Sufjan Stevens’ show at the State Theatre on Monday night looked good. There were moments of bombastic brilliance, from the band, there were the gorgeous evolving geometries of his psychedelic visuals - in fact, the whole thing was a visual treat - the outfits, the cute attempt at hula-hooping. Too bad it was, to twist Emmy Hennings‘ words, “contrived, twee schoolyard indie”. Though you wouldn’t have picked it from the audience, which bordered on the sycophantic, calling for how many encores - I lost count.

They all loved little Suffy, even him (though agreeably not him).

There were songs about towns and highways, about serial killers, he had an explosive band and quiet folk songs, seemingly stream of consciousness anecdotes about sugar highs - Suffy had plenty to grab your interest. Just not much charisma or spark, or as my partner of 10 years said afterwards, “I just wasn’t intrigued by him”. I agree, musically and personally I just didn’t care. I am, however, seriously in the minority.

It’s inevitable really.

Kev Carmody tribute show tonight at the State. My fam’s saying last night was “special”.

Jazz in the Domain tomorrow night, with Phil Slater’s band and the Spanish Harlem band, followed by Andy Weatherall at the Oxford Art Factory

Tunng on Sunday night, Spiegeltent.

Sufjan Stevens on Monday night.

And then I’m playing records on Thursday night at the Beck’s Bar with Caribou, Mountains in the Sky, Jamie Lloyd and Somatik - you should come if you’re around. How I’m going to work out what to play amidst this craziness I have no idea. You?

The man may have a history in advertising and the arts stretching three decades, but by the end of his Sydney Festival tenure he was a fogey. Plain and simple. Boring, stuck in his ways, and running a festival that was polarised between (a) a majority of elitist events celebrating the work of dead white dudes and (b) a few low-brow mainstream events, who could forget how middle of the road Jazz in the Domain was. And his regular columns were fixated on grafitti artists.

I guess he’s retired, at 72, though he’s still writing a column for the Bulletin and doing the talks circuit.

The reason I bring it up is Daily Tele writer Nick Pickard’s comment that people are complaining about the festival.

In the Oz, Matthew Westwood said this year’s festival “lacks balance and is a disappointment to some … Theatre has only a small presence, as does visual art. Classical music is absent altogether.”

The Herald Sun’s Chris Boyd said Linehan’s 2008 program is “seriously lacking in good judgement and good taste.”

Pickard reckons critics are dreaming of the past and forgetting the reality of that past.

I am not sure where it all comes from, but I suspect it is certain sections of festival going people who have a shared nostalgia for the days when Leo Schofield and Brett Sheehy were the festival directors. They were the days when chamber music and good old text based theatre were the big hit numbers.

I have a different recollection of those days, and am firmly planted in the camp relieved by current artistic director Fergus Linehan’s vision to create not only an exciting festival, but an energy that fills the streets. It’s a less dusty and more accessible programme that makes The Arts sexy, beautiful and brazen.

Me too. It’d be great to see some more challenging works presented. But the festival’s mandate isn’t polite music, arts and theatre programming you can get year round in Sydney. It should be new or new to us. It should make people think differently. It should fascinate and inspire. And while that may not be true for Brian Wilson, it’s been true for a lot of Festival shows I have seen over the past three years.

It was the harbour city collected en masse last night to open the Sydney Festival. A huge public affair with much less of the usual VIP business.

When you talk about getting cities working better, this kind of event has to play a crucial role in getting people out of their usual head (and physical) spaces, thinking about the city differently, and meeting, listening, dancing and celebrating.

There must have been at least 50,000 people squashed into the city’s mesh of interconnecting streets, although the SMH says “tens of thousands” (the Telegraph has since reported 150,000). Three couples got hitched on Macquarie St, Brian Wilson and Paul Kelly played in the Domain, Fuzzy threw a nu-rave/Baltimore/beats party in Martin Place, Spankrock played around the corner; and even further around the corner, in Angel Place, the Uber Lingua crew had their own thing going on.

I’ll start with the biggest. Brian Wilson was as banal and Bernie-esque (as in Weekend At Bernie’s) as he was at Byron Bay’s Splendour in the Grass festival, 2006. As he sang from his LCD autocue, and told the crowd to put out their (”god damn”) cigarettes, I wondered if those amazing albums (Pet Sounds, Smile) happened by accident rather than talent. Probably not, but these tours are diluting his legacy.

The dancing, singing-along and beaming Boomers loved it.

Spankrock and the Fuzzy party with Kato et al sounded hot, but the respective spaces were crammed with kids in bright clothes, and I couldn’t be bothered fighting my way through. Instead, I went to Angel Place to check out the Uber Lingua crew.

