Phew! What an epic festival review hey Party People? Christ, feels like all I’ve been posting for the last two weeks is Daisiesdaisiesdaisiesdaisies.
Time to wrap it all up with my Saturday post and then I promise you’ll not hear anything more about this festival until next year rolls around.
Like the day before it, Saturday morning was a hoot. Myself, Peggles, Barbarian and Spu spent it all chilling together while the girls hit the Daisy Den which took at least about two hours, just enough time for us to smash a couple beers and ease ourselves into the day.
From there everyone got all Tiger-striped up and we went to actually explore the festival and try to catch some bands.
We started by checking out the Hemporium stage where Little Kings were playing the most chilled out set you could ever imagine. I liked this band a lot, they just had this great vibe about them, very loose and easy breezy but great songwriters and performers, all of them.
This is what that looked like:
After that we met PURPLE MAN! Well, if by met PURPLE MAN I actually mean watch a man in a purple morph suit walk casually into the dam, then ya.
We met PURPLE MAN!
Once we’d finished laughing and taking pics of PURPLE MAN, I finally hit the media lounge for the first time at the festival where I had an ice cold Red Bull, ate some kind of cranberry / cereal snack thing and contemplated using one of the laptops there.
Next time. I swear I’m blogging from Daisies next time…
Next stop was the beach bar, which was PUMPING! On the way I ran into some proper BOYCHAYS and this happened:
I don’t remember how long we stayed there, but eventually we decided to hit the road when the people there started tweaking out and tried to fingerbang each other’s nostrils.
At the main stage we half-heartedly watched a band before deciding to wander over to the lemon tree theatre where we caught our good buddy Dylan Skew’s set which, again, had all of us literally in tears.
That guy is my favourite South African comedian, hands down. I swear, it’s like he’s read my mind, found the funniest, most random thoughts and made stand up out of it.
Hats off to that man. His material is seriously amazing.
Then we met these guys in lumo vests with camel packs who, judging from this picture, loved the shit out of me.
After that, we went back to the main stage to listen to some more bands I don’t remember and J-Rab met Bob, who she instantly fell in love with.
The temperature started plummeting pretty soon after that so we went back to The Mushroom and suited up for the evening. I had some jelly tots that a buddy had spare and wandered out into the night like some high-powered mutant.
God’s own prototype 
Among other things we checked out the New World Beat Barn and I instantly regretted the fact that I hadn’t discovered it sooner in the festival. It was like some kind of crazy carnival in there, good times as far as the eye could see.
We also posed for a pic with this skeleton who was in a bath tub:
Above us there was this long string of balloons and lights that must have been at least 300 meters long. It floated like this long, luminescent string of glowing blue dental floss against the night sky. Like a lot of things I saw that night, it inspired awe and child-like wander in me and I knew things were going to be ok.
Believe it or not we actually stayed for the end of Arno Carstens’ set so we’d have a good spot for Shadowclub when they came on and Jacques and the boys did NOT disappoint.
I made a mental note to watch them live more and actually support this band. Their set was super-slick without losing its badass bluesy-rock edginess.
Which left only one main stage act left. The reason a lot of people were there in the first place. The band that inspired a million million bands to pick up guitars and write dancey indie rock.
Bloc Party. And man-o-man did their first three songs suck.
The sound was shocking which was sad because it had nothing to do with the band, but all their levels sounded way out with the vocals drowning everything out completely and the bass being almost non-existent.
Things quickly improved though and the crowd started losing their minds to this awesome band.
At some stage in Bloc Party’s set they let the balloons go. Actually, it could have been before, I’m not too sure, but watching them drift away, I felt a profound sense of loss, like the very stitching that held the festival together was coming undone.
And the truth is, it was.
I loved Bloc Party’s set but festival fatigue was kicking in and when they launched a barrage of fractal-patterned fireworks after it was all done, I felt totally satisfied in every conceivable way and ready to call it a day.
It was a great Daisies, no doubt. One that will live on in our minds as long as this post lives on, rattling in this junkyard site that I call home.
Here’s to Daisies ‘13!
See you crazy fuckers there
-ST
