“Your boy’s a little out of shape!” Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst says, slightly out of breath, on the second day of Adelaide’s Harvest Rock festival. The last time his band visited Australia, it was for the unrelated but similarly named Harvest festival in 2011 – and a lot can happen in 12 years.
A rootsy offshoot of hard rock festival Soundwave, Harvest’s quick demise was, in retrospect, an early sign that Australia’s noughties festival bubble was about to burst. Soon Soundwave, Parklife, Stereosonic and the once-mighty Big Day Out would all fall.
Harvest Rock arrives in an entirely different landscape. Backed by Secret Sounds, the Live Nation-owned promoter behind two of Australia’s biggest festivals, Falls festival and Splendour in the Grass, it’s an example of music’s biggest hitters navigating even more unstable times. With post-pandemic recovery wracked by climate crisis-charged extreme weather and cost-of-living pressures forcing even the once-unassailable Falls festival to take the year off, Harvest Rock has a different model: a smaller, top-heavy lineup with a more targeted, safer spread of music, complemented by a food-and-wine focus – and a hefty injection of state government money supporting the whole thing.
A familiar lineup of gen X and millennial-friendly acts smartly maps the common threads between genres and generations, from Tim Rogers and Adalita fronting a Rolling Stones tribute act, to Vera Blue covering Enya’s Orinoco Flow. In her Saturday afternoon set, Thelma Plum covers Powderfinger’s These Days just hours after its writer, Bernard Fanning, played the song himself on the opposite stage. In both their hands, its bittersweet 25-year-old lyrics age in a way the many winemakers floating around would appreciate.
Plum digs even deeper with Homecoming Queen from her album Better in Blak, which she finishes in tears. “Sorry about that, it’s a really emotional time,” she tells the crowd in her first performance since the Indigenous voice referendum. “Everything that’s happening in the world, that’s the first time I’ve sung it since the vote.” She quickly adds, with defiance: “It’s not a big deal – I cry all the time.”
Later, on Sunday, Baker Boy also pays tribute to Fanning with his buoyant rework of Wish You Well, in a typically joyful set from the Yolŋu rapper. Santigold’s set also ends in jubilation, the US electro-pop singer inviting a stage invasion to finish.
In a city that’s used to big acts bypassing them entirely, Harvest Rock’s great novelty is that its big draws are Australian exclusives, from its inaugural headliner Jack White in 2022, to Beck and Jamiroquai this time around. The short explanation seems to be the aforementioned government funding – South Australia has been throwing a $20.8m war chest at everything from golf to football to boost tourism numbers and coax its own citizens back out of their living rooms. Which might also explain why some corners feel like set dressing for a tourism campaign – such as the cul-de-sac of stalls from South Australian winemakers. A Sunday panel session titled “Why is natural wine so gross” tilts at self-deprecation, but it’s all clearly become big business.
But is it any good? Harvest Rock is certainly a pleasant festival experience; its city-side setting in the East End parklands, with just two stages a few hundred metres away from each other, mitigates clashes and other familiar festival gripes. A “Little Harvest” kids’ zone caters to families, while plenty of raised and roped-off VIP areas allow cashed-up older audience members to circumvent outdoor festival indignities.
On Saturday, Nile Rodgers and Chic deliver a euphoric twilight set, breezing through the stacked backlog of hits Rodgers had a hand in, from Madonna’s Material Girl to Beyoncé’s Cuff It. “We have reached a state I call ‘maximum funkosity’,” Rodgers says after playing Daft Punk’s Get Lucky. Night has fallen by the time they play his famous Bowie collab Let’s Dance, with the crowd bellowing along to “this serious moonlight” under a bright full moon.
Having already hit the peak of “funkosity”, headliner Jamiroquai suffer by comparison. Ubiquitous hits like Canned Heat and Virtual Insanity are rapturously received but are punctuated by long stretches of high energy but low yield 90s grooves, as frontman Jay Kay shuffles across the stage in a feathered headdress of ambiguous origin (the man’s love of hats has seemingly been unmoved by the last decade of cultural appropriation discourse).
In a largely safe and crowd pleasing lineup, the biggest revelation comes from art rock eccentrics Sparks, who make their Adelaide debut half a century into their career on Sunday. “We don’t know what took us so long!” singer Russell Mael says, as he and his seated, stoic, toothbrush-moustache-wearing brother Ron work from seminal tracks including This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us to more recent material. Their local cult following laps up every overdue second, and when the set finishes the septuagenarian oddballs don’t seem to want to go either, lingering onstage after the house music has faded up.
In Sunday’s final stretch, hometown hero Paul Kelly returns undaunted after his cameo at a yes rally a few weeks ago. Even if his closing singalong of From Little Things Big Things Grow lands a little differently, it’s impossible to have a bad time hearing To Her Door, Deeper Water and How to Make Gravy played in succession.
Beck closes with a high-energy, lull-free set spanning three decades and all the genres seen across the weekend, from the Americana of 2002’s The Golden Age to the funk of Midnite Vultures and 90s alt pop of Where It’s At. In leather pants-wearing rock star mode, the indie rock chameleon leaves no one disappointed.
Harvest Rock may play it too safe to be a great festival, but that’s not the point. It’s about seeing what format sticks, what will get people out their front door and, unlike the earlier Harvest, what will keep this whole operation going – without losing the farm.
