Splendour Is The Latest Festival To Be Rightfully Flooded With Demands For Shannon Noll

Over the past few months especially, something beautiful and good and true has been brewing around the first rightful Australian Idol winner Shannon Noll and I’m not sure I can fully explain it. After more than a decade of relegation to dodgy NRL grand final shows and gigs at the Tamworth RSL, the singer has been met with a flood of support and renewed hype that has now made him the most requested headline act of our nation’s biggest festivals.

For many, it started as irony; a fun bit of nostalgia and something to assuage the guilt we all have over callously abandoning him when he really needed us in 2003. But now it’s become something more. Meme wars on Facebook events for gigs in Goulburn pubs have evolved into calls for him to headline nationally touring festival Groove In The Moo and this has led to a genuine appreciation of his music. If you haven’t screamed the lyrics to his early-noughties’ moderately successful cover of Moving Pictures’ ‘What About Me?’ at closing time with a pint of Tooheys New and/or VB in your hand in the past few months, you’re at serious risk of becoming completely irrelevant.

Gloriously, against all odds, this is Australia in 2016:

For the record, this is something Shannon Noll is pretty stoked about. He’s been in touch with the organisers of Groove In The Moo and told them he’s up for playing the festival. He’s talked to fans about it. In a video posted this week, he responded to questions of his involvement in the most Nollsie way possible. “I hope so … Let’s have a crack, ey,” he said before throwing the horns.

But this isn’t enough for Australia. They want more. They need it.

Yesterday, just a few hours after Splendour In The Grass dropped the dates for its 2016 festival, dozens of people started flooding the official Facebook event with requests.

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After the groundwork had been laid, a campaign started growing. The crowd brought threats and, of course, the inevitable memes.

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Honestly, this is just a small selection. It’s important to me that you know there are many, many more. This is bigger than all of us.

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Neither Splendour nor Shannon Noll have responded to the requests yet but it’s clear we haven’t heard the end of this. Australia Day is now just four days away.

 

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h/t Pedestrian