Driving to a festival, it’s always a good sign when you see punters walking alongside your vehicle and vomiting in the gutter. While we undertook the lengthy voyage from Sydney to Maitland for the closing weekend of Groovin’ The Moo, it seems that most of the locals had been indulging in beer bongs for breakfast. Our scenic drive up past the Hawkesbury River and Central Coast was pleasant – we stopped by McDonald’s for a cheeseburger and I annoyed everyone in the car by singing Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ way too many times.

The first act of the day was Sydney rap super-group One Day, with Joyride bellowing out the hook to ‘S.D.R.O’ with enough force to fill the entire venue. From there, they continued with material from their commendable 2014 album Mainline, including heavy posse cut ‘Many Hands’ which is the type of shit that makes me wish I had a posse in the first place. Still, the highlight was their fiery cover of Scribe’s ‘Not Many’ which may be the best Like A Version track of all time. This was when I also began to notice an unusually high amount of people dressed like crayons for some reason.

Next up was ASAP Ferg, and the Trap Lord got into the ignorant material early with the immortal ‘Dump Dump’ and a remix of Future’s ‘Move That Dope’. He was accompanied onstage by some bro named Marty Baller, and anybody named Marty Baller is an upstanding human being in my books. Ferg’s set continued with circle pits forming for ‘Let It Go’ and both ‘Work’ and ‘Work (Remix)’ – It’s just a shame that Marty Baller didn’t step in for French Montana’s verse on the latter. Still, Ferg did his job of getting people to make gunshot noises and yell words like ‘BALLIN’ really loudly.

We then walked past the official merchandise tent, where Peaches had a shirt for sale that said ‘WHOSE JIZZ IS THIS’ on it. Pretty weird if you ask me. We also went to get some chips from one of the many mobile restaurants on offer, but they were way too salty and made my mouth feel like the Sahara Desert. To quench my thirst I bought a can of Sunkist for the fairly reasonable festival price of $4. Then we saw some drunk punter get German suplexed by a security guard next to the chips stand.

Ball Park Music played a cover of the Friends theme song which made me sad about the fact that I’m not married to Jennifer Aniston. Local duo Carmada dropped their wobbly single ‘Maybe’ into Blink 182’s ‘What’s My Age Again?’ – Huge. Hermitude showed us what a live electronic show is supposed to look like, whipping out keys and percussion for a remix of Kanye West’s banger ‘All Day’. This was around the time it started to get really cold, I brought some Adidas sweatpants which kept me warm and comfortable even though I now looked like I had wandered in from Stereosonic.

After that, Charli XCX took the stage with her all-girl band and delivered her brand of sparkly anthemic pop with ultra-fun results. ‘Doing It’ might be the most addictive song of 2015, while ‘Break The Rules’ is also built on one of her many sugar-coated hooks. She then yelled ‘Pussy Power’ repeatedly. Touring partner Tkay Maidza joined the stage for a hyper remix of ‘Fancy’, bringing some hot bars and her excellent dance moves to the XCX set. God bless Tkay Maidza, what a fuckin’ legend.

We closed off the day by witnessing RL Grime in beast-mode as he dropped bass-heavy bangers usually reserved for Chinese Laundry at 1:52am on a Sunday morning. The heavy ‘Love Sosa’ remix proved that Chief Keef is still kind of relevant, while three seconds of A-Trak’s ‘Heads Will Roll’ remix was enough to bring a tear to my eye. The rest of the set was filled with everyone from Big Sean to Rustie, with RL Grime wrapping up a 40 minute set concisely and pleasing everyone in the audience who was wearing a bandana under a snapback.

Salute to Maitland for proving that they can hold a festival to rival capital cities. We drove home the same night because we are all good sons who wanted to be home for Mother’s Day. We also stopped off at a different McDonald’s where we bought more cheeseburgers and a surprisingly enjoyable carrot cake.