Golden Lights Festival in the West. A festival to welcome the New Year and Dance to the day when fear/ It is gone.
This years Dionysian celebration has that sense of expectation. Change is Now a classic song from the Notorious Byrd Brothers of 1968.It was a hippie song of the release from dark forces.
The year just gone was a worm hole back to the burning of America in 1968, with the assassinations of MLK and RFK, preceding a pivotal and critical Presidential election.
The current incumbent would be dead now except for an act of God on a bullet’s trajectory. It would have been the only way to stop the inevitable outcome, never in doubt. It’s also led to the return of another RFK who may carry on in the same vein as his dad. The same actions that got his uncle, JFK, killed in the first place.
What does this mean for music? Which is still coming out of the Darkness that was the 2020 Lockdown paranoia. When to enjoy the close human contact and bacchanal of dance, eroticism, stimulants and togetherness was brutally shut down by irrational fears of contagion and death.
It was an attempt to shut down human life itself on the planet.
Plenty of trauma and damage to deal with when I speak with many musicians about those dark forces. Alas still present.
As in 1968 when musicians responded with courage and intense creativity, we look to the Art world to help carry the fight again.
I’m tracing the line from the Beatles (White Album) to What’s Goin’ On, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Led Zeppelin (One), to Exile on Main Street.
All searched deep and raged. They inspired and pulled others along. Difficult times ahead. Or as Bill Monroe put it in 1946 when he first codified Bluegrass music, There’s Heavy Traffic Ahead.
Golden Lights was a minor hit song for Twinkle from the UK in 1964. Lynn Ripley was a sixteen-year-old ingenue who flashed briefly at the height of Beatlemania. But Elton John recognised her talents later, and the Smith’s revived the song to some success.
She reminds me a little of Rebecca Becky Hill who is the headline performer tonight for Golden Lights 2025.
Impressive last year at this festival, when she was hit by a brief weather deluge. This afternoon the rain gods are staying away (and hitting lower down the country).
Last time I compared her vocal power to the original Foghorn Helen Shapiro. She doesn’t get that deep in her voice, but she has a stunning and powerful Pop timbre, nonetheless.
An early start and straight into it with True Colours and Gecko (Overdrive). Only you can make me come alive seems to be the switch that turns on the young crowd, the majority 18 to 35.
Crazy What Love Can Do kicks the show into orbit, maintaining the Indie Pop high with an overflow of bangers like Afterglow, Indestructible, My Heart Goes (La Di Da).
I Lose Control she extends out on the vamp and unleashes some Gospel power. Reminds me of Madonna’s Like a Prayer.
She has three backing vocalists with her. Because this is predominantly a DJ music event, there are no live performing musicians.
Lost the Plot previews a brand-new tune. Sound ecstatic and inspirational as familiar ones Swim and I Wish You Well.
Closes her set on a peak with Remember. Everyone is on a high.
Sachi are Nick Chrisp and Will Thomas, two young Kiwi guys getting hot reputation’s here and overseas.
Friends since high school and sharing a love for electronic music, they have developed a style which includes live vocals, bass and electric guitar and keyboards, which they do tonight.
They don’t play live drums tonight, though.
They do have a guest female vocalist, whose name sounded like Alimony (?) from the stage. Sings Pop in the higher register. Sometimes with a helium lift and at other times sounding the Material Girl Madonna.
Disco beats which roll out smoothly in sync. Dancehall Soul vocals appear in warm honeyed tones.
I appreciate the Latino percussion they insert into the flow.
One young guy is dancing in smooth syncopated fashion in front of me until I notice he has one artificial leg. A hybrid of the way James Brown famously danced on one leg.
From the stage comes the sampled vocal watch me working. It is NOT from There Was a Time.
Some people are getting quite pissed and it’s only 6.40pm. Everything is kept in check, and nothing boils over.
It seems like half the afternoon shift from the Henderson Police Station nearby is down here cooling out on the vibe.
Girls Don’t Sync are a trio of young female DJ’s who like to pump it up.
The effect is hypnotic and relaxing in a chillout fashion. I feel some psilocybin of MDMA would be ideal. Not THC as it would be ultimately enervating. Ketamine might lift you off like a drone buzzing around the big field.
Jyoty is a DJ who is of Indian parentage, born in Amsterdam and raised in London.
She starts with distinctive Indo-beats and an Indian male rapping voice with a speedy patter.
Like the two songs she has on Spotify, which incorporates Qawwali sounds and great passionate female vocals.
But the Asian beats are quickly relegated to more conventional DJ fare. Which left me a little disappointed.
Indian Rappers do get sampled later but their style is distinctly western.
The more exotic costumes and flamboyant personalities are seen cavorting around. Starting to get some Mardi Gras atmosphere.
Luude comes on immediately after Becky Hill, and he’s all fast electronic percussion beats. Old school Techno like Planet Patrol is part of it.
Meshed space satellite noise and all quite like Joe Meek having an Elon Musk adrenaline rush.
Down at the front barrier it all looks manic and on hyperdrive. The blast of gas flames is warming as the night has gotten chilly.
Christian Benson comes from Tasmania (an island like New Zealand) and he did have a huge number one hit here with a reworking of Men At Work’s Down Under.
Everyone’s blitzkrieg bopping front of stage. The heat and passion are high as lyrics ring out… It’s only me and I walk alone/ On the streets of empty dreams.
Golden Lights Festival 2025 is essentially a physical experience more than a cerebral one with the DJs.
They are the modern-day shaman practitioners who work a certain alchemy to induce trance states. They open the dopamine and endorphin channels, and ten minutes can sound like a whole concert. Time expands and contracts.
We are hopeful and expectant as we party and negotiate the fraught and troubled times ahead.
Rev. Orange Peel
Photography by Leonie Moreland
Becky Hill
Sachi
Luude
Jyoty
Girls Don’t Sync
