Burdened with the daunting task of reviewing the largest musical event of the year that you’ll see anywhere in Australia, I was all set to catch as many of the 70 odd acts as I could. But being as it was such a large-scale event, a large portion of my day was predictably spent either waiting in lines for alcohol or dashing between stages. However, I do have the following words to say…
It’s an unavoidable shame that some of the best new and relatively unknown local acts are placed right down the bottom of the bill, and as a consequence play to largely empty arenas. At the start of the day groups like Die! Die! Die! and Dappled Cities were all doing their thing, while British India, who headline local nights with amazing enthusiasm, were saddled with the midday slot. Nevertheless, they’d still be my pick for up-and-coming act of the year. Skipping straight past the annoying Operator Please (an iTunes ad waiting to happen if ever there was one), I typed into my phone the obligatory “Hey, where are you? I’m near the puddle, next to that guy dressed up as Radioactive Man,” while grabbing a beverage and making my first venture over to the infamous Boiler Room…
If anyone remembers the days in the mid 90s when the Boiler Room was little more than a sweaty tent, things have certainly changed a lot since then: it’s now a stupendously huge space with a ceiling that’s probably around as high as a four-storey building, stretching out as long as an airplane hangars and with a capacity for more than 25,000 people. Yikes. In the past the problem has been that the space can often feel cavernous and empty, with the sound echoing all over the place. But it seems like the organisers figured out a few new tricks this year: there were massive mirror balls hanging from the ceiling splashing light all throughout the venue, making it an inviting space from the very beginning and somehow, the sound was crystal clear from wherever you were standing. Who the hell knows how they did it, maybe they’ve got magical powers or something. First up for me were Triple J favourites Funktrust. Ah, dependable old Funktrust; causing dancefloor damage by dropping dusty dirty disco ditties for dudes and dudettes, who were dancing do… Ah, forget it. They. Were. Good. And who would have thought dropping Here’s Johnny at the end would cause such a ruckus?
I must make special mention here of Mark Walton. Unknown and unrecognised to many, he’s nothing less than a musical legend. He’s been around since forever and his latest album Fretless is so fresh, articulated and groovy it leaves all other sample jockeys looking like wannabe dusty-fingered button pushers. His DJ sets are always choc full of delicious party goodness, and at the Big Day Out his six-piece band was bringing a real live soul/funk vibe to Hot House: pity it was so underwhelmingly attended, as this was really the stage that seemed to lose out in terms of audience participation this year. And on that topic, at the end of the day everybody was really stoked to see Dr. Octagon (AKA Kool Keith) break out some of those tight, straight-from-the-brain-style freestyles that made him famous – even if it seemed like I was the only one there actually watching him!
But Dizzee Rascal had no such problems when he hit the Boiler Room mid afternoon. The UK born and bred ‘boy in the corner’ certainly has a strong presence when he hits the stage, but he’s still retained a down-to-earth maturity that defies the fact that he was thrust into the spotlight at such a young age. Indeed, he’s acted quite differently to some of his UK hip-hop counterparts who’ve broken into the mainstream: instead of opting for a white Armani suit, Dizzee was dressed in a modest basketball shirt and backwards cap, and no sooner had he jumped up and bumped out a few jams than people started going crazy. His particular brand of grime and drum n’ bass couldn’t have had a better home, unless they’d situated the dancefloor inside a 40m bassbin. Most memorable was Fix Up, Look Sharp, which samples Billy Squier’s I’ve Got The Big Beat, and the undeniably huge breakbeat resounded throughout the massive warehouse while Dizzee’s vocals were clear and sharp from virtually anywhere in the place. Not always decipherable maybe, but that’s sorta the point with Dizzee.
After a brief stop at the Essential Stage to check out the cheesy synths and heavy guitars of Enter Shikari (death metal meets trance, every bit as weird as you’d think but kinda charming), it was back over to the Boiler Room check out Pnau. I was visually assaulted – so many bright colours and lasers, loud 80s synths and giant pieces of fruit dancing around on stage (the titular Wild Strawberries and so forth) that I felt like an bewildered old man, walking around in a daze and grabbing people’s arms to help me get out. Material from their earlier album Sambanova went down a treat for a lot of people, but their new stuff brings to mind visions of the Teletubbies on acid. That’s a double shot of psychedelia, if you hadn’t already figured it out, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that’s a bad thing or not. What’s not in doubt however was the quality of UNKLE’s performance: every last dramatic chord of last year’s heavy rocking War Stories album was recreated, and while some of the more memorable vocal performances were coming straight from James Lavelle’s laptop (couldn’t they just have packed Josh Homme up in a box, jacked him up full of cocaine and make him play guitar for an hour and fifteen minutes?), the album’s other memorable vocalist Gavin Clark was there to lend his sublime vocal chords to Keys To The Kingdom and Broken. The brilliance of War Stories was conveyed brilliantly, and the flashing lights, giant visual screens generally amazing production of the Boiler Room only made it come alive even more.