Bemused middle agers, Shire blondies, music geeks, hip kids, Japanese and Indian Australians, loads of Brazilians, actually people from right around Sydney and the world were squashed into this Melbourne-esque laneway. I’ve loved the space since the mid-90s when I organised parties at the former Angel Place Brasserie (as Obvious), so these days even a classical piece at the Recital Hall has a nostalgic charge, let alone a no-holds-barred street party.

The light sprinkling of rain did nothing to dampen spirits.

Instead of performers on one central stage, different performers were based at each corner in the weaving laneway between Pitt and George streets. It was kinda sound system style, though they never battled, they simply took it in turns, with the focus of the music shifting from time to time.

Stu Buchanan (who the Guardian just voted best blogger for world music) selected music between performances that spread the gamut from indigenous and Asian hip-hop, to Gypsy beats, reggae and soca to techno, baile funk and a world’s worth of other music. It was an obvious thrill for everyone involved (on the performance and audience sides of the equation).

When you’re cooking a spaghetti bolognaise, there’s a point where all the ingredients coalesce into a flavour that’s more than the sum of the parts. You get the peaks of individual ingredients, but there’s something more too. It was like that tonight. Fabulously inclusive, welcoming and cooperative, an event that uses space in the city in a different and innovative way, that gets people interacting with the city spaces in a way that town planners would spend millions and still fail to do.

And that’s just the first night.

Most end of year music lists look pretty similar - check the Mojo/Uncut/Q crowd for clear signs of collusion. Like always, Jace/Rupture has something different… for British art mag Frieze.

The legendary Sydney band have called it a day, according to drummer Laurence Pike.

Due to irreconcilable musical and personal differences, i have decided to leave Triosk, effectively ending the band. I want to thank everyone who has supported the group over the last 8 years, bought albums and/or come to shows. I look forward to seeing you all again shortly.

Sad, but Ben and Adrian could still get some Elton-alike and go cabaret, right?

Talking music, 2007’s been a strange year. I’ve felt more connected to and more detached from music than ever before - that’s just where I’m at, I guess - from being out at gigs and parties every weekend to doing a lot more of my listening to music at home or on the bus. That, and the gradual impact of storing music on a hard drive, have paralleled a shift in my listening habits… away from house and techno and other dancefloor sounds, which I really still love, and towards more… song-y? indie? maybe just back to my roots. But it’s a broader malaise, I think, with massive, exponential changes in the way people interact with music.

Hearing bits of my brother seep out of the edges of his second solo record (Urthboy’s The Signal) was a personal highlight. And, even though ‘We Get Around’ wormed its way into my head for months, it was the anthemic ‘Modern Day Folk’ that anchored the record for me, and that I keep going back to.

It took me a while to notice Adrian Klumpes’ sound in Triosk’s thrilling wash of sound, but at some point I realised his phased arrangements were the magnet that really drew me in. The worst band name in a world of worst band names, according to The Wire, Roam The Hello Clouds’ debut, Near Misses, had me listening over and over. Following on from collaborations for Perth’s Meupe label, and Klumpes’ gorgeous solo record, Be Still, this new collaboration with Dave Miller and Phil Slater is a real Matt07 fave.

One of my favourite shows for 2007 was a little birthday gig at the Hopetoun Hotel (for/by Emmy Hennings) with Founder, Charge Group, Rand + Holland, and a duo show from Geoff ‘Sly Hats’ O’Connor and Guy Blackman. It was a spectacular lineup, and just reinforced O’Connor’s talent. Considering he recorded one of last year’s best pop hits with Crayon Fields’ Animal Bells, it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but his naive, minimalist bossa nova was one of this year’s unexpected pleasures. The other favourite show from this year was Sydney’s Jazz in the Domain, featuring Oscar Castro-Neves, Airto Moreira, Abraham Laboriel, Alex Acuna and others, playing a magical set of Brazilian jazz (I wonder if 08’s nuyorican set will match it?).

After an exhausting series of gigs late last year, Animal Collective faced a Brisbane crowd at the Zoo, and caved - “Our singer’s sick!” - they called it a night after just five songs, leaving drummer Noah ‘Panda Bear’ Lennox to hold the fort. He played what’s been described as a single dub track. It didn’t sound so great, but when Panda Bear’s Person Pitch appeared early the next year, it was so much more. A favourite. The other big record for the year was Burial’s Untrue. I slept on his debut - I get a bit allergic to hype, and sometimes it takes a while to go back and reevaluate big records. No such problems here. It’s been called Enya crossed with the Artful Dodger, but I’d say This Mortal Coil crossed with El-B.

