“Your boy’s a little out of shape!” Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst says, slightly out of breath, on the second day of Adelaide’s Harvest Rock festival. The last time his band visited Australia, it was for the unrelated but similarly named Harvest festival in 2011 – and a lot can happen in 12 years.
A rootsy offshoot of hard rock festival Soundwave, Harvest’s quick demise was, in retrospect, an early sign that Australia’s noughties festival bubble was about to burst. Soon Soundwave, Parklife, Stereosonic and the once-mighty Big Day Out would all fall.
