Posts by Russell Brown
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Capture: Big Day Over and Out., in reply to JacksonP,
The Adults.
Would have liked to have Shihad there, as many have said, but it was good to see these kiwi icons on stage at the last BDO.
I thought their closing song, 'Please Wake Up' was really brilliant. Julia Deans brought a real intensity to it. Also -- awesome red dress. She does have the best frocks.
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I should have taken more pictures. But I was having a good time.
Here's the Six60 crowd leaving the new un-tented Boiler Room.
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Hard News: #BDOMemories, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
at times the ball was replaced with members of the vegetable kingdom
I seem to recall Ratbag sending down a watermelon.
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A criticism of the Big Day Out ...
It's never really done right by local hip hop. In part, that's simply because there physically wasn't a place for it: that benighted stage behind the Boiler Room was a terrible place to play.
But, to take this year as an example, they have @Peace playing at 11am in the tent. Whatever. The right call there would have been to give the Young, Gifted & Broke crew (@Peace, Home Brew, etc.) a late-afternoon slot on the alternative stage. They'd comfortably draw their own crowd and it would be memorable -- a lot of the best stuff on the #BDOMemories hashtag has been from local hip hop folks. They like a party and they deserved one.
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Hard News: #BDOMemories, in reply to Jonathan Ganley,
There was mud, of course. But you had to go out of your way, right down to the edge of the Waikato, to find it.
Is that Andrew Dickens?
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Hard News: #BDOMemories, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
A couple of other memories from that Sweetwaters ...
1. Interviewing Jim Kerr in a caravan, and him being so coked-up it was a struggle to keep up.
2. Had sex. Also in a caravan.
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Hard News: #BDOMemories, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Mostly I remember the epic cricket game played between the backstage caravans, which even Talking Heads management couldn’t stop, though at times the ball was replaced with members of the vegetable kingdom, players included ’Arry Ratbag, Doug Hood, Roger Shepherd, and many others, I’m pretty sure Russell was there – but I’m not gonna swear to anything this far beyond…
:- )Oh, I was definitely there for that. I have very fond memories of getting a demon delivery through the defences of Graham Cockroft of Netherworld Dancing Toys.
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Hard News: #BDOMemories, in reply to Chris Waugh,
It would be nice if that didn’t seem so unusual these days. Are such people really a dying breed?
I don't think so. Most of the people running the other summer festivals are decent folk, and the ones who aren't have come a cropper. There are more genuine music fans in concert touring now when I was a lad.
Because it all seems to be about the money these days.
We've seen that in Auckland with the opening of Vector Arena, which brought in a flood of acts but saw prices rocket. And they won't spend the money on acoustic panels to fix the arena's horrible, patchy, acoustics. That pisses me off.
In the wider world -- and the US in particular -- for sure. The vertical dominance of Live Nation, which was spun off from the crushingly dominant Clear Channel radio network, is pretty creepy. Even the more sponsorship-heavy festivals are still a welcome break from the machine-like business of arena touring. I suspect that's one reason for their popularity.
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Nice Big Day Out send-off by Scott Kara on the Herald site, greeted with the same weird pissiness by a couple of the commenters.
I wholeheartedly agree with him about the year-after-year presence of The Living End. They are one of the dullest, most ordinary rock bands I've ever seen.
But they're evidently popular back home in Australia. And it's fair to note that some New Zealand acts have had a pretty fair shake on the Aussie leg of the festival.
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Hard News: #BDOMemories, in reply to JacksonP,
Yeah, the negative article that got on my goat most yesterday (no links) was written by someone who hadn’t even been to one! Sorry if I don’t care what they think.
Ah, but he did go to Sweetwaters that time.
