"Dune Rats & Friends" was maybe Splendour’s greatest mystery heading into this weekend, and to a certain extent it still remains one. Still, it was a one-of-a-kind Splendour spectacle.
Backed by a giant cheese riser that one artist backstage dubbed “The Rat Hole”, the Brissy trio rolled through a collection of their own greatest hits plus a bunch of pretty fun covers. They got across a lot of territory, and also left a whole banana bunch of questions in their wake. Let’s get to them:
- 1.
What Just Happened?
Still not totally sure about this. What can be confirmed is that Dune Rats played at Splendour In The Grass, and they invited a tonne of special guests to play with them. You could cast an Ocean’s 11 movie with the list of guests: A.B. Original (what!?), Alex Lahey, Drapht, Mallrat, Tkay Maidza, WAAX, plus usual suspects Hockey Dad, DZ Deathrays, Gooch Palms, and a Bennie. There were expected checkmarks – ‘Bullshit’, ‘Scott Green’ – but there were also a fkn lot of surprises, none moreso than the team-up that resulted in Mallrat/Tkay/Anty from the Bennies and the Dunies covering ‘Pump It’ by the Black Eyed Peas. Or how about a rendition of ‘Where’s Your Head At’ ft. A.B. Original and Drapht. You’re reading correctly. Those things happened.
2. How did they pull THAT together!?
Working theory: The Dunies might be secretly heaps clever, hey. They self-brand as scatterbrained, party-heavy beugy boys, so to buck trend and watch them actually try to pull together something incredibly ambitious is a strand of kinda genius. It didn’t all work but it didn’t have to. The charm was in Dune Rats’ ability to piece the jigsaw together and have fun completing it.
3. Who was the Best Friend?
It’s hard to pick a Chosen Rodent out of all of the Friends that Dune Rats invited on stage, but Mallrat gets the nod here for being a) part of ‘Pump It’, which was the standout of the set, and b) part of the rat family already. Consider her Rat Adjacent.
4. How could a band who have build a career out of being hot, messy fun produce anything other than a really fun hot mess?
You really couldn’t have expected anything else. The beauty of the hour-long set was in the push-and-pull, the band’s ability to both precisely meet and completely surpass expectations. Are they Australia’s Friendliest Band? Whoever they are, it sounds like they’re having more fun than anyone.
5. At A Party. Who’s Scott Green?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