The Chaser Report - We Fixed Splendour in the Grass | Sami Shah

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

To cap off our 'Fixing Everything' week Charles and Dom are joined by music festival aficionado Sami Shah to give his recount of Splendour in the Grass. Please enjoy what starts as a satirical review of a music festival, which slowly descends into a loosely self-aware rant about today's youth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report for Friday the 29th of July. I'm Charles Firth and with me today are Dom Knight and Sammy Shah. Music festival gore Samisha, popular youth music enthusiast Sammy Shaw. So you went to Splendering the Mud? I did indeed. In the last few days. I was in hipster Passiondale as it's called.

yes and did you go for the whole time like was it um no so okay so basically for starters i want to make clear this is not a thing i do i don't i don't normally go to music festivals uh i don't hang out in muddy areas i don't even camp i don't like that shit it is not for me i judge people who enjoy it in fact i i am so far away from it uh it's definitely not a thing that i put myself out forever. However, my partner was invited to be a part of some event over there. They have like, so I don't know, have you guys ever been to these things? Now, Sammy, I have walked in your footsteps before because back when I was slightly more relevant and the chaser was slightly more relevant, we got invited to a thing called the Splendor Forum.

Right. Because a weekend of talks and shenetigans and camping and fun. It was some of the best weekends I've ever had in my entire life. and we don't get invited to that shit anymore now it's people like Sammy Shah who get invited not even actually I was a tag along it was a weird thing where a music festival

which has amazing bands on all the time for some reason has a tent where people talk and for even more bafflingly people come to it to watch people talk I don't understand it do they know but I was happy to turn up well they did do our events I was happy to turn up and basically we just drank vodka backstage at the forum tent

for three days and it was some of the best fun I've ever had. Exactly. Okay, so basically, yeah, if you haven't been to spend in the grass, it is a festival of music,

three, four days of like just the best hipster young bands that I've never heard of. I'm more of a blues fest kind of guy, I realized. And they've got this weird tent in the corner

where I'm assuming it must be a tax right off. Yeah. Where like if you're a music festival, you pay cinema tax, but if you're an arts and culture festival, you probably pay even less tax.

And that's why there's this tent in the corner where young people who need a break from the music and want to just take a nap can walk in and watch a live version of Q&A because that's what you want to watch at a fucking music. Are they still doing the live version of Q&A? That's hilarious. Yeah. There's usually, they're just random, worthy green senators being boring. Exactly. That's largely what it was. There was a green senator whose entire energy, I can't remember his name to be honest.

His entire energy can be summed up as high school debate champion. There was a Labour representative that no one knew or cared about. There was a Liberal Party representative. No one knew or cared about. There was a teal because now teal is basically the new token. And you've got to have a teal person in every room. And then there was just like a random friend of mine who's like just there and had nothing to do with the whole thing. And again, 12 audience members, middle of the afternoon.

12. nine of those, yeah, at best, nine of them chewing their own faces off because it was so high at this point, after two days of just mud and drugs. So it's a weird thing, but it happens, but I don't care. Like, they put us up in a hotel. Yes, which is better than everyone else who were camping. I got a tent. When I did it, they just gave me a tent.

Fuck that. If there was a tent, I would never have gone. In one of the years that I did this, because I think I went about three years. I saw like Kanye West at Splendor. Like I saw them incredible artists. I also saw a cold play. But it was amazing. And then somehow we were in the build.

I once bought the last pair of gumboots in the whole of Splendor. I had to pay 50 bucks for them. The best investment I've ever made. And that wasn't nearly as bad as this year where it was a fucking lake. Okay, so I'm going to break it down for you, right? So firstly, I get told that my partner is going and she said, like you want to come with me. I was like, hell's yeah, let's go. I'm not, I'm not staying in tent. I don't do that shit. I don't understand people who do that

shit. This is this whole hipster fucking refugee fantasy camp experience that I have no interest in that's exactly what it is. And shitting in the woods. I have zero interest. It's people agreeing with each other at a very, very middle class and privileged event. Right. And I don't want to do it. I don't, I don't use, I don't know if you've ever used a portalue or a portable toilet. I would rather set myself on fire than go into one of those things. and so I get there and we're in a hotel which is great

freaking nice hotel really fancy you go into the reception and there's all kinds of celebrities there which is cool and my partner said hey buy gumboots

everyone said Michael Hing comedian and Triple J presenter contact me said hey if you're coming buy gumboots I like sounds good

I don't know what gumboots are because I don't fucking do this I went and I bought workers boots no oh my god he's used with lace up like like

Like steel-tapped, steel-toed worker boots. So here's what, they were useless against the mud, but I could kick the shit out of someone if I needed to, all right. Here's all I basically bought. We arrived there and then we're just hearing the horror stories, right? Just the video. You've seen the pictures. Yeah.

