Friday 02/02/07 The Big Day Out @ Adelaide Showgrounds, Australia

The sun is directly overhead, it’s thirty-seven in the non-existent shade, and if this were a Sergio Leone production, someone would be crawling off to die behind a rock. The audience would watch from the refrigerated comfort of the cinema. In reality the crowd are out in the heat, Snowman are hogging the only shadows, and the whole arrangement must be the next best thing to the Leone film. Take one part spaghetti western, add some horror and schlock, some art house musings and a smattering of dodgy sci-fi, and you’re coming close to the wide-screen images Snowman evoke in their taut, high-energy rock and roll. B-movies, A-music.

Over on Orange – one of the two main stages – we’ve got Jimi Hendrix. Sorry, it’s New Zealand rapper Scribe with a sampler. Oh well. Despite a reputation for a social conscience (he’s been described as “the real deal alternative to gun-toting, bling-laden cash hip-hop”) Scribe’s performance is peppered with the same old banalities: “Make some noise, laydeez” and “This one is for all the MySpace friends”. Enough of the Internet. It’s time for BeerSpace.

Word from the Blue Stage suggests that the most entertaining moment of My Chemical Romance came before they took to the stage and the announcer asked the audience not to crush the young girls down at the front. “It’s quite possibly their first gig and shouldn’t be their last just because they have bad taste.” That report may or may not be accurate and impartial.

On my way to catch the last few minutes of The Sleepy Jackson, it seems prudent to rehearse a few metaphors for “impotent, confused, po-faced rubbish”. But some sort of rock monster has clearly been called up instead, and the crowd is being given the old everything louder routine. When I get there, much to my astonishment, those crunching guitars are actually being ridden by Luke Steele, the Sleepiest of them all. Given Steele’s reputation for chopping and changing, both with his music and his band, it’s a little too early to eat my hat just yet, but I am considering how to wash it down.

In the Boiler Room, by far the coolest place that any of the crowd has access to, Peaches is going off and taking off, though she wants us to go down. The instructions, along with her knickers, just keep on coming. “Shake your dick, shake your tits”. We do our best to comply. Though now with added Herms – an all-girl backing band, whose drummer once played with Mötley Crüe – Peaches looks as much like Wonder Woman as she ever did, even with one of those many pairs of knickers caught around her thighs. She often stands stock still, looking down on us all from the drum riser, but there’s an impressive energy in her and Herms’ performance.

The Vines are playing mid-afternoon on a side stage, but the crowd is so dense that it’s a struggle just to get to the mixing desk and a position where it’s possible to see the band. Singer/guitarist Craig Nichols has lost his edge since the last time I saw the band, and for once that’s a good thing. It’s a relief not to be wondering how long he has left. Nichols still doesn’t connect with the audience all that well, but he stays out of the way enough for the music to do it for him. At the end of the set he knocks over the drum kit and hurls his Strat at the backdrop, just like in the old days, but this time it seems like a good-natured part of the act rather than a cry for help.

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