Splore your musical side

Maybe I am not in the right scene but until I found out that Lupe Fiasco was playing at Splore this year I don’t recall ever hearing about this 12 year old three day festival.

As a festival you can see the influences. The organisers have been to Burning Man and there is a fair share of punters with their butterfly wings and devil horns. The line up includes not only the main stage featuring Lupe Fiasco and Bassment Jaxx DJ set on Friday, King Kapisi and Sola Rosa on Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon with Nathan Haines, but also fringe acts such as beat poets The Artist Formerly Known as Bob Geldolf, who were actually quite good.

However, what about the information that you can’t get from their website?

A festival, to me, should be festive and carnival like. I don’t want to see everything polished and corporate. I want it to feel like a circus and I think that Splore has that nailed. To stereotype it, it is a hippie festival with good music and, therefore, there are all the hippie clichés that you come to expect. There were the drumming circles and people with juggling balls but the vibe of the thing is pretty free. Some festivals you go to have a crowd who dresses up to get noticed and be the ‘crazy’ ones, whereas for Splore some were dressed crazy, but I think they were just crazy people not normal people trying to get their crazy on.

The thing that makes the atmosphere really is the site. Tapapakanga Regional Park is spectacular. Even if you don’t go there for Splore it is well worth an Auckland day trip during the summer. It is right next to the water and with the boats moored in the bay it makes it feel like instant holiday.

The first thing that you get to on entry is the food village which contains all of the food options that you’ve seen at every other festival you’ve been to. This of course means that the food is good, overpriced, and most likely made out of free range organic lettuces.

Down by the beach is full of stalls where various vendors can sell you their wares. Havaiana have a stall there but that is about as corporate as it gets with the rest of the stalls leaning more towards the clothing and fashion of the free spirited.

Past the stalls towards the end of the bay is filled with creative installations that include anything from the tree of life to a cycling movie theatre and to be fair, although the number of works was small, the standard of the work was pretty outstanding.

Below: Living Lounge

It is a festival though and, as with all things, it is not complaint free. It is a music festival first and foremost and there were some sound issues – particularly affecting the Lupe Fiasco set. Also, if there is music you expect dancing so making the crowd stand side on down a hill doesn’t make any sense. My ankles let my body dance for about 30 seconds before it was resigned to just letting my head bop for the rest of the evening.

All in all though, it was a good time. The festival is glass free which means that you can’t BYO alcohol but it seemed fairly evident that as long as your substance of choice wasn’t in a glass container then security was pretty happy to let you through. This led to an certain aroma in the air at points but if that is not going to put you off then I would head along because for the most part the crowd was with it, happy and well behaved enjoying a pretty well put together event.

By Jeremy White, February 2010
Photographs Natalie Fejos-White