CHAPTER 24
1995 - The Year Of The ‘FUCK YOU!’
Anger is an energy. Triple J drops out.
Ticket price- $45+
National attendance 130k
Looking back at the road out of 94 and towards 95, it’s a lot clearer to me now just how volatile the scene was during those days.
The job for 1995 was to build on what we had achieved in 94 while keeping the event credible.
Virtually as soon as the 94 shows concluded, it was clear the landscape was changing. It was now a serious business with impending consequences that come with commercial success.
The Big Day Out was now a six-city, 5-time zone, ten-thousand k trek, spread over 17 days. All this was accomplished in just two short years.
It was obvious that competitors were going to attempt duplicating the formulae, so I needed to make sure 95 delivered on all levels, not just the bands.
Post BDO is primarily bill paying, future strategic decisions were mostly in the back of my mind. It was time to switch off the noises in my head and enjoy my well-earned break.
Then Kurt blew his brains out…..
Two months after the BDO shows, on April 5 1994, Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. In those low-tech times, the message was spread by radio, tv news and ringing friends. A huge black cloud had spread across the planet & what was once a great musical movement died in one day. He touched everyone who loved his music & broke the hearts of anyone that was ever close to him.
While I was aware that the album ‘In Utero’ was a deliberate act by Kurt in an attempt to purge their new mainstream fans. It was also an obvious cry for help. Tracks like ‘Rape Me’, and ‘Radio friendly unit Shifter’ stand out as bold blunt statements. However, "Heart-Shaped Box", with a magnificent colour saturated clip was enough to undermine the goal of being able to escape the mindless adoration. That combined with an insatiable tabloid media, merciless paparazzi and a corporate marketing system designed to stoke the fires, would have been overwhelming. It didn’t help having the delightful Courtney Love by his side and a child to make him feel even more burdened.
They had tried an intervention, but it didn’t help. Most likely to him it just felt like more people telling him that his self-loathing was justified. He drowned his sorrows, ended up in hospital, then a few days stint at rehab, before jumping the hospital fence, running away and a few days later killing himself. I remember Pav telling me that when Kurt rang manager John Silva during all this, John wasn’t very sympathetic at the time. Apparently when Kurt said, ‘I feel nobody likes me’, John's response was, ‘maybe that's because you're not a very likeable guy'. If it's true all I can do is sympathise with John, he has to live with that. I might have said the same thing. At some stage, you have to let go.
However, this tragedy isn’t my story to tell. Only the impact on myself, the scene and to a lost generation, suddenly even more lost.
Kurt chose what I refer to as, ‘a permanent solution for a temporary problem’. Isolated and with a shotgun at the ready it's just too easy. I thought back about my own dance with the devil and thought deeply about how it might have turned out if I had a loaded gun in my hand.
The strange thing when looking back into the time portal I realised that while we all knew how important Nirvana were, we didn’t have a real perspective. There were a lot of great new acts, it was a musically volatile time and Nirvana were a sad casualty. What really did my head in was now realising the timelines, and the consequences.
I wasn’t aware that Courtney would have been pregnant at the time Nirvana played the Big Day Out in 92. That Kurt, most likely only found out on his return. That they were both on the H during that time. That Holes album, ‘Live Through This’, came out only a week after Kurt’s death. Then two months later, in June, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff was found dead from a heroin overdose. Courtney then started touring within a few months, beginning with Reading Festival on August 26 as a late addition. This meant she would have confirmed her Reading appearance soon after Kristen’s demise.
The King was dead, long live the Queen.
There are two ways to unravel why Courtney needed to tour. Was the decision to tour her way of confronting her demons in an effort to avoid killing herself? Or was she a total narcissist aware that with a ready-made audience, her time to shine had arrived? I guess it doesn’t really matter. Either way, she was cast as the villain by the world and was now wearing her thick celebrity skin.
During all this, I was trying to predict a path forward post Nirvana. Grunge had been a big part of the Big Day Out statement and now the party was over. I spent a lot of time attempting to understand how this tragedy would affect the scene and our audience.
Sadly, I neglected to look at how his death affected me. In many ways, I was also a bit crazy around that time. I was drinking heavily again. I just didn’t know what made me happy anymore.
After a pretty wild self-destructive night in Paris in July 94, I accepted that I needed to see a shrink. I can't say that he really helped me that much, but he did put my self-destruction on hold until I could dig my way out of the dark void I was in at the time. I guess Kurt's death did tunnel into my inner darkness after all. Being an undiagnosed ADHD nutjob didn’t help the situation much either.
I wasn’t lost, just confused. It had been a wild couple of years.
