Review by Ben Connolly
Photos by: Naomi Rahim
With 20 years under its belt and a major crisis in confidence, Big Day Out organisers and marketing teams got all introspective in the lead up to the 2012 event. For many, it was time to question the event’s continued validity in the now flooded one day festival market. That questioning, undoubtedly, led the co-founders to part ways and this year’s event to succumb to circumstance and dramatically downsize. And with recent news that the Auckland leg was no more after this year, it’s pertinent to reflect upon what, exactly, the BDO brand has brought to the rock festival table over its two decades.
What are rock festivals all about these days?
Rock festivals are still about discovering.
Early in the baking summer’s day, Melbourne’s BONJAH held the fort at the aptly-named Hot Produce stage. Now with a rockier edge compared to its urban-roots inflected past, the five-piece oozes charisma, with front-man Glenn Mossop’s chiseled looks and studied moves adding to his extraordinary brooding, honey-dipped drawl. A kicker of Portishead’s “Teardrop” adds icing to the cake and pegs this performance as a great way to ease in to the steamy afternoon.
That sense of discovery follows the crowd over to loose Kentucky group Cage The Elephant, occupying a corner of the grounds known as the Essential Stage. Tucked away near the entrance, the tent is overlooked by the hordes, providing a calm eddy to collect your thoughts throughout the day. Cage compliment this perfectly, with those keen enough to make the trek to the far reaches of the grounds doing so in the full knowledge of this band’s legend (thanks, Youtube). From the get-go, “In One Ear”, the furtive, chaotic show barely stays the good side of falling apart. Acrobatic front man Matthew Shultz literally throws himself into the performances, tearing through renditions of singles “2024” and “Aberdeen”, spending half the songs screeching the vocals into a tightly-gripped mic whilst crowd surfing from one side of the stage to the other. There are so many parallels here to warm the cockles of any old rock dogs – flashing moments from The Ramones, through Nirvana and Sublime – it’s uncompromising, deceptively poppy and exciting. The crowd thins out noticeably by mid-set, a spectacle witnessed time and again through the day, with massive receptions for well-known songs followed by waves of exodus as the hordes quickly file out and on to their next conquest.
Rock festivals are invariably about compromise.
With such a full and diverse line-up, pulling your gig-buddy from one act to another generally involves a level of negotiation. And so, reams of bored looking boyfriends are left hanging as the overtly ovary-friendly guitar pop of band-of-the-moment Boy and Bear plays out over the main arena. Just days after its triumphant domination of Triple J’s Hottest 100, the group snared a coveted mid-afternoon main stage slot in its first ever Big Day Out, leap-frogging the usual tour-of-duty of the smaller stages. Customarily, it fails to offend, and is best left to be enjoyed with a beverage in hand and shade from the furnace-like conditions in the open field. Its cover of Crowded House’s “Fall At Your Feet” and blockbuster single “Feeding Line” pass as peaks in an otherwise pedestrian array of bland pap.
The spirit of compromise then sees the boyfriends led to the extreme other side of the grounds for Kimbra’s turn in the Converse Green Stage. Spurred on, no less, as her role as the “that girl” in “that song” which just stormed the Hottest 100 chart, the tent was overflowing out the sides and up the small rise to the fence for the Kiwi’s Big Day Out debut. And she didn’t disappoint, with a diaphragm-busting vocal power which can easily slay even the staunchest of bored significant-others. Backed by a pitch-perfect crowd-choir, hits such as “OId Flame” and “Two Way Street” are uplifting moments – the latter thanks to an almost bossa-nova reworking of the beat and extended vocal flourishes setting the spine to tingle more than once.
Rock festivals are about pushing your boundaries.
And there were plenty to be stretched with controversial rap-collective Odd Future Wolfgang Kill Them All (aka Odd Future, aka OFWGKTA) in early Boiler Room action. While the collective is infamous for its misogynistic lyrics and deliberately antagonistic attitude (it was also banned from the Auckland show for being homophobic), it is of little consequence early on with a weird and spiky mix providing moments of dull roar interspersed with an ear-splitting cacophony of six men simultaneously yelling. The spectacle comes to a head with the menacing “Yonkers” later in the set, as well as nervous moments where stage invasions and bottle throwing almost spells an end to the teetering gig.
Battles stretches the bounds of imagination and interpretation, with its circular and aggressive beats overlaid with angular and confronting bleeps and blips. It’s also visually arresting – the now three-piece enjoys equal footings at the front of the stage, centred by John Stanier’s kit and his customary crash cymbal mounted high in the air. On either side, multi-instrumentalists Ian Williams and David Konopka alternate between playing and disappearing from sight to fiddle the with the dazzling array of effects pedals at their feet. During “Atlas”, Ian stands straddled on either side by keyboards which have been tilted up on their long ends, facing the sky, intermittently triggering samples, keying notes and strumming his cherry red guitar. Sitting in behind the threesome, two tall video screens add to the confusing contortions of sound, often silhouetting and framing the musicians as they go about attempting to make sense of it all. All the while it remains a blissful array of joyful confusion for the small collective gathering in the tent.
Rock festivals are about the ones you know and love.
