We sat in the shade of a tree and mostly watched the big screens. The sound was fantastic, you could clearly hear everything. Highlight is definitely the theremin player. That guy is amazing.
I used to, back in my youth, dream of Patton in his 60s like fat Elvis doing a solo show playing his hits from various bands and covers with an orchestra. Mondo Cane is the closest we're likely to see of this. It really is great. Only complaint is the acoustic guitar of one of the players had a bit of a crackle in the output. I'm picky.
Smallish crowd (compared to Dandy Warhols who were on before and Beck who was on a band after) but still fairly large, and nicely respectful.
Harvest really is a well run festival. It was a nightmare last year apparently (not enough of anything, lots of lines) but this year seemed great. No lines. They gave out free bananas and water all day.
We were only there for Beck and Mondo Cane. Everyone else we looked at wasn't particularly interesting.
Monday 12th November 2012 - Regent Theatre, Melbourne
We sat front row of the Dress Circle (one level above the stalls). Great view right across even while slumped in our seats. A couple of a**holes to our left were a bit chatty but otherwise respectful crowd. The band did a short set as a warm-up which was jazz/prog awesomeness.
Patton came on around 8:50pm. Again, brilliant set. Not much I can really say about it. The band are perfect.
Acoustic guitar had same problem tonight, actually stopped working in one song, they skip it and play it last with and electric instead. Patton takes the opportunity of the break to talk about liking Melbourne and being fascinated by the "fascinators" the horse-race-going female public wear in their hair. Got someone from the crowd up on stage to borrow hers (wore it for half a song). The conductor lost all his paper-work in the middle of one song and managed to save the song picking it up in the middle. Lots of applause and laughter. Some crazy woman gave Patton a letter in the middle of one song which he picked up, looked at for a second and dropped like a hot potato saying "no speak English". I wonder what it said... Another group of people kept trying to bring their child down the isle to the stage but security kept stopping them.
It only took until the encore before someone screamed "play some Mr. Bungle" which got a "smart-arse" look from Patton.
I loved this gig.
Including these two gigs I've seen Patton perform at a gig 17 times and this is probably the best work (as a performer) I've seen since... ever?