“All my drugs from the 70s are kicking in now!” - Leo
We remember watching Neil Young play to a sea of smashed 16-year-olds at one of the final Big Day Outs, wondering what some festival curators are on as they pencil in their headliners.
A similar thought hit us when we first saw Leo Sayer announced for Meredith. Obviously, the festivals aren’t comparable, but plonking an ageing disco legend between Mannequin Pussy’s furious feminist punk and Precious Bloom’s experimental Indonesian city-pop felt like a throwback to the gloriously jarring lineups of yesteryear.
Check out our gig guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
View this post on Instagram
As it turns out, it was an inspired call—the kind of daring selection that keeps Meredith surprising every year. While Neil haunted the BDO stage with stoicism, Sayer was jubilant. Looking like a Woodstock Bilbo Baggins, he belted out that ball-crushing falsetto as if his vocal cords were preserved in amber.
When he launched into You Make Me Feel Like Dancing halfway through his set, it wasn’t just a brave crowd-pleaser that cauterised the rest of his performance—it was a festival-wide eruption. All 12,500 attendees seemed to be dancing in unison–the largest simultaneous crowd I’ve witnessed in the Sup’ during the day. Two soggy couches behind me, someone proposed to their partner, the crowd roared, and for a fleeting moment, life was improbably perfect.
Meredith often feels like the 70s never really ended: the neckbearded dads, toddlers swirling around tripping parents, full frontal nudity, Kombi vans gasping for life. Sayer was the perfect time machine. He emigrated to Australia in 2005 to rediscover his love for music, eschewing the Billy Mack glamour of London for the raw, beautiful truth of a bush bash in country Victoria. His disco exuberance, and Zapp funking it up soon afterwards, was exactly what everyone needed and as usual, nobody but Aunty knew it.
But while Meredith flirts with nostalgia, it never ties the knot.
That night, we were jolted back to the present—if such a thing even exists in the kaleidoscope of postmodern music. Massive laser shows lit up the night sky, green and blue beams perforated by faint raindrops, shimmering as they fell like nature’s disco ball.
The Dare hit the stage with raw electrotrash swagger, a live sound brimming with unexpected grit and guttural fuzz that evoked shades of Nine Inch Nails (if you tuned out the lyrics). It was an unexpected twist for an artist best known as a Charli XCX producer. It was also a standout highlight of the festival.
Conversely, Jamie xx delivered exactly what everyone expected, which is what you’d hope for from the weekend’s marquee act. With arguably his best album still fresh in the rearview mirror, his set hit every mark.
IN2STELLAR followed with that hypnotic, pulse-driven techno. Some would call it mind-numbingly repetitive, others a meditative groove. Ayebatonye built on that foundation, weaving the same repetition but with a more playful, funk-infused energy that elevated even the most dystopian closing moments. We’ll never get used to the sight of dancefloor zombies stuck in endless loops, while volunteers in pink vests rake their trash from around them in the unforgiving glare of the early morning light.
And that was just Saturday night.
We haven’t even touched on Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi, who spent his set performing cunnilingus on the cameras—again and again—while aggressively grabbing himself, all while wearing tight, stained children’s overalls that looked like evidence from a crime scene. Despite the chaos, they sounded incredible, with Saoudi’s voice—a surprisingly melodic gem in the post-punk universe—cutting through the madness.
There was DJ PGZ, wrapping up a mind-bending techno set with 15 serene minutes of Frank Ocean, leaving the crowd in a euphoric trance as their ears rang in the post-club calm. There was the beauty of waking up to Maple Glider’s angelic voice, her music floating over the hills and illuminating the tent flaps like sunlight breaking through stained glass.
And how could we forget Billiam and the Split Bills? They tore through two-minute DIY anthems with barely a pause, offering the crowd little but a simple “we’ve got more songs”. Meanwhile, Olof Dreijer reclaimed his place as a visionary of contemporary electronic music, standing shoulder to shoulder with Fever Ray and reminding everyone how underappreciated his collaborations with Björk have been.
We’ll politely sidestep the Meredith Gift ‘powerwalk’ debacle (our friend was cruelly robbed of the title after sprinting the entire way) and instead end with Barkaa. A leading force in so-called Australian hip hop, she brought not just raw energy but a controlled intensity and razor-sharp political edge.
Barkaa jolted Meredith out of its hazy 70s reverie and delivered a sharp reminder of the power and urgency of the present.
‘Til we do it all again in March.