The takeaway for me was to accept that copycat deaths and youth suicide in general needed to be confronted. The Big Day Out now had a new mission. Convince young people life is worth living.
I now had to get myself together by September or my career was over. Time frames are good but even now I still feel that I never properly confronted my demons. Part of the problem of being the producer of an annual event is that ....... It is annual.
If I was to keep going, I needed to produce the best event possible. I didn’t give a shit about improved profits, I only cared about making sure it was built to my standard, hopefully without losing money.
I threw everything at the 95 shows to make sure the community beyond music supported the event. Much more like a travelling circus except with Skating, Hot Rod exhibition, Lilypad, Boiler Room, Extreme Rides, Inflatables and Mechanical monsters to complete the picture. It had to be a lot more than a collection of bands. It had to live up to its Youth, Music and Lifestyle mantra.
As a touring company, Vivian and I worked generally as one unit. We knew exactly what the other was up to, not like we didn’t trust each other, more that we were paranoid about fucking up, after all, we were both learning on the job.
Then with the rapid growth of BDO our roles split, I as the creative engine & he as the financial controller, after all, that was our strengths.
For me, especially after my emotional implosion, producing a complex uncompromising event was all that mattered. Win or lose I had to believe in what I was creating.
Of course, my megalomaniacal arts, fascistic approach was freaking out my business partner Vivian.
1995 was a really, FUCK YOU event.
Producing a festival, especially a one-day travelling one is alchemy. A combination of arts, logistics, politics, finance and most of all people. And that's only the top end. On the local music level, it was becoming more brutal. On the way up it was about friendships and positive attitude, but now I had to tell acts, often my friends, that I couldn’t give them a spot as they were not for lack of a better term, hot, or not in the release cycle. In short, I was becoming harder, like a judge.
Post 1994 we were becoming cocky. Soundgarden, Bjork & Smashing Pumpkins had gone on to sell platinum albums soon after the BDO tour. We had proven that we could break acts.....big time.
I had witnessed Ministry at Lollapalooza 92 & believed they were the perfect show closer.
Richard Allan was back in the artwork seat but delivered a very strange work, more like Bee wallpaper than a poster design. I wanted to add an image of a V8 engine, so the artwork became a hybrid. I loved it, it said everything and nothing. The artwork and logo needed to change each year, like a tour or album.
In late September a meeting was scheduled at Triple J to finalise details for the 95 BDO presentation. This was my first and last meeting with station manager Barry Chapman. It was meant to be a simple catch up with manager Jackie Riddell but fell apart when Barry, out of nowhere demanded the Triple J logo be included on our event T-shirt and we split the profits. This made no sense at all. The ABC is not for profit and I had already allowed Triple J shirts to be sold on-site. I guess no one bought any. It quickly got heated when I asked if this was a deal-breaker. As the answer was 'yes', I got up and left.
Then on the 29th of September, General Manager Stuart Matchet sent me a fax to confirm that Triple J would not be presenting the Big Day Out. Chapman was from the commercial world and was hired to steer the national rollout of Triple J. I was the one that fought the way it was handled. At the time I just thought it was about me, but later I realised he might have been clearing the decks for his friends……..my enemies, old and new.
That news initially felt like a body blow. However, it ended up a blessing. None of the Triple J staff could believe what was going on so they kept promoting the show like they were still presenting it. Having no national presenter opened marketing up to all media, including mainstream media, more community radio and allowed us to have the likes of Triple M presenting suitable acts like The Cult which included BDO. We even held regional radio competitions for tickets. There were a lot of tickets given away that year, including to all Triple J staff. Everyone could have a piece of the BDO this time around.
Promoting the BDO was very targeted at that time. We never advertised in the papers in the main cities, the first posters had no dates or acts. The late-night TV ad we produced to announce the shows consisted of 15 seconds of drag racing with a BDO logo, the on-sale date and a grab from Ministrys’ track, “Jesus Built My Hot-rod”, as the sound bed.
We announced for on sale October 28 with a motley bunch that included Primal Scream, The Cult, Ministry & Oasis.
I did then & still believe now that it is imperative to get the audience (or shareholders as I believe they are) emotionally involved. They need to talk about it with their friends & like to gossip about who's on & who's to be announced. A secret is better than an advert. That’s why you can’t buy upside down ads in the newspapers or TV or silence on the radio. Everyone is on to it.
I also realised that having achieved global coverage we needed to encourage more international media. This would make our audience feel more worldly and was also a great way of marketing directly to the international artists, managers and agents. It was winter in the Northern hemisphere, seeing people having fun in the sun was a great motivator. Tourism Australia had no involvement of course.
