I’m not really a big fan of music festivals. I don’t like crowds, the bands always sound like shit and you invariably end up losing everyone you were with and wander aimlessly in the sun for hours. And yet here I was driving into a festival on an overcast Saturday afternoon. Why you ask? Well this one had a point of difference, namely 20,000 Christians. That and I had consumed enough Tramadol to kill a small elephant. I wouldn’t be alone on this adventure – my trusty side kick Colin Mitchell joined me along with American immigrant Alexis Brooks to try and find out what goes on at the infamous Parachute music festival.
Parachute is a place of rules. This became apparent quickly on our arrival at Mystery Creek just outside of Hamilton. We were ushered through a gate and told to park our car and walk for 15 minutes to collect our press passes. At the press tent we not only received our passes but also a programme and a small rule book. This outlined what was not acceptable behaviour at Parachute. There was to be no violent dancing, no alcohol, no revealing clothing and no tent sharing between unmarried couples.
We were then told to drive half a kilometre down the road to yet another gate where we could finally join the festivities.
Before entering we decided to talk to a colourful character we’d spotted on the drive in. He’d parked his caravan just outside the festival and erected a large banner that read ‘Warning: The Coming of the Socialist Apocalypse’. Our initial excitement at finding such a goldmine of insanity so early in the day quickly diminished as we listened to a stream of nonsense that included the phrases ‘New World Order’, ‘inside job’ and ‘September 11’. His gripe with Parachute was that there had been “an emergence of social justice movements and people wanting to solve the world’s problems” – when I pointed out that these seemed like positive measures, he went back to his dogmatic default setting. After a few more minutes of paranoid ramblings we managed to extract ourselves and get into the festival proper.
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