Woodford in review: Day Four

31 December 2009 by Max Easton

Soulshine is updating daily from the Woodford Folk Festival this year via photos and words trio Leigh Plover, Richard Wilson and Max Easton.  From the heart of the festival site comes this account of Day Four.

Being at a festival on December 30th with sights on a New Year's Eve rumpus is hard to manage. It's safe to say that dedicating the day to a festival pub crawl might not be completely wise, but hey, no one complained at the time. It's now the 31st and this supposedly daily update we were planning to do each morning has slowly crept up towards the early afternoon, which means it's only a few hours away from popping corks and trekking up to the Amphitheatre for the countdown to 2010. But let's not postulate about the day to come, this is supposed to be a review.

The 30th consisted of a sequential visit to each and every bar on the festival site, a crawl which brought us to settings wide and varied. Professionally, that means we saw a whole stack of great music to write home about...realistically though, it means we saw a whole lot of beer can condensation on each other's palms. The quality of the bar's vary as some are just tacked onto stages, with other's being significantly more unique. The Wood and Ivory is a beer garden nestled in a pocket of dense bush, making it as near to the best festival bar on the Australian festival scene as you could get. The Outpost bar at the very top of the festival's gigantic natural Amphitheatre is also a great place to drink from, one of which provided a stunning view of the Audreys who seemed to be delighting the punter's down below.

Ryan Meeking and the Few followed the Audreys, playing to about 100 people at a venue that probably nears a capacity of 50, 000. Something which is an absolute organisational joke that is completely unfair on an artist. I'm not sure where the idea to follow one of the bigger names of the day with an up-and-coming young Melbourne band came from, but it's definitely something that needs to be rectified for following years. To their credit though, Meeking and his band did extremely well with their short straw, playing some very tidy, very enjoyable rock and roll, a genre of which has definitely been favoured on this year's line-up to enjoyable consequence.

Finishing off the night with the raw, concentrated energy of LABJACD, the night before New Year's Eve was rounded out with vigour. Having now stuck this up on the internet for your convenience, it's time to get back to it. The festival is shaping up for a big night, typically one of the highest selling days, so if you're still toing and froing about getting your day pass, it's time to get onto it and begin the drive. Alternatively, if you're immune to alcohol poisoning, we'll see you bright and early on New Year's Day for some chilled festivalia.

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