It was genuinely like Fire Festival meets the trenches, meets basically the First World War. Yeah, exactly. You know, people dying in the trenches. Did people get trench foot or splendor foot? I don't understand what is wrong with young people. There were people wading waist deep in the mud, like just thick mud and being like, fuck it, we're here.

And then like taking selfies of themselves in mud. It's disgusting. What is how did you not have a childhood, Sammy? I did. And you know what we did in my childhood? Fucking stayed indoors where there's no mud. Because guess what? Humanity evolved to get away from that shit.

Did our ancestors build buildings for nothing? Did we learn construction techniques for no reason at all? Why did we make shoes in the first place? Everyone keeps going to children of the future. The children are fucked. The children dress poorly, have all kinds of drugs, and then go and wait in the mud and listen to terrible music. They're a fucking disaster.

The next, the future of humanity is doomed, in my opinion. Well, I mean, in my first time going to Splendor, I made two crucial mistakes, camping. And I will mention this in case anyone else, like me, gets invited to a festival, which is amazing, but you required to camp. It was a bit of a rough thing. The first thing I did was I bought a sleeping bag

which said it was like minus 10 degrees. Right. And it was in no way minus 10 degrees. It was the most freezing. It was like sleeping under it like a thin towel, basically. I absolutely froze. For some reason, the nights there are very, very, very cold. Yes.

And I froze. But then while I was freezing, I also managed to injure myself while camping. while sleeping, because what I did was camping on a slope, because they gave me probably the worst campsite in the whole place. It was on a big slope. Which way do you think you should have your bed, your little camp bed, when you're on a slope?

Surely, like, it's perpendicular to the slope. Yes, your head should be at the high end of the tent. What I did was, I slept sideways, and I rolled off in the middle of the night, and I very badly injured my back by thudding down onto the frozen permafrost You're a moron. I know.

It was amazingly stupid. Yeah, look, I was limping around the site for the rest of the weekend, trying to avoid cold play. In fairness, you limp all the time. That's true, I do you leave. But yeah. Crazy thing, though. So did you have the VIP pass, like those performer passes?

Yeah. Okay, so I had that. And I know I'm winging a lot for someone who didn't really have to live in a tent, who didn't have to go in the mud. You didn't injure yourself camping. You kill it. You remind me of those scenes. The CEOs who sleep...

Oh, genuinely. The CEO sleep out. Yeah, yeah, that's what this is. One night a year. And go, oh, I really now know how everyone slums it. Charles, I have never felt more like the 1% in my entire life. All right? So the area where we were, there's just free alcohol.

We're just like, you don't have to pay for a bar or anything. It's a little green room area. We're all just, like, I'm hanging out with Dr. Carl and Costa from Gardening Australia and all of these people. And then there's an entire backstage area, is just for the performers and artists, which is genuinely like it's dry. There's hard surfaces everywhere. There's a barbecue going. Triple J's got their music tent happening. There's a Mexican restaurant. There's a bar. Like, it is, it is, if, if the people at the festival knew that existed, there would have been riots and overthrow. It would have gone from the First World War to

the French Revolution like that. And I would have been the first person with my head cut off because I was complaining the most about mud on my shoes. But it was gross, it was terrible. There's no reason to do this to yourself. I don't understand why people went. I understand why people didn't say it all on fire. And I don't understand why people are like, I want to go back next year.

What is wrong with you? Hug someone. Get meaning in your life. The one thing, that was cool. I'll say this. So if you have that little VIP badge thing, right? It's basically, it's not in VIP, it's just a performer boss.

