My first indication that perhaps this afternoon was going to be chaotic was when my friend Jo sprayed me in the face with a shower of spit.
We were standing in Federation Square, blowing into our little white plastic instruments along to Céline Dion’s seminal 1997 hit My Heart Will Go On. I had not played a kazoo since childhood. Jo had never played one. And so it was that I found myself covered in his saliva, shot from the bottom of the instrument. A baptism. A rebirth.
The concept of Rising festival’s 10,000 Kazoos event was as absurd as it was strangely appealing, so of course I jumped at the chance to attend with Jo and my friend Lauren. I was excited as I was fearful, especially after someone suggested that it might be like a redux of the great vuvuzela moment of 2010, except heaps more annoying.
Walking in, I heard others exclaim around me, confused as to how to play the instrument. “It’s the sound of failing,” one man said to his friends, as he blew into the top of his and no sound came out. But, as we found out, it was in fact the sound of friendship. Of community.
No one knew what was going to happen – only that we were, at some point, to play a composition by the Melbourne musician Ciaran Frame, and that there would be a rehearsal, then a performance. Also, that we were going for the world record of the biggest mass kazooing event. Finally, I thought, finally I will make my parents proud.
Standing in the square waiting for this moment, spontaneous kazooing broke out. We kazooed to Rick Astley (Cursed). We kazooed to Pachelbel’s Canon (as a longsuffering wedding cellist, this healed something deep inside me). We kazooed to Billie Eilish. I started to become pretty good at it.
Then a stranger walked up to Lauren, Jo and me. He introduced himself as Ciaran – the kazoo king himself – and asked if we wanted to go up on to the stage. My god, I thought. My talent has been recognised. My big break has arrived.
On stage, we danced with Betty Grumble, who led aerobics routines and encouraged a kazoo tribute to Tina Turner. I stood behind Sammy J, the leader of the kazoo orchestra, as he commanded the people down below. I looked out on to the sea of kazoos and I noticed that some of them were shiny – people had BYO-ed theirs – and some enterprising young children had stacked kazoos on to the ends of one another to make large kazoo horns. Here with my bird’s eye view of my fellow Melburnians who were as unhinged as me to show up to this event, I saw the best of humanity.
Strangely, the actual performance – which turned out to be an accompaniment to a story of a lonely flying kazoo in Melbourne, searching for community – was kind of an anticlimax. We simply kazooed our interpretations of emojis on the screen to add to this tale.
But after humming (not blowing) into this little plastic instrument for over an hour, and saying the word kazoo so many times that it lost all meaning, I felt something inside of me release. This was the dumbest thing I had ever done and yet I don’t know if I’d ever felt so joyful or free. I didn’t care how silly it was, or whether so many people publicly and aggressively breathing for an hour was going to be a super-spreader event. My inner child was beaming at what was, in Sammy J’s words, a sweet, beautiful, absurd moment. Here I was, 34 years old, standing on a stage in front of thousands of people, playing the kazoo. Only in Melbourne.
And then after the kazooing was done – after we had broken the world record – we looked up, and there was a goddamn rainbow over Fed Square, like the lord himself was smiling down on this wacky congregation of freaks. It was annoying. It was funny. It was stupid and delightful. Just like life.