We made three staggered announcements. This allowed acts a chance to have their own time in the media sunshine and help build momentum.
There were, as usual, only a handful of acts for the on-sale. One of them being Oasis before they were huge. When it came to the third announcement, they were replaced by Screaming Trees with little media reaction. Oasis cancelled for no logical reason, which soon became a pattern for them.
The thing about that time was that attitude had become king. I’m not saying that talent or the quality of music was suffering, but all of a sudden, acts that had been really struggling were being offered million-dollar deals. In some ways, it was the Nirvana curse. Offspring moved from indie act to megaband on Sony. The Cruel Sea with Tex Perkins out front had gone double platinum, Courtney Love, post Kurt, had become the new queen of grunge & Sony had snapped up silverchair, a bunch of teenagers from Newcastle in the hope of cashing in on an obvious trend.
Their agent, Owen Orford, invited me to see silverchair perform at the Vulcan Hotel, an inner Sydney pub, on Saturday, October 22. They were fantastic, something special was taking place and once you got over the fact that they were 15 years old, you could just go with the sounds. Post-show Owen introduced me to the band, they were sitting in their van as they weren’t allowed into the licensed area. It was an easy yes for me to lock them into the BDO run.
Silverchair would be in the second announcement, however, I felt underplaying their rapid rise would be the safest career strategy. We decided to place them mid-afternoon on the skate stage, instead of in the main arena. I wasn’t comfortable in the post Nirvana world. It had become a chew 'em up, spit 'em out mentality and these young fragile souls needed some protection to avoid them becoming casualties.
Ticket sales of course were initially slow, then eventually over the top, resulting in sell-outs in Sydney, Melbourne & Perth.
But on the road, it was looking like a freak show.
In those days I tried to do everything & be everywhere. Arriving in Auckland four days out my priority was to make sure the show, site, production & staff were together & ready. Another big aspect was to make an effort to welcome the bands and let them know I appreciated their involvement. This meant going to Auckland Airport three days running at 6am to basically say hello.
Over those three days, seeing what was coming off the plane brought home to me what we had taken on. Ministry were chemically dependent, Courtney was certifiably self-destructive, The Cult were AA, Mark Lanegan from Screaming Trees was a basket case & of course, Primal Scream were out of control.
6am, two days out from the first show I was waiting at Auckland Airport for Primals to come through immigration. After years of touring bands, you get used to the standard immigration bullshit. Most go straight through but at least one, normally more get stopped & searched, sometimes the whole way, including the rubber glove.
I expected that with Primals, but what I couldn’t have predicted was a cold sober Bobby Gillespie coming straight through, looking anxious, & acting responsibly. So, here’s the story. Primals flew from London via LA & being 15 guys on the road did what you would expect & got drunk rotten. Then, with a four-hour transit at LAX, they decided to drink their duty-free as well. Some of the guys, Rob & Innes in particular, were trouble but their mate, come, security guy, was a real nightmare. Apparently after a minor confrontation at the airport, they boarded the plane but were taken off by fully armed police, then locked up for the day & made to pay for four one-way tickets from LA to Auckland. All that seemed standard Primals. Bobby in charge was not. I couldn't believe how together, calm, methodical & professional he was. Eventually, everything was OK & Bobby could go back to being, the ‘out of it’, fragile, rock-star. But for me, it was a learning curve. Never forget that for artists to get to the top of their field they couldn't possibly be as untogether as they appear.
All this of course made Primals superstars amongst the other groups, Ministry, in particular, were very upset that they had been outdone in the fuck up games.
As the Centra hotel in Auckland began to swell and the bar began to get louder we all started getting excited. For the first time, it really felt like everyone was making an effort & it would be a wild ride.
Pav had decided to do a pre-tour party at the Squid bar; he even secured a Goldschlager endorsement. For the uninitiated, this is caramel flavoured Snaps with real gold flakes floating in it. People walked around with bottles & just poured it down your neck. By midnight we were in trouble, by two am we were toast.
I was meant to go to the venue at 6am.....didn’t happen. This was the first time I missed the opening of the gates. It was a very, very, hard start, even Viv Fantin, the straight-shooting event publicist was an absolute mess.
Needless to say, backstage that day was very shabby. It was also very surreal.
So now we have what I refer to as a multi-layered event. We are not only producing a very volatile ground-breaking festival, but we are also trying to keep under control a myriad of issues backstage (at the same time as a massive hangover). At one point I had to break up a fight between Ian Astbury, the singer with the Cult and a Maori security guard who had stopped him because he didn’t have a pass. Later I saw All Jorgenson from Ministry throw Courtney Love over his shoulder & take her off to Ministrys’ dressing room....... and this was the first show!!