Krafty Kuts was up next, but he didn’t quite rock the joint as much as a lot of people had hoped: playing it a tad safe with all a bunch of high-profile breaks remixes, he probably could have been afforded the luxury of bangin’ it out just a little bit harder. But it was a fun party set nonetheless! Not so great were the Hilltop Hoods over at the main stage: if they’d a later slot at a smaller stage then we’d probably had more of an idea of what songs they were playing, but hip-hop doesn’t sound that great in the grandstands. Someone told me later they played with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra… Man! That kind of sound just doesn’t travel well over distances and the acoustics in the main arena was compromised enough to begin with, but wasn’t their fault…
I didn’t really know what to expect from Silverchair, but it seemed like they were pushing shit uphill last Friday night because even though Paul ‘Itch-e & Scratch-e’ Mac joined the band on stage, nobody seemed particularly impressed by their performance. It probably had a lot to do with the tension building throughout the crowd as everyone waited for the headliners to come on: there was nothing they could really have done to get past that. But frontman Daniel Johns gave it his best shot, focussing his performance on the more palatable songs from the post Freak Show era while also weaving in some more personal ones, the kind the crowd might have disliked because they’re ‘slow’. Great tunes yeah, but not necessarily the ones that go down well at a festival. Thankfully, he broke out that old chestnut Freak right at the end, which shut the bogans up for a short while. Arcade Fire on the other hand… They were like rock n’ roll valium. Maybe I’m missing something here, and if that’s the case then feel free to punch me out if you spot me in the street. But either way, it was all just a warmup…
“Now testify!”
Rage Against The Machine are one of the most influential and politically hard-hitting bands of our generation. And exactly seven years since they split due to ‘creative differences’, they’ve now swung back into our radar and landed in Australia with a splash, opening with Testify, a song that puts the spotlight straight on the class segregation that’s rife throughout Western society. But enough politics, did they rock? Yes. Fuck yes.
The band dynamics were so tight it was like they’d never broken up: like watching an old jazz band, where the members don’t even need to look at each other to initiate progression in the song. With Brad Wilk drumming as intensely as I imagined and Tim Commerford effortlessly drawing sound from the frets of his bass guitar, they both held the whole groove together. Meanwhile, guitar maestro Tom Morello roamed and pounced around the stage, throwing in licks, stabs, pitch bends and plucking, sliding, tweaking and twanging improvised notes, and all this other crazy squeaky shit that was totally off the radar. Meanwhile, Zack De La Rocha was throwing out his articulate lyrics and rhymes with the ease of which you’d toss a deck of playing cards across the room, pausing only for mere seconds for some well-orchestrated crowd participation. He transformed once again into an even more impassioned swashbuckling pirate of politics, flailing his arms and body around with fiery intensity. The seething anger in his delivery, reaching its peak with the rapturously received encore of Killing In The Name Of, was something that you just had to be there to experience.
And oh deary me, plenty of people were… When Daft Punk played to 35,000 last December, the main arena wasn’t NEARLY as packed as it was last Friday evening. The rest of the venue seemed like a ghost town as nearly every last single person in the 55,000 strong crowd crammed into the main arena to see their heroes perform, and every last single inch was crammed with people. Screaming fans were jammed from the front of the grounds right to the very back, the D-Barrier apparently became dangerous with the amount of people trying to cram in there and the grandstands were absolutely spilling with punters as well. And the collective energy of tens of thousands of people crammed into a single space all for the very same reason is nothing to be scoffed at. Which only leaves one question: where the hell is the new album?
All that was left after that was Carl Cox closing off proceedings in the Boiler Room. After the pure exhilaration of Rage Against The Machine it was always going to be hard to keep the energy levels high, but somehow he managed to still smash the place to pieces. Plenty of crankin’ techno and pulsing tech house was heard, but as is the way with Cox, he’s never one to be tied down to any single genre and he even found room for some breaks and trance. But it all had one thing in common: it was fucking banging, and there are few others who know how to fill such a large space so effortlessly. The room eventually filled right up to its 25,000+ people capacity and the pyrotechnics were turned up to the max: sweeping lasers so powerful they could reach the back wall, trippy visuals flickering on the massive screens and light installations stretching from the DJ booth to the ceiling that when they started flashing during the breakdowns, very nearly gave me a bad case of epilepsy. The scale of it all was just ridiculous
Oh yeah, there was heaps of other stuff to enjoy too. The mobile mirrored disco; the ‘lords of lightning’ performance; the Lillyworld; that weird Roborock dude; and thousands of other little touches like the short drink lines and adequate bathroom facilities that were appreciated by many. All of these things combined and more made 2008 edition of the Big Day Out one of the best. Ever.
godbox says...
na
alex sillan says...
lcd soundsystem shat all over rage
McPetros Meal says...
haha Liquid Crap Display had nothing on Rage lol. Even though i like them i can see them anytime. I was in the mosh to rage and dude, ive never seen anything in my life!! So go back to your pills and flouro sunglasses and stop wasting my time dude lol.
mlucinda says...
I just can't get enough of Midnight Juggernauts and even though I have seen them so many times this year I still enjoy their shows. The way they built up their set by starting with perccussion then keyboards then guitar and then vocals for Road to Recovery for the first song was awesome. Someone suggested singing lessons for them, can I suggest hearing aids for the critic....? Then off to boiler room for UNKLE, LCD sound system, Krafty Kuts and to finish off with Carl Cox and that unbelievable laser show! That was an awesome day.