The first time I went to the Big Day Out, it was 2003, it was stultifyingly hot and I wore an At The Drive-In shirt I had bought on my dad’s credit card.
The shirt clung to my back by the time our train arrived at Mt Smart Stadium. I opened my water bottle while we were in the queue, and some seasoned-looking guy in dreadlocks told me “you probably shouldn’t do that”. He was right – despite my petulant protestations, the guard poured it out once he saw the broken seal, and I was desperately thirsty, and around more people than I’d ever been in my life. A bucktoothed boy from Taupo in a white singlet joined us at the smaller set of stages. It turned out he knew my friend’s cousin. He offered us swigs of rocket juice out of a faded Miranda bottle. He had been twice before, he explained, and it was easy to get things through when you knew how.
Crowd at the Big Day Out 2013 Photo: Jacinda Boyd
We moshed to 8 Foot Sativa. Later, I worked up the courage to go see Wilco by myself, the stringy, burnt and drunk teen in a horde of white-faced Murderdolls fans. I saw Queens of the Stone Age twice – once with shit sound, again in a generous and deafening late-night encore to make up for the botched slot. I helped a girl who couldn’t have been five foot out of the Foo Fighters pit and lost my friends for good. It was so loud, and there were so many people, and I felt like in some sort of adolescent sense I’d arrived.
But if you’ve gone to the Big Day Out in Auckland, you probably have a version of this story. The event rose, crested, was made fun of (guilty as charged), and then died. At which point glib trainspotting about the lineups became less interesting than people’s war stories. But now, phoenix-like – it’s back! Though as I discovered, there are plenty of BDO lifers who can remember a time when it didn’t exist at all.
Clayton Spence has been to every Big Day Out since 1994 bar the second, and you can hear the rue in his voice when he remembers the school camp he had to go to instead (“That was the year with Primal Scream and Hole – still gutted”). The original Sydney event in 1992 had been an act of stunning serendipity. A band called Nirvana had been booked as second-fiddle to Violent Femmes as headliners, and in between the announcement and the show, Nevermind became the most successful album in the world. The format was assured, and NZ promoter Doug Hood brought it to a city – a country - in sore need of a big event that wasn’t sport or an A&P show.
It was smaller scale – only 8000 or so people attending, but that meant you had space for crazy stuff like The Breeders arriving on this really big fruity pageant float to play
“There was nothing like it,” Clayton recalls. “Like, maybe if you’d been around a decade earlier you got to see Sweetwaters. But Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, The Breeders, all in one day. You can’t overstate what a big deal that was. My dad dropped me off, handed me fifty bucks, and said ‘have a great day’. I’ll always be thankful to him for that.” He remembers feeling like he’d found his own. “There were goths, punks, every colour of hair, and you basically felt like they’d all discovered each other at last”.
“It was smaller scale – only 8000 or so people attending, but that meant you had space for crazy stuff like The Breeders arriving on this really big fruity pageant float to play, Kim Deal dressed like a homecoming queen – I never saw anything quite like that again.”
At the end of the night, Clayton and his best friend stumbled out into the industrial hinterlands of Penrose and straight into the comfort of a passing limo. “We asked ‘can we have a lift home?’ and the guy said sure. Took us all the way back into town.” To this day, he’s not sure whether Billy Corgan spent hours seething and waiting for his ride in the parking lot.
Sounds like a teenage dream. But half the time, it was portrayed as a teenage nightmare. “The media would always treat it as this terrifying gathering of youth, and in a way it was – it was a meeting of the freaks!” recalls Renee Jones, who has been to every BDO but one as well (she later met and married a fellow lifer, Phil Armstrong).
“But that was the great thing, people would come from all over the country and dress up – whether they were goths or punks, or whatever. It was a pilgrimage, it had performance arty kind of spaces like the Lilypad … there’s always been that vibrancy.”
“I’d just come back from two years in the UK, and I’d been to the Reading Festival there,” adds Phil. “It would have been a pretty depressing return in some ways until I realized we were starting to get a festival culture here.”
This was the era where letter campaigns urged organisers to stop Marilyn Manson from being allowed into the country and where the Prodigy were accused of inciting arson. Plenty of my friends were shuttled to Parachute instead by their parents lest they ended up drug, drink and Satan-addled BDO casualties. And their fears weren’t without merit. The early days were more lax. One year, Renee had her new shoes thrown up on before she even got in. Meanwhile, Clayton can remember passing out in the queue and waking up to “Mikey Havoc standing over me, screaming in my face. Somehow, my mates ferried me through.”
Amid that, some incredible times. Courtney Love handing her guitar to a fan as the crowd lost its mind. That QOTSA double-whammy. And the great microclimate of 1996, when the Jesus Lizard, Bailterspace, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds played in a biblical downpour that had formed over Mt Smart and Mt Smart alone.
In the 2000s, it got a rep for being stagnant and playing it safe, and sure – in 2014, a headline act like Pearl Jam isn’t exactly an avant-garde statement of life on the edge. But Clayton remembers a festival that evolved with his times and tastes. “When I first went, you know, I was a young metal, rock, grunge kid – so you had Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, and that was me. Then five years later I’d moved into dance, and there was a Boiler Room with Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx. Then in the 2000s, when there started to be revivals of the 70s and 80s stuff, they were down with the same stuff.”