In fact, there have been many a band whose very careers have never taken them past the mid-afternoon main stage slot at Big Day Out – and that’s precisely why we love ‘em. Take The Living End, for example, whose set minus the newer songs (appreciative hat-tips to “White Noise” and latest single “The End Is Just The Beginning Repeating”) could easily have been transplanted into the exact same slot at any BDO during the past decade or more. Its trademarked hubris and bravado has Chris Cheney poking fun at My Chemical Romance fans patiently waiting inside the D barricade, inviting rapper 360 to add spice to “How Do We Know”, and having a decent crack at Nirvana’s “Breed”.
Just an hour later, and fellow stalwarts Regurgitator still managed to have grown men giggle innocently to the concept of licking anuses. Sporting bare chests and ratty, grunge-esque long wigs, the three-piece powered through a best-of setlist with a late-90s focus. New song “One Day” continued its modernist theme of cutesy electro pop, but nothing can cut through the cheekiness of “Bong In My Eye”, “I Sucked A Lot of Cock To Get Where I Am” and their opus ode to fortune cookies “Kung Foo Sing”.
Rock festivals are about saluting legends.
It wasn’t always the way, in fact the now common phenomena of including a legendary act only came to the Big Day Out relatively recently, but has spawned mythical moments spearheaded by names such as Iggy, Neil and Rage. This year it was the recently reunited Soundgarden and a serendipitous hat-tip to the festival’s past (they also played the first gig). “Searching With My Good Eye” signals a best-of setlist heralding a new era for the group. The spiralling, buzz-saw of Chris Cornell’s guitar work is matched by his guttural growls, the first of which sends shockwaves through the audience, who in kind return fire with rousing hollers.
Early in the set, guitarist Kim Thayil sets off a groove which becomes “Gun” from 1989s Louder Than Love which in epic proportions highlights exactly what this band has brought to the table: a screeching, fiery guitar lick, overlaid with cathartic vocals and underlaid with one of the thickest bottom ends this side of the 90s. So thick is bassist Ben Shephard’s rumble and solid time-keeper Matt Cameron’s groove that it feels like eating a treacle sandwich whilst bathing in a pool of honey in the deepest of Louisiana’s swamps.
(At times, the earth literally shakes, which was later found to be caused by standing on what appeared to be ground-level concrete platforms which had been covered with dirt and grass which dotted the main arena. Either way, it’s a splendid feeling to have a bassline rumble right through your body, threatening to shake you ribs right from their foundations). Special mentions for crowd favourites “Spoonman”, “My Wave” and “Rusty Cage”, though the subdued reaction to “Outshined” was puzzling, considering how much of an epic treatment metered out by the crowd at a sideshow a couple of days later.
Rock festivals are also not always about the headliners.
Sadly so, in the case of Brazilian metal supergroup Cavalera Conspiracy, whose headlining slot at the Essential Stage is seen by barely a fraction of that which saw off Cage The Elephant at the beginning of the day. Perhaps it is a lack of line-up support (the only bands close to them in genre were considerably softer in style – Parkway Drive, The Amitty Affliction, etc), or perhaps it is the star-studded timeslot competition which decimated the crowd. Either way, a tent of barely one-third capacity attempting a circle mosh to a cover of Sepultura’s “Roots Bloody Roots” as a set closer comes off slightly comical.
Rock festivals are about the egos.
And, arguably there are none bigger in the music world than the two competing for the audience’s final attention – that of Manchester lad Noel Gallagher and US hitmaker Kanye West. The ego is in little doubt with the beginning of West’s set, with the cacophony of Soundgarden’s closer still ringing, his cherubs scatter over the neighbouring stage, frantically searching for their missing messiah. To the strains of “Dark Fantasy”, he appears on his celestial platform, rising above his loyal followers, whilst still in their midst. The imagery was not hard to get (the female backing vocals ram it home for the less astute: “Can we get much higher?”), but the Spinal Tap moment hung in the air for those perhaps slightly more jaded: his platform was nothing more than a blue industrial scissor lift, still with the hire company’s name and telephone number print on the side, wedged in between the two barriers at the peak of the D barricade. Still, props to him for skirting around the OHS officer and doing it without having to don a hi-viz and harness.
To the instrumental strains of “Power”, he descends from atop his throne and sets about slowly walking amongst the parted waves of his believers. His loyal subjects kiss his feet (well, brush his shirt if they can stretch their hands between his extra-large apostles/bodyguards), and direct their prayers to him (well, scream “Kayneeeeeee” loudly whilst sprinting to the next vantage point in which to get a blurry iPhone picture). As he finally mounted the stage proper, the introductory chords of “Jesus Walks” rings out (for those who still didn’t get it), and sense walks out of the arena, accompanied swiftly by your reviewer.
On to the lesser of two egos – which is not often a praise levelled at Noel Gallagher. Armed with a songbook of post-Oasis ditties and a whole new band (Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds), the former madman from Manchester proves he’s not quite as much of a toss-pot without his annoying little brother around. A heaving Converse Green Stage crowd speaks as one when early Oasis covers “Mucky Fingers” and “Talk Tonight” are trotted out, but it is new material “If I Had A Gun..”. and “AKA… Broken Arrow” which underwrite the boiled-down essence of what defines his genre-defining band of old and goes with him in his new guise: solid, irreverent guitar rock hooks and gorgeous melodies. And as if to underline the point, a rollicking cover of “Don’t Look Back In Anger” rings out across the grounds as a final kiss off to the 2012 Big Day Out.
I hope we don’t look back in anger on this festival – it’s given us a lot.
Review by Ben Connolly
Photos by: Naomi Rahim
Photos by: Naomi Rahim