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■ Playground Weekender
Playground Weekender was a boutique music and arts festival held annually in New South Wales, Australia, often in February. Known for its picturesque location on the Hawkesbury River, accessible via boat, it featured electronic music, indie acts, and fancy dress themes. Timeline: The event was active around 2009–2011. 2012 was cancelled due to flooding.

I was updating some articles and found a bunch of unused photos of Australian music festival Playground Weekender from 2010 (Feb 18-21, 2010). The festival did not last long, it started in 2009 and by 2011, the party was over. There was a 2012 event planned, but due to flooding in the area, the organizers had to cancel last minute, but still owed $2 million, as reported by news.com.au. Despite being expensive, requires camping, and you need a boat to get there… they sold out the festival! Based on the photos, it looks gorgeous and everyone who was there were having the time of their lives.

Sally reports with photos:

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Playground Weekender Review

Sunday, 28 February 2010 at 09:00 PM

Sunburns all round, in a curious pattern on both my arms. Anyway, Playground Weekender, the 4-day music festival has now been and gone. Friday afternoon happened to see Sally, Maureen and Steve pile into Steve’s quite swish mini and zip through the bush up to the ever-lovely Wisemans Ferry. A perfect afternoon for a boat ride a short way up the Hawkesbury for Sally to show her true engineering skills in the “putting up a tent” arena; Team weheartmusic had arrived.

Bands? You want to hear about bands?

The Cribs, a young group of English lads, loud and dirty guitar-based indie at its finest. And then we have Johnny Marr of The Smiths fame; the latest addition to The Cribs, less bursting with energy, but to tell you the truth, he was the biggest drawcard for me and possibly quite a few others.

Now I have never been a huge fan of OK Go, but I thought I’d give them a go, with the secret hope that they’d get some treadmills out for my viewing pleasure. Treadmills? No. But bell ringing and fluffy incandescent guitars… almost as good.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre we nearly at the top of my list of bands for the weekend and quite a fitting choice to end the Friday evening line-up. Not too raucous for those of us who were looking forward to a nice nap (*ahem*), but by no means boring. Psychedelic-shoe gaze rock, with tambourine included. Sure, many of their songs sounded quite alike to me, but the upside is that even though they sounded quite similar, they were all equally as good. The set even saw a guest appearance from Aimee Nash from The Black Ryder.

The highlight of the Saturday (don’t laugh) had to be Manchoir. Imagine eight men, donned in blue wife-beater singlets singing acapella. I Touch Myself, Dead Or Alive and the Home and Away Theme song, to name just a few, were accompanied by some delightful hand actions and embellished with the odd swear-word. Special mention must also be made to the sound and lighting team who managed to get a bit of a backdrop going using MS Paint (the computer drawing program of the true artiste)…. Oh, I suppose you just had to be there.

As the afternoon progressed into the night and the $8 beverages began flowing the main stage began to attract more and more people. It also may have had something to do with the extreme heat of the sun and the size of the shadow cast by the stage. The Black Ryder, not the most fitting soundtrack to a stinking hot summer day, were amazing. Psychedelic-esque and melancholy; brilliant.

Next, I ventured into the crowd to inspect some of the costumed individuals that were wandering around on what happened to be “fancy dress Saturday”. I must say there were far too many Indians roaming around, not sure what the go was with that. However, there were quite a few notably excellent costumes. My personal favourite was the guy (I think it was a guy) dressed up as Gumby. The carpenter who fashioned a life-size Lego man costume from wood was probably more crazy than not. Particularly when it came to navigating hills, but A+ for effort…. and a special mention goes out to the highly intoxicated boy in the Superman suit designed for 8-year-olds (made me laugh anyway).

The bands of the evening that we managed to see were both very entertaining indeed. Namely Bjorn Again and Polyphonic Spree. As you may have guessed Bjorn Again happen to be and ABBA tribute band. But wow, they really quite close to the real deal (or so I’d assume), even down to the fake Swedish accents. I can only describe them as “fun”. For ABBA fans it would have possibly been some kind of moving experience, but for those not such large fans of ABBA it would have at least been mildly amusing.

The Polyphonic Spree were as epic as expected. With the cast of thousands, they were highly entertaining. It’s always brilliant to see such a large group of people coming together and performing so tightly. All dressed in white; mesmerising dance moves (especially to those of us who had been sipping beverages in the sun all day). And all those uplifting songs…. Nice.

Shamefully (I blame the rest of my festival posse) we skipped out early on Sunday and sadly missed some of the acts I was more looking forward to catching. That is, British Sea Power, Bluejuice and Orbital. But the word on the street is that it was indeed I that was the fool with regards to leaving early, missing these bands who turned out to be amazing.

Anyway, thanks to Tom and Felicity for helping us to attend such a great event. And special thanks to the rest of team weheartmusic (Maureen and Steve) and to young Chris Thodey (competition winner) who supplied us with a few happy snaps.