Most people don't look at it too closely. and if you take a shortcut through the woods and end up in the wrong place and notice there's a tent and there's a little gap under the tent and then crawling through the gap under the tent, you suddenly find yourself side stage of Angus and Julius Stone performing

and you're... Oh, you poor things! Maybe two meters away from them and nobody even asks you anything. They all assume you're supposed to be there and then you watch an entire concert of Angus and Julius Stone or rather Julius Stone with a cameo by Angus

10 feet away from her, which was fucking awesome, but also from a security point of view, I'm a brown man with a beard. Like, this should have been more careful. The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. Can we just zoom back a bit? And get the sort of, you know, the more political overview of this, which is, is there an extent to which,

now that we've got climate change and everything like that, that we shouldn't be holding festivals in flood planes in the middle of a Lenina flood event. Well, it's funny you mention that, Charles, because the thing I wanted to bring you to the table about this is this hilarious thread that I saw on the weekend. And it's important to bear in mind that, as Sammy said, Splendor is an incredibly kind of worthy festival.

Like all of the packaging is biodegradable. Everyone's constantly going on about composting and stuff. It's full of bar and hippies selling you eco-friendly donuts, basically. Yes. And it's owned. It's owned. The festival is owned. Is this where you're leading?

No, I've got it a whole other thing, but no, you can tell me. And the festival is owned by coal barons. Is it? Yes, it's owned by coal interests. Yeah, people who own coal mines. Yeah. That's who owns Splendering and the guy. It's a total greenwashing, sort of exercise in performative.

progressivism, where you're encouraging the youth of tomorrow to sort of ignore the facts in front of their faces about the absurdity of holding a stupid event in a stupid place. Everyone's flown in. Everyone's flown into it. It's essentially, yes, it's the most carbon unfriendly thing run by carbon unfriendly people, but it's sort of making the next generation do something that actually ignore. reality. But I think it's a

hilarious thing. It's a propaganda exercised by coal interest. There's a local green because everyone in Splend is like we're really eco-conscious. Like it's the kind of event. As we destroy this field.

It's the kind of event where like there's an event that, where they invited, one of you and I was there, they invited Julian Assange's mother along for an event about changing people's minds as though it would have any effect at all. People standing in a field in North Byron

talking about Julian Assange. But then one of the local greens posted this thread that did a lot of on Twitter over the weekend, saying that she had campaigned very hard against Splendor because it was an eco-disaster. It was in a... Yeah! A nature reserve that was gazetted.

They won in the land and environment court. It's apparently an important wildlife corridor that's really essential and unique. And she says it's the only intact corridor that connects the Gondwana-Wollamban, ancient deep time forest to the unique subtropical coastal lowlands, et cetera, et cetera. The locals hated it, and then they went to the liberal government and just bulldozed it and got Splendor up. So whenever anyone goes to Splendor, and I loved going to Splendor,

they're basically destroying an excellent ecosystem and filling it with hippie fucks. That's essentially what it is. This is exactly it. So it was genuinely, and you're not wrong, it was an ecological disaster. There are oil spills in the Atlantic,

which are less damaging than Splendor in the grass probably was, given how much fucking plastic and rubbish I saw thrown everywhere, just people just, you know, all the amount of infrastructure boat, into the place and then taken out of the place, the overall carbon emissions, those stages that are set up, everything, fucking, I refuse to believe everything was green friendly. I want to see some science on that, because what I saw was not good for the environment at all.

Meanwhile, I have to fucking use a metal straw every time I want to drink something. Fuck off. I didn't destroy the environment. That's Craig's fault. I'm just trying to be made feel guilty about it. Everyone at Splendor is really a climate criminal, and I'm the good guy in this. I don't know what that's been. Well, earlier in the week, Sammy, we had David Shoebridge on the podcast.

I'm surprised he wasn't at Splendor, actually. Yeah, well, no. He's the kind of person they get. Yeah. But he had this whole idea that actually they should pass laws against ecocide, right? So, and essentially make it known that if you, even in the past, have committed ecocide, you're going to get it in a neck. And it should be like death penalty level sort of. Look, I've been advocating for assassinations for a long time.

Well, don't you think that the first sort of trials for our new ecoside idea should be everyone who attended spending of the glass? Well, they did try to kill them. To be fair, the organisers pretty much subjected them all to exposure. It's a COVID super spread of sight, and a lot of them will have caught bacterial infections from waiting through mud, I suspect. Absolutely. Yeah, forget COVID. Most people there.

