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.
Continue reading Big Day Out 2012 – Melbourne – 29th January 2012 | REVIEW
There’s a buzz in the air tonight – a full house and the Ball Park Music headlining debut album launch tour tends to give out a special vibe. And it’s been a long, well-worn track to get to this point: singles and free downloads leading to early Triple J recognition, signing to a supportive management company and releasing one of them most anticipated EPs of recent memory, seemingly tour after tour as the perpetual bridesmaids before finally knuckling down to carve out the first full-length offering.
Musical legacies are fickle beasts. For the privileged few, early bravado can lead to a lifetime of open doors and opportunities; for most, thorough, their own massive shoes are rarely filled again, leaving a life of painfully striving either to attain the same heights, or failing to convince the world that there’s more to give. For those at the pinnacle, the ones whose exploits drew a definite line with which others would measure themselves, this is arguably even more acute: audiences are liable to bay for more brilliance, and are vocally deflated when their lofty expectations are not met (take, for example, the expectation of larger-than-myth Bob Dylan, whose audience is rudimentary brought down to earth every time his never-ending tour juggernaut rolls through town).
Brisbane band Blame Ringo is a band steeped in its own curio past, to the point of it almost being written off as a comic band. The name itself, and the mileage the group got over the official rebuke from Ringo Starr over its previous name, set it up early on as a tongue-in-cheek piss-take. They followed that through with curious film clip for single “Garble Arch” off its first long player – which became a bona fide Youtube viral phenomena – and then a cute tour concept of playing in laundromats; an audience would be forgiven for thinking this band’s interest was firmly in taking the mickey, rather than solid songwriting. And there would be nothing wrong with that; there are plenty of decent and long-lived acts in this land and abroad who could stake their claim firmly in piss-takery, whilst still holding credible assertions of musicianship (think The Fauves, TISM or, further afield, The Duckworth Lewis Method).
Jeff Lang was not always the teller of disturbed tales accompanied by face-melting blues guitar shredding. There was time – in the heady post-grunge days – way back at the beginning of this 15-year-long and counting career, that Lang appeared to fancy himself as a bit of a fringe-rock crooner. His then long locks and fresh face even graced morning television and he seemed always just on the verge of tipping into the mainstream proper.