Oliver Tree is an absolute weirdo. Like, did you know he's actually from Victoria? You don't need to look that up. He lived here until he was six years old. True story. He actually told us that he was born at Royal Jubilee Hospital and briefly attended the South Park Family School in Victoria, despite what the internet has to say, and this information certainly seemed legit at the time, considering his entrance.
With the maple leaf flag proudly splayed across the main stage's big screens, the majesty of the old red and white resonating in the dynamic tracksuits of the Olympic athletes of Vancouver Island celebrated during Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Oliver Tree rode around the stage on an oversized kick scooter while an abbreviated version of the Canadian national anthem played, screaming out, "God bless Canada! Canada, I missed you! You ready to have some fun?!"
Turns out, Canada was ready to have fun. It's pretty hard not to have fun when you're listening to this lunatic's high NRG rave rock nonsense while taking in his Harajuku-meets-David Byrne fashion sense and Eric André level absurdist prankster videos. It's like seeing the Flaming Lips if they were more into snorting Ritalin than shooting heroin.
For this set, Tree came out wearing his standard outfit, the one he's wearing in most of his early videos, with the jogging phat pants and baggy windbreaker like a classic '90s raver. On risers behind him, Tree's drummer and guitarist and keyboardist were dressed identically to him, because why not. So weird.
Now that I think about it… Oliver might have been joking about being from Victoria. He's either a Californian filmmaker/producer/singer who holds the Guinness record for the world's largest kick scooter or he's a mutating computer virus that we all somehow mass-hallucinated seeing perform at Rifflandia. What was in the water station's water?
Anyway, Tree started out with "Miss You" before moving into "Bounce" and "One and Only," all from his album Alone in a Crowd, which was somehow released by Atlantic Records in 2023. All of these performances were accompanied by the music videos for them, which are essential viewing in their own right, as directed by Tree himself, the Andy Warhol of our times.
Having been handed a keytar by a stage tech, Tree robotically tickled out the signature melody for "One and Only," but this wasn't the only interaction he'd have with techs. After that song, he provided a moment for the "mary wholiani" smokers in the crowd to light up, leading into his medley of "All That" and "Alien Boy" (if you watch the video, that's the outfit they were all wearing at the time). As Tree was bouncing around for the "Alien Boy" section, his Beatles wig came loose, and a stage tech to desperately attempted to reattach the mop to the top of his head while he was jumping from one side of the stage to the other.
Tree abandoned his wig entirely for "When I'm Down," during which he goaded everyone to hold their phones up and wave them side-to-side by calling them "lazy motherfuckers." He wasn't too far off from a costume change, though, which he performed in the middle of the stage while "Spanish Flea" played over the house system. Underneath his original outfit, Tree had on the cloudy sky jumpsuit from the "All That" video, and added ski goggles, a fisherman hat and a neon green vest. Safety first?
With his new duds on, Tree insisted that his "hometown" crowd jump vigorously for "Do You Feel Me?" or else he was going to cut the song off, and end his set right there. Not only did he continue on to play "Miracle Man," but when he was threatened with a five-minute warning to finish his set, he offered to pay $35,000 USD for the opportunity to play four more songs. After all, it was his grandmother's 93rd birthday, and his whole family was there. It could have been her last birthday ever, a fact that he reminded us of twice as we sang "Happy Birthday" to her "in Canadian."
Tree also claimed his band was from Saskatchewan, so who knows if anything he said was true. His grandmother might not have been there, or existed at all. The only thing we know for sure is Oliver Tree is an absolute weirdo.