West Coast Lowdown
Since I've taken photos at the tattoo expos, when I saw this event coming up it sounded pretty cool so I let Desert Highways know about it. Sadly it sounded way better on a little Facebook flyer than it actually was.
Firstly, this event had no event guide ANYWHERE. Nothing on Facebook, nothing on the website, and as I found out on the day not even an event guide at the event. So for someone who has a media pass and wants to try and capture the best parts - I couldn't.
One guy on Facebook promoted the show and his band TRS, so that was the first I knew his band was playing and asked what time he'd be on.
Another person on Facebook commented about being in part of some pageant so I asked for times on that and there were 3 times. No idea what was happening in each part but the 3rd time was pushed back by 30mins and was the "crowning" of the winners.
On the day I met up with my friend Lauren and we headed down. So first up my media pass is a ticket for Sunday but they let me in anyway and told me if I want to come Sunday too the ticket will be there. After spending a couple hours there trying to take photos and failing I decided there was no way in hell I was coming back, that and I have very little money and didn't want to waste is on a train trip there.
The event was marketed as hot rods, tattoos, skate ramp, artists, choppers... yes there were cars and bikes..but the rest REALLY lacked. There was really just fuck all in this place for lack of better wording. As we walked through the door to the left were 3 tattoo stands with nobody at them, and to the right was two stalls selling clothes and jewellery, one behind them was a nail artist. We could see the top of a stage behind this large triangular shaped seating thing which had a handful of people sitting on it. It was mostly an eyesore. In the back corner was one tiny skate ramp with a kid skating back and forth. I swear over an hour later he was still the only kid on it and I wondered how he wasn't bored yet. Karl of TRS was set up here with his ute as a stage for the band to play on (I didn't even realise this fact, I just wondered why a band was stuck on this tiny stage but turned out he refused to play on the actual stage) with his ginormous set list on the side of stage and the small skate ramp behind them tucked out of sight.
This area was fenced off for skateboard surfing (the tarp worked as a "wave") and there was a huge van selling shirts in line with it so if you didn't know better you'd figure staff only could go past that point. The ramp had the Day In The Dust banner on it too, and the skate ramps Karl had put up for last years Day In The Dust were awesome! There was so much room in the venue going to waste they could have really done something awesome in there to make it more interesting for the skaters and the people watching rather than it all being tucked away in a corner.
The artist area consisted of about 4 stalls. One was Karl's artwork which was some amazing tattoo style work painted on wood panels, a guy with car sketches, and two others I don't really remember. I spoke to one guy for a bit who had a stall selling t-shirts and stickers and he turned out to be the guy who carved the trophy for Popular Choice Award for Best Hot Rod. I asked him how it had been so far commenting on the lack of people around and it seems to have been that way all day and sort of came in waves. He commented on the massive eyesore that was the seating for the stage/hot rods so you could watch the cars bounce (two whole cars) and that nobody had really sat on it all day and it was useless. His wife brought up the trophy and asked if I wanted to get a photo of him with it - as if I would knock that back! So we walk off towards the front door because he didn't know where they were put and the woman at the door working the event was just so incredibly rude I couldn't believe it. She didn't know where they were. He lets her know he knew where they were earlier in the day but not now and she goes full attitude problem and waves her hand in the air telling him to go look around for it - how do the staff not even know where things are?! Gobsmacked. This whole event was a nightmare.
The rest of the room was just cars randomly scattered around and there weren't that many of them really, there was two food vans and a bar at the back corner where for $5 you could get a 300ml bottle of coke so mostly I did a lot of close ups to try and make it look less craptastic. These are not my best work but I'm sending them to Desert Highways anyways. This was the first year for Perth having this 'festival' so here's hoping if they do it again it's ALOT better because this was not worth the $30 entry fee people had to pay. They shouldn't have even had an entry price for kids given there's really nothing that they can do there. I'm not an event organiser but it wasn't hard to see so many ways this event could have been amazing and the space put to better use. It makes me wish I took the events management course further but I have such a short temper over the last year I would probably have an aneurysm organising something like that, I know I want to just organising bands for fundraisers.
Lastly, I ended the day taking a selfie in the bathroom where I managed to make my face look like it gained 10 kilos since that morning. This is possibly the worst photo I've taken of myself. I'm the only person on the planet I can't make look good in a photo!