There have been so many favourites this year. More than any other, it’s been a year of overwhelming amounts of music. New and old. Alela Diane’s gorgeously familiar The Pirate’s Gospel, Disco Inferno’s Five EPs (how did I miss that back in the early ’90s?), Underlapper’s lovely Red Spring (I may never forget wandering into the Bat & Ball, Surry Hills, to them playing just as the election tally began to turn against Howard), Saddleback, Iron & Wine, Seaworthy, Caribou, Andy Weatherall’s fantastic Sci-Fi Lo-Fi compilation, Deepchord, Young Marble Giants, Skull Disco, Sun, Swoop Swoop, Aluf, Animal Collective, Rand + Holland, Groove Chronicles, Kinski, Westernsynthetics, Pikelet, Go Betweens, Faux Pas, Naked On The Vague, AR Kane, Birth Glow, Ed Kuepper. There’s a lot more too. To be perfectly honest, hit me up for an annual list next week and it’ll probably be different.

I spent most of Saturday morning in a daze. Popfrenzy’s xmas party at the Spanish club was responsible - a wicked combination of good friends, music and a bar tab. Somehow I managed to get to FBI in time to cover Anna Burns’s weekend lunch show, which I always enjoy doing, even a little bleary eyed.

Fortunately, the annual FBI xmas thing was also scheduled that afternoon (with just enough time between to get home and dump CDs). Like last year, it was at the best bar in town, and quite possibly a contender on a global scale, Opera Bar, where another drink tab got the ball rolling on all sorts of conversations, catch ups and new introductions. Boxes of the new FBI mag too.

As usual, there were prizes. Peach & Shag got the “Most Likely to Get a Proper Job” prize, to which Peach drolly said that all he could say was that they’d got the same award last year and still didn’t have proper jobs. Naked City got the “Best Show” prize again - though Dave Regos got the honourable mention. And Jon Valenzuela got the dark horse “Music Geek” of the year.

I really love that party. Mostly FBI cats pass like ships in the night - I thought it was just me, but everyone comments they only ever see the people on either side of their show - but when it happens, everyone gets along famously.

(*People who run things - more FBI parties*)

I spent several hours at Canberra airport on Friday night waiting for a plane. Storm-tossed Sydney was hosting my ride, so I bided my time in the nation’s capital waiting for a lift to Brisbane, hoping to make it north in time for the Robert Forster sings the Velvet Underground set booked to launch the new Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art’s Warhol blockbuster.

The gallery opened late last year with the Asia-Pacific Triennial and Katherina Grosse’s immersive and surprisingly direct Picture Park, but all that’s a soft launch compared with the huge Warhol collection. Arriving in Brisbane you couldn’t miss it - billboards, banners and coverage everywhere. For someone who’s rarely seen Warhol’s work outside print, it’s something of a revelation.

Brisbane royalty turned out for the launch, half at least - and the plush VIP and public launch marquee was filled with silver pillow-shaped balloons (a la Warhol’s ‘66 installation Silver Balloons) and Robert Forster, the ex-Go Between, his partner Karin Baeumler (violin, vocals), Dylan McCormack (The Polaroids), Adele Pickvance (Go Betweens) and Susie Patten (I Heart Hiroshima) covering the Velvet Underground.

That’s Forster’s comb poking out of his pocket. Some people commented (unfavourably) that the band played the songs pretty straight - which is true - but it was far from a by-the-numbers performance. It was the first time the five musicians got together on stage - Forster said he’d only met Patten the Tuesday before the show - and they radiated a kind of contagious excitement.

‘White Light/White Heat’ got a remake though. And how. Drenched in white lights, the band was blistering, coruscating, electric. Here’s a video I shot on my compact camera. It’s distorted, but it’ll give you an idea.

A cameraman from ABC’s Sunday Arts program recorded most of the show (though not from the stage, Forster warned him off early on: “The people should be able to see the stage”), so there should be proper footage appearing before long.

(it looks like the band took it to the next level, with half time costume changes. not true. they played two nights - same set, right down to the northern soul dj and the disco dj playing the same songs in the same order - still great both times though)

Read my review at Mess + Noise. Despite my long love affair with that magazine, and the fact that I was listed on their contributor list when the mag first kicked off, this is my first.

My experience at the show was no doubt accentuated by the stress of waiting in an airport hoping I’d make it in time, and then making it with minutes to spare, but the long and the short of it is that even at 30 minutes long this was one of the most enjoyable shows I’ve been to all year.

Only because it’s becoming quite the thing for me to put out the word on upcoming special themes on the radio show, and just because you all come up with great song ideas, I’m putting out the word for Thursday week’s xmas song special on my show. There’ve been a few great xmas compilations this year, not least of which is Mistletone’s Mistletonia - but what do you think I should be playing?