Anyway, I'm sure it's a, it's a chlamydia and hepatitis, like, hot spots. And Sammy, all those pictures of, like, those giant lakes that I saw on social media. Was that actual rainwater or was it urine from all the warm beer people consumed and had to piss out while they weren't doing anything? It's pretty disgusting. Yeah, yeah. I saw many people peeing in the mud, like openly urinating in the, I'm telling you. It's a sewer. It's sewer in the grass. everyone keeps talking about young like there's something condescending

I've noticed about the way we talk about the youth right there's always this thing especially gen Xers and stuff my friends many of them on social media they're like the youth will save us the youth are amazing the youth are so intelligent and the youth are so woke there's very much a what's that literary

trope the native savage kind of a thing you know like oh the noble savage the noble savage thank you we very much do the same thing with the youth They're like the youth are these amazing people They all identify as they them And they're all eco-friendly And they're all super understanding The youth are fucking animals

I saw them Just pissing and shitting Everywhere in the mud Just absolutely destroying the environment Also they can watch Tyler the Creator By the way, virulently known Violent Misogynist Tyler the fucking creator With pretty shit songs I might add

I heard some of them They're terrible Eminem was doing that shit 20 years ago 25 years ago and being more original and more listenable at the time. And they're all waving along with their stupid phones and glowsticks like they matter. Fuck that shit. It was a horrific shit fest and everyone there, I hope, catches gonorrhea.

But you know what it is? It's not a festival of the youth, Sammy. It's a festival of Triple J listeners, the most heinous and noxious group known to humanity. No one, we've seen the ratings. No one young listens to Triple J. These are people who listen to radio that's bad songs constantly interrupted by fuck quits doing shoutouts to people. That's what triple j is. I know many triple j presenters or all of them have white hairs in their

beards at this point. There isn't a single young person involved with triple j, listening to triple j, working at triple j, creating content for triple j. Triple j at this point is just another medical term for back pain. So the thing that's funniest about this too is that there is an alternative. This is fixing everything weak. And what if, I mean, let's say we want to have a music. festivals, because music festivals are fun, what if you had it in, I don't know, an existing site that had asphalt, not grass, and it was set up for large groups of people to come there on an annual basis, and had good public transport.

Let's say, I don't know, they had it at like the showground in Sydney, and let's say they called it, say, the big day out, and that it was exactly the same thing, but not an eco-disaster, why did we kill the big day out and keep Splendor? Surely Splend is the one that should have been shot and the one that actually took place at a purpose-built event where large numbers of people are coming in and out by train isn't that a much better way to do it?

At this point, that's what Mother Nature is saying, right? Nature itself is saying, the planet Earth is saying we don't want splendor. We don't want this thing. We're trying to do everything we can to get rid of it. And humanity is doing, where basically the organises Splendor have the same energy as the Saudi King.

MBS who just announced that really stupid new building I wanted to talk about that actually a massive mega structure in the middle of the desert that will also be an ecological disaster just out of hubris and arrogance that is what splendid

That's where Splend is going Splend is going to the 120 kilometer long skyscraper in Saudi Arabia Which in the end like everything else Like the Saudi Construction will be A whole lot of Western consultants paid a whole lot of extra money

That they don't need A whole lot of people from South Asia Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladesh She's used a slave labor and killed in the construction of a thing that in the end will lie empty except for the old billionaire who has a yacht there for a few days, basically. Okay. So just to summarize, we as a panel, we despise Splendor. We hate it. We're never going back there.

I despise all things outdoors. Let me be clear. It's not specific to Splendor. I don't like the outdoors. I don't like nature. I'm against it. But it seems as though your position is, yeah, Splendor sucks, but Blue Fest is awesome. No, no. The line up at Blues Fest is awesome. But if, look, I will happily go to Blues Fest if there's a hotel nearby. If I can drive up, stand on solid ground, put my hands in my pockets, a rock gently back and forth to Dave Matthews band, and then drive back home again.

So you're like an old person music festival. Sammy, you're sounding like you're doing an audition to become a Triple J host. You're that old. I don't have enough arsaritist to qualify yet. Excellent. Our gear is from road microphones, and we're part of the ACAST creator network. And Splendor, we're very happy to do this event at the Splendor Forum next year. I think it'll be really fun. I'll pitch it. I'd know the organiser still probably.

I'll pitch it to have.