SN-DTOMC - Tamworth

Well, I'm back. In case you didn't know or notice, I wasn't around for the last week. I was off on a Surprisingly Non-Disturbing Tour Of My Childhood.

The first stop was a night spent with friends in Tamworth, disturbingly enough at the time that the town's annual country music festival was reaching its climax. My friends there swear that they don't have any particular fondness for country music, but are adamant that the festival is super and that there's much more to it than just country music. Having harboured traumatic childhood memories of driving though Tamworth on the way home from Christmas holidays for many years (you couldn't get out of the car to buy a sandwich without being bombarded by yodelling buskers and people in unfeasibly large hats) I was always extremely sceptical about how much fun enduring two solid weeks of it could be. As it turns out, a single night isn't too bad.

We started in a bar somewhere, and after making the fairly amateurish mistake of leaving there after a few hours (the queue to get back in was surprising, but apparently not at all unusual) we went to see a band that was giving a free performance at another pub. As it turned out this was a band that my sister had seen in Sydney recently, and they were not country music-y at all. They knew their audience, though, and so instead of doing much of their own stuff, they stuck mainly to cover versions of Australia-heavy songs (this was also Australia Day. At one point some drunken dude on the dancefloor turned around and yelled at the semi-enthusiastic audience "Come on! It's Australia Day, it's Acca Dacca*, it doesn't get more Aussie than this!" which was a nice try but it didn't really result in anyone else embracing displays of unbridled patriotism) and they were super. Instead of ending on that high note, though, we stayed for the next band who we thought was some guy who was also not a country music band, but apparently he was on on a different stage** and so we accidentally watched a terrifyingly country bush band (with a guy in it sporting pyjama pants and the biggest mullet in the history of mullets) singing "click go the shears" and "give me a home among the gum trees" and that "I am, you are, we are Australian" song for 20 minutes or so until we managed to escape.


Unscathed but a little bit traumatised.



* Because they were doing a cover of some AC/DC song at the time
** The "stage" we were at was actually a truck that they had parked next to the verandah of the pub. I gather there was another room somewhere inside the pub and it had an actual stage. The inside of the pub smelt pretty strongly of vomit, though, so I'm glad we weren't too committed to the other band