Dinner Plain Hotel

Had a nice weekend at the Dinner Plain Hotel in Dinner Plain (about 10KM from Mount Hotham). I was invited to play at the Dinner Plain Hotel for the "Feb Fest", but unfortunately the Feb. Fest. was cancelled in the last minute. I still played to the regular Saturday night crowd at the Dinner Plain Hotel.

Dinner Plain and Hotham looked different in Summer, but the scenery was still beautiful. Lots of layers of mountain after mountain, and lots of white trees with shedded leaves along winding roads. Apparently, the Great Alpine Road that takes you to Hotham is one of the most winding roads in the world!




Dinner Plain looked a bit plain without the snow, but the architecture still gave it the look of a fairytale town. Surprisingly a very modern building was being constructed right alongside the Dinner Plain Hotel, which contrasted with the old wooden houses and motels. It will be interesting to see how well this new building blends with the old wooden ones!

On Saturday night I started the gig with some layed back tribal US/UK House and moved onto some funky quirky US stuff later on. I played US House for about two and half hours and then slowly moved onto some underground electro-ish stuff (Trentmoller, JT Donaldson) and then smoothly into some old and new Commercial tunes. They (of course) enjoyed the Commercial tunes the most! I had lots of people come up and compliment the music (including the manager -- can't harm my chances of future gigs there!), and someone even came up and got into a long conversation with me about Vinyl versus CDs! This person used to play Vinyl back in his days, but asked me why on earth am I playing Vinyl these days, when there are such sophisticated CD players out there! In the end I think I managed to convince him -- thanks to the many ITM forum threads on the Vinyl versus CDs debate!

I finished playing at around 1.15AM after which I had a chat with some of the locals at the bar who were a very friendly bunch. Some of them had been living in Dinner Plain for many years and they loved the town and everything else that came along with it -- Skiing, Mountain Biking and of course their liquor! I headed back home at around 1.30AM (4.5 hr set).

The next day (Sunday) we all woke up late and had to check out after a quick breakfast. We then headed back to Melbourne and were back home 6.5 hours later (as opposed to 5) -- thanks to a long lunch, a visit to a berry farm, and a flat tyre!

Overall it was a top weekend. Great group, great place, great bunch of locals and some great quirky bumpy chunky and funky US House!! I'd be happy to go back there for their next major event, and I'm definitely going back for some Skiing in winter.