But even with all this intensity, it was sort of innocent. There was fuck all usable drugs in New Zealand. People like Courtney were on prescription drugs & the rest hoped we could find our poisons once back on Australian soil.
The run went Auckland - Melbourne - Sydney - Gold Coast - Adelaide -Perth. This meant that we arrived in Melbourne with fuck all sleep. Most of us were on the 7am flight to Melbourne and went straight to the site. What I thought was a one hour drop in to see how it was going ended up a 20hour haul to keep the show together.
Part of the problem was that not only were the bands a mess but our local teams & in particular the local suppliers had fuck-all knowledge of deadlines or teamwork. Everything was way behind schedule, plus the local scaffolding supplier liked making his own version of high-quality trussing which of course was shit. At 8pm the night before the show we lifted Ministrys’ lighting off the ground to a resounding ‘crunch’ when the trussing broke in half from the weight. Thank Christ it happened then.
Around that time, I got a call from Steven Pav, who was touring Courtney Love, asking for a contact for a good lawyer. She had missed her morning flight out of Auckland and flew over later, first-class, on her own. Apparently, she had an altercation with a hostess, with words to the effect of ‘FUCK OFF BITCH’ coming in to play. This resulted in Courtney’s arrest in Melbourne. We called our lawyer Bruno Charlesworth who jumped at the opportunity to defend a ‘celebrity client’.
It's now 14 hours before gates and we have a collapsed main stage & one of the main acts in jail. Bruno bails out Courtney & while we rebuild the stage Ministrys’ tour manager, Curly Jobson loses it and fires our production manager, Matt Doherty, which makes no sense as he doesn’t work for him. Matt of course thinks going home at this time is a good thing, but I managed to cool it down. By six am we have the show ‘technically’ together.
All is well until ten a.m. when Duckpond (our ambience director) tells me I look stressed & hands me a cookie to calm down. Being almost delirious from lack of sleep I realised soon after that the cookie was gone & I must have eaten it. This makes me panic. I keep it together until gates & then drive back to the hotel. Halfway home & I begin to really trip out. I clenched my teeth and breathed heavily to keep focus. Soon I was losing reality but had to make it back. Eventually, I made it to the hotel, launched the Tarago onto the footpath, fell out, gave the key to the front desk & went upstairs. I panicked but knew what to do. I drank & consumed every bit of sugar in the minibar. Then did a hundred push-ups to regain focus.......yes, I was fit then. After that, I passed out on the floor for a few hours, then got myself together thinking I had to get back to the show. I arrived at 3pm, everything was running smoothly. The reality was that no one really missed me, and the show did run by itself, after all, it was Vivian's show. This was another learning curve for me. Being a control freak means that you don't want to find out that you are not needed, especially at something that is your creation. It was a mixed feeling of pride in our team & a feeling of being dwarfed by my own creation. In short, I loosened up substantially after that morning.
Duckpond had been so enthusiastic with the pot cookies that he added a few to the mixed biscuits tray in the site office. We knew what they were but the guy from the EPA did not. He was from the council & his job was to monitor the sound, log the complaints & make a report to the council. In a room full of T-shirts, he was in a suit & tie. Before we knew it he had eaten two cookies. I had flipped out on one. All we could do was watch & wait. Normally the show is the focus of our attention but on this day, everyone was watching the guy from the EPA. We knew he had lost it when he went into a storage room instead of the toilets. He didn't come out for 10 minutes then sat back at his desk. We kept an eye on him in case it went pear-shaped. I was thinking that we could go to jail, instead, we got a glowing sound report for the show.
There was also a surreal moment when Nick Cave came down to the show and while we were talking Al Jourgensen came over, he just stood almost between us like an excited puppy dog waiting for his chance to talk to Nick. Eventually, he had his chance and told Nick about his admiration for him. Nick sort of brushed him off and then said, "who was that guy?". Nick knew nothing of the band Ministry. Ironically Nick's sound engineer, Matt told me that the same thing happened to Nick when Johnny Cash and Nick played on Lollapalooza. Johnny remembered Matt from when the Johnnys supported him in Australia but had no idea who Nick was, so didn’t give him the time of day.
A few days later Bruno had to pick up Courtney for the hearing. Bruno turned up at 9am knocked on her hotel room door & was greeted by a naked Courtney Love. Bruno was young, lean, but not single. The story goes that he tried to hurry her up as he needed to brief her before court. Her response was to sit naked on his lap & insist that he briefed her while he dressed her. Bruno has thanked us many times for the case. Needless to say, she got off. As Bruno said, ‘”I always wanted to stand on the courtroom steps in front of the media & say ‘my client is innocent”!