“I don’t have any time for people who knock the Big Day Out. It’s a bit of a trendy sport each year when the lineup’s announced, and I think it’s bullshit,” he argues. “Let’s say for argument’s sake there were only six international bands on there you wanted to see, leave aside the experience, all of that. You’re already getting a much better deal than if you had to pay to see them all separately.”
“There’s also that belief in some circles that the lineup is instantly a failure if there’s stuff you don’t like,” Phil agrees. “The thing is: the Big Day Out’s not being designed for me. It’s not being designed for you. It’s being designed to cater for as many people as it can. If you really don’t like it, no one’s forcing you to go, and there’s more options than ever before.”
Jimmy Christmas playing with The D4 at a show at Western Springs. Photo: Jacinda Boyd
“Some people do tend to think the local acts are just a filler or bonus on top of the internationals, but they forget that it’s not easy to catch all those bands when you’re a young kid from the suburbs. I’d go along and see the local acts, playing on the biggest platform they’d had so far, and think ‘Hey yeah, I can do this”, Jimmy Christmas says.
“I remember that feeling seeing Loves Ugly Children, who played this blinder of a set that was actually under the stadium itself, where they did the food and toilets and stuff later on. And I saw Nothing At All! play in ’96 before Tony Brockwell passed away the next year, and then saw The Snitches, which were Dion (Palmer)’s band before we came together in the D4. Seeing that Snitches show was one of the things that made me know I wanted to work with that guy. I don’t think I’d ever seen a crowd with that kind of energy before, and this wasn’t a big headliner. This is something that people were stumbling by at two in the afternoon and got floored by.
The D4 would end up playing plenty of BDO circuits themselves. It’s a period that blurs together for Jimmy. “The time when we were playing one of the main stages in Auckland in the early evening – that was great. That felt like a full circle. And you’re access all areas, which you don’t get if you’re on the smaller stages. That’s how we ended up meeting and playing table tennis with the Hives”. He maintains that his comprehensive two-hour trouncing of the Swedish garage-rockers was what earned the New Zealanders an opening slot on the Hives’ international tour later that year.
You didn’t have to be a musician to bump into bands in Auckland, either. Through their connections as 95bFM DJs, Renee and Phil experienced a very boozy night in the K Road Ballroom with Blink 182 for the 2000 BDO. “Those guys were hard case. Everything was on the house, they were really down-to-earth and wouldn’t let us pay a cent.” Never mind that bFM itself wouldn’t have touched their music with a bargepole.
It wasn’t always a perfect day. Uneven sound, the odd rough timetable clash, and getting through the endless hordes were the parts you chose to forget. “The turnout at the first couple of years was way smaller than what you get now,” Renee recalls. “You were able to get around a lot easier, and later on it became this case of 'shit, if I want to go see something at the Green Stage now I’d better give myself 25 minutes'. There were over 50,000 people at a couple of the largest ones.” Phil thinks braving the crowds was part and parcel of the experience, but everyone’s agreed that in 2012, when it looked like the show was over for good, they actually had a nice time. “I’d never actually been able to see the grass before.” There was a lot of space at the wake.
2012: the year Kanye didn’t come to the party. Soundgarden became de facto headliners, a mirror of the first Auckland show in both lineup and stature. An okay lineup still needs a big drawcard or two to sell big, and this didn’t have it. Before the day itself, current organiser Campbell Smith confirmed it would be the last Auckland BDO – which, it’s been observed, was pretty savvy in terms of marketing this year’s return.
For what it’s worth, Clayton rates the Soundgarden gig as one of the best headliners he’s seen, while Renee remembers Royksopp’s set as a reminder of how weird and brilliant the BDO could be: “I knew who Royksopp were, but I didn’t know what to expect. Honestly, I was just anticipating a couple of guys behind synthesizers.” The Norwegian duo had a backing band and ridiculous feats of taxidermy couture (deer and bird heads on B-movie costumes). Meanwhile, the tasteful bloopy ambient of their records became an ecstatic rave-up live. “I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see them anywhere else, and I would’ve really missed out.”
So what’s 2014 going to mean? November’s announcement that Blur had pulled out of the entire Big Day Out (Australian included) created a creeping sense of déjà vu, and there was an inevitable Twitter pile-up on Smith and the Auckland organisers for a decision they had no say over. A show this size in Auckland can still be lucrative, but it’s piggy-backing on an Australian circuit, and that leaves it at the mercy of a whole lot of factors before the bands even set foot here.
Nevermind - there’s obviously some solid big-hitters (Arcade Fire, Snoop Lion (né Dogg)), and old soldiers that fit the bill. It’s in new, central digs at Western Springs, and a presence of a Metro pop-up tent suggests it’s gentrifying as it starts to get its first second-generation attendees. Most importantly, it’s addressed that long and pointless tail of Australian pub-rock bands that kept being dropped into the lineup unbidden. Powderfinger! Eskimo Joe! Grinspoon! We have been spared.
And if it’s found itself competing against its own progeny in the past five years, the lifers and organisers alike can comfort themselves – it’s only because of the BDO that anyone figured out it could be done at all. Today Clayton, who works in event and tour management, is working on a major musical event in Christchurch. “The final thing is going to be nothing like the Big Day Out, but that’s where it all began for me and a lot of people,” he muses. “So we definitely owe it that debt.”
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