Big Day Out hasn’t had a particularly easy run in the lead up to its twentieth year – from the scaling back of the Adelaide and Perth events, to increasing festival costs and high audience expectations, putting on one of Australia’s longest-running festival is clearly no mean feat.

Addressing these issues, BDO promoter Ken West has given an extensive, 20 minute interview with the New Zealand Herald. We’ve picked out some of the best bits from the talk – including revelations that the festival tried to book Eminem, Prince and Blink 182 and that the New Zealand show was almost cancelled. Check out our selected snippets below, or head to the NZ Herald website to listen to the full interview.

Booking artists:

“We got asked over a year ago by Prince’s representation to say, ‘We really want to do the Big Day Out’ and so we spent a year working that forward…At the same time we had Blink 182 chasing us for a year, saying, this’ll get Travis [Barker] on a plane. Neither happened. It just kept going to the end of the line and nobody ever really said, ‘No’.”

“Eminem walked out with 15 million off three shows [on his recent Australian tour] means that was la la land to think he could ever do the BDO even though we offered $6 million. La la land, like how can we compete with that, he was getting $5 million a show at the end of the day, toughly for that. 50,000 people, work it out minimum $150 for a ticket.”

“Because everyone has such high expectations of the twentieth show that unless we have Jesus and the Devil on different stages it’s a disappointment because of the expectations of the public about what we can and can’t do.”

“I’ve managed to piss off everybody, without being able to do it any other way.”

“I had to start negotiating with everybody to see what we could do. The fundamental things that were in the jigsaw were, Soundgarden didn’t want to play before Kanye, Kanye couldn’t play before Soundgarden because he would have probably gotten heckled, you know this is the musical flow.”

Rising costs of running a festival:

“It was kind of a perfect storm in effect. The competition levels in Australia went crazy. The bidding wars went crazy. Everything got bidded up. It’s about two years that this is going to go on for, maybe only another six months, until the northern hemisphere realizes that the southern hemisphere isn’t just a place to come down and make money.”

“First off, my business partner bailed on me one day after going on sale – which was very helpful – after thirty years of working with each other. Without going into the gory details, we had an understanding… The agreement was I that I felt personally that with the twentieth year we were trying so hard to deliver the impossible – we’d put massive offers in for Eminem beyond our budget, we were prepared to take a loss for this year to produce the best show we could.”

“When my business partner pulled out, the show [in New Zealand] was basically over. It was over for three days, totally. Then as I was virtually going through the process with being a receiver of my own event with the principal acts – Soundgarden and Kanye’s people – there was a great deal of confusion and anger and lots of contract waving until I just said “we’re the three biggest stakeholders now – the two biggest acts and myself.”