In short, this tour was pretty bent. Ministry set a new record for the loudest band at their sideshow at Selinas in Sydney & everyone seemed to be trying to out rock-star each other.
But for me, the real art was elsewhere. The Boiler Room made its debut and I had connected with the pyro mechanical crew called Triclops for Sydney. Pete Farrell, our head of backline knew them and to put it simply, they were the most dynamic industrial artists in the world at that time. Not to say that anyone knew them, but their work was incredible. Giant, remote-controlled steel creatures the size of cars shooting flames & battling each other while destroying symbols of modern life. It was so good in fact that I couldn't let anybody know about the show for fear of having it stopped by the authorities.
The Big Day Out in Sydney that year was quite scary but not for the obvious reasons. While the acts were becoming more volatile, I had neglected to appreciate that the audience was going the same way. Everyone was an exhibitionist and extreme everything was the new game in town. We had placed silverchair on a secondary stage at a time when they were number one nationally with the JJJ recorded song “Tomorrow”. The obvious result was that all hell broke loose. In Melbourne, there must have been 30 people using a shade roof positioned 10 metres above the concrete as a trampoline. At one stage people were diving onto the audience from buildings. The peak came when some fuckwit climbed a 25metre light pole in Sydney & began doing acrobatics with one arm. All eyes were on him, not the band, luckily, he survived.
This was the tone of the show, still innocent but so dangerous.
Triclops performed in the same area as silverchair, but at the end of the night. It was pure mayhem. Flames flew less than a metre over people’s heads & explosions were constant. At one stage the police wanted to shut it down but couldn’t work out how to do it, or for that matter, who was in charge. I had tried to get Ministry down to see the show but later found out that they hid in their shed when they heard the explosions. Total wimps. Their excuse was that they thought it was gunfire.
After the show, back at the hotel fights broke out between mates of the Primals & various other people. As usual, it resulted in a few thousand dollars in damages.
By then it was also becoming apparent that we would be lucky to hold this thing together. Ministry and in particular Al Jourgensen were becoming obvious trouble. It appeared that Al had a much darker side than even his image. The TISM song, ‘Deficate On My Face' came to mind. This led to a few bad scenes in hotel lobbies with crying girls but to my surprise, these girls seemed to accept that stars can get away with things like that.
At the Gold Coast Squasha rented a classic Mustang to drive Al around. The problem was that Al was such a mess that he threw up in Squasha lap when he got confused about which side of the car the window was on. Lucky Squasha has a good sense of humour & a lot of patience.
These shows were very out there on many levels. We felt responsible for delivering a cutting-edge event, but music, post Nirvana was pretty dark. We had a collection of artists that had wanted to be commercially accepted for years, realising that now they had broken through, they weren’t sure that was where they wanted to be. Most in fact hated it, as the money meant little, there was no real upside.
The Perth show was rammed. Daniel Johns was being stalked by fans and the charming Courtney Love of course. Post-performance the band returned to their site shed to find some guy and his kids waiting inside for them to sign autographs. He was from the local council. I threw them off-site.
I had organised an afterparty at a local venue with an open bar. The Primals arrived early and managed to rack up $10,000 in drinks in an hour, rounds of 20 dark cocktails. Ministry really wanted me to join them on a river cruise for the next day. When I rejected the offer I was cast out, one of their crew that said no was fired on the spot. By that time, it was simply ‘with us or against us.’ I loved the music but not the people who made it, this was not the Birthday Party.
In short, we survived what was to be our final year without direct competition. It was also the year the information superhighway was gaining traction and was about to change everything.
The take-away from 95 at the time was that credibility and clear statements meant more than commercial achievements to the audience.
Looking back at the youth at that time I feel they were a generation ready for change and demanding the future…. now. The superhighway was coming. The fact that the 95 lineup now looks weak, says more about the times we were in pre-online. I was able to talk directly to our audience and convince them that this is the show you don’t want to miss. It was timely, not timeless. And as long as we delivered the goods, we all benefited.
We were living in the future, nostalgia was dead, anything new was supercharged. Who said optimism and anger can’t coexist?
It’s the cornerstone of social media.
Some of the songs that mattered 95 tour:
Ministry – "Psalm 69"
Hole – "Violet" (Live Thru this)
Screaming Trees – "Nearly Lost You"
silverchair - "Tomorrow"
Offspring – "Come Out And Play"
Magic Dirt - "Ice"
© Ken West January 2022