enjoyed it immensely when I’ve joined them. Soundwave 2013 was a highlight; seeing Linkin Park, A Perfect Circle and Metallica to name just a few of the great bands that performed at that festival.
So last year when I saw Karnivool and Cog headlining a new festival called Monolith, I decided I was finally going to get on the front foot and go along to the Brisbane show. There were plenty of good reasons:
Karnivool and Cog are probably my two favourite Australian bands
I’ve seen Cog live once before, but have not seen Karnivool
It’s been a tough two-years for the Arts, so would be great to support local bands
It felt like we would be past the worst of COVID by the March date
It was clearly well past my turn to organize something on behalf of my friends
This is Cog. check them out at https://www.cog.com.au/
Pretty much it was a no-brainer! So, I put my procrastination to one side and immediately texted two good mates to see if they wanted to come along. One was interstate and would need to fly up from Sydney, the other lived in Brisbane. I was pumped when they both responded with a yes, and immediately got on and booked the tickets. Five minutes later, I had three tickets to the show sitting in my email inbox, good to go!
Fast forward about five months. Australia had endured another couple of COVID scares (courtesy of Delta and Omnicron variants) but seemed to be past the worst and, outside of WA, borders had remained open since late 2021. The festival date was rapidly approaching and my excitement was growing. We had decided to make a weekend of it, with my mate due to fly in on the Thursday night before the show. The flight wasn’t cancelled, ran relatively on time, and I picked him up from the airport smoothly. We had a good meal and shared a few beers that night, looking forward to the weekend’s festivities.
And this is Karnivool. https://www.karnivool.com
Friday dawned and after a bit of a sleep in we headed down to Big Cart Track for some go-carting. It was good fun, racing our first leg on a dry track, then the second leg after a splash of rain, drifting around the course and having a great time. Afterwards, we headed over to Your Mates brewery, though I must say getting in a regular car and driving by the road rules after tearing around on the cart track was difficult and took additional concentration! Perhaps luckily, I drive an aging Camry, so not exactly a high-performance machine condusive to breaking the road rules. Your Mates brewery was great; we had a good feed and a couple of great beers at a cool, relaxed but atmospheric venue.
Mid-afternoon, we were joined by my second mate and after a couple of beers at home, we headed out for dinner at a local pub in Palmwoods. However, I had forgotten how early things closed up in the hinterland region of the Sunshine Coast, and even though we arrived at 8:30pm, we only had about an hour to order and eat our meals and have a couple of drinks before things closed up. This was a Friday night by the way!
We headed across to another, later opening pub nearby and were transported back in time, with the older style pub-come-nightclub with the outdoors smoking section and flashing lights of the pokies visible through a glass door. Needless to say it didn’t tick all the boxes for us, so we didn’t stay long and ended up back at mine, having a few more beers and deciding to listen to some of the bands we were going to be seeing at Monolith that we were less familiar with; Sleep Makes Waves, Ocean Grove and Plini.
Note the dates that don’t say March 2022!!
This is when the Epic Fail part happened. While checking on the website for the other bands playing, one of my mates noticed an August date for the festival, rather than the original March date. The night stopped. Suddenly we were all on our phones searching. And what we found was…somewhat disappointing. The festival had been postponed three weeks earlier for somewhat unclear reasons. There had been no obvious border closures or lockdowns or particular reasons to think that it would have been and, while the tickets had come through smoothly when I bought them five months earlier, my email inbox had remained curiously empty of any communication regarding the change.
There was some silence. There was confusion. There was some shaky, disbelieving sort of laughter. There may have been a fairly rapid change of music, in protest of our disappointment (only temporary; how can I stay mad at that line up?). I felt bad for my mate who had flown up from Sydney for the show and should probably have had the chance to be forewarned and potentially change his flights.
Then, pretty quickly, the moment passed, we cracked another beer and kicked on. Talk turned to what we could do instead, laughing that at least we had found out before turning up at the venue in our band shirts the next day, looking like complete gumbies! We were able to cancel the accommodation that we’d planned for after the show, so were at least not out of pocket there.
While we would have loved to go to the festival as planned, the Saturday shaped up to be a pretty good day. We headed north towards the Noosa hinterland and climbed Mt Cooroora; a reasonably challenging climb but the view at the top making it worth it. We then drove over to Sunshine Beach at Noosa afterwards and had a swim to freshen up, before heading to the Surf Club and enjoying some beers and prawns looking out over the beach. This clearly sparked a taste for more seafood, because on the way home we ended up picking up a heap more prawns as well as a decent-sized bug and, combined with some left over brisket I’d cooked on the Thursday night, had ourselves a tidy little feast, with some good craft ale to wash it down.
We definitely were disappointed at the festival change of dates. But then we did this, and things seemed OK!
And doing this also helped manage the disappointment.
So while the festival part ended up being a fairly epic fail, the weekend was not. It was the best band weekend I’d had, where we didn’t actually get to see any bands play. And the upside; we always have the option to do it all again in August, this time with the music!