Crowded House – Happy and Relaxed

By Greg

This story was inspired by the picture above, which Trenna had captioned “Us, happy and relaxed @ Crowded House gig”.

Concerts

One thing I wish Trenna and I had done a little more of together was attend concerts.

In the 1970s and some of the 1980s Trenna and I had, seperately, attended concerts by a LOT of international acts. However, once we were together, for many years we tended not to do that.

That changed in 2010 when Crowded House gave a concert at Sandalford Winery in the Swan Valley just to the East of Perth.

It would be wrong to say we were mad fans of the band, but I had bought Trenna their “Best of” CD at the airport once when I was on my way home from a business trip and it turned into one of our favourite CDs.

Sat Nav & ACROD

It was Sunday, 14 November 2010.

The winery was about a 30 minute drive from home and we amused ourselves with the Sat Nav, first setting it to use Darth Vader’s voice, then Homer Simpson’s, and then finally having it give all instructions in French. Trenna had been studying French at university at this stage.

The Sat Nav was a novelty, albeit, a useful one. They were quite new in Australia and it was one that stuck on the windscreen.

The other new thing we had was an ACROD (disability) parking permit.

As we approached the rustic entrance to the vineyard and winery the traffic got heavier and slower. However, there was a seperate lane for ACROD permit holders and we whizzed past dozens of cars to a dedicated car park just on the edge of the wide verdant, grass seating area.

Happy Crowd

We had two low, foldable “concert chairs” we had specifically bought for the event.

The long, sloped grassed area was big enough to seat thousands of people and it was starting to fill up. We set up a picnic blanket and our chairs maybe 40 metres from the stage below.

It was a beautiful late Spring afternoon/evening and the crowd were laughing and good natured. As Trenna put it later, “you could feel the love”.

After we were settled in I went to the bar which was set up on the edge of the seating area. It was well organised and efficient.

Sandalford wines are generally pretty good, and I bought a bottle and was given a couple of plastic wine goblets. What impressed me was the bottle looked like a regular wine bottle, but was made out of a light but strong acrylic material – crowd safe-ish.

When I returned Trenna was talking to Jane, a friend she had made quite recently at uni. It was nice to see Jane, and as happened with Trenna, Jane and her talked freely.

I think it was Jane who probably took the photo that inspired this story.

As you would expect, the band did a great job and the crowd loved them. For a while we went down and stood at the front for a closer look, but it was just so nice sitting on the grass, sipping wine and soaking it all up.

Trenna and I thought they were fabulous, but for us, even better was the warm night with the clouds clearing to reveal thousands of stars above, and the friendly, happy mob.

We remembered that evening fondly for years to come.

The Set List for the night is HERE.

After an encore of four songs we all packed up and Tren and I were glad our car was close by. In fact so close we beat almost everyone to their car and we had a smooth, uninhibited path to the exit.

“Tourner à gauche” said the Sat Nav.

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