Looking back at the Big DayOut with promoter Ken West

Wed 24th Nov, 2010 in Features

Since 1992, the Big Day Out has been run by the dynamic duo Ken West and his business and his business partner Viv Lees. Dealing with massive bands and huge egos, they’ve brought us tours from Nirvana, Arcade Fire, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Bjork, Tool, Muse, Metallica, Flaming Lips, White Stripes, The Strokes, Kings of Leon, Nine Inch Nails, New Order, Beastie Boys, Hole and a whole lot more.

Just before tickets went on sale for the 2011 festival, FasterLouder caught up with Viv Lees to chat about the biggest days out on the festival calendar and discover how the lineup for next year’s festival came together and now, with the announcement of the second round of bands for the festival, we spoke to Ken West about the history of the festival from it’s birth as a single day of music in Sydney to the touring behemoth that dominates the musical calender each Summer.

Oh, and yes we asked about the possibility of Blink 182 returning to play at the festival. The answer? “Returning at all is the question. When they work it out I am sure we will be in the loop.”

What are your memories of the first year and in particular of Nirvana’s legendary shows?
That’s a big question for a short answer. You firstly need to imagine a time before festivals, before Triple J (Double J was Sydney only) was born. When the music industry was either ‘Mainstream’ or ‘Alternative’.

As for Nirvana they were incredible live, They played at 7pm, Yothu Yindi played after them. This was also the week they had the number one album around the world. They destroyed the line between Alternative and Mainstream.For us, we were creating something unique, There was a lot of explaining about what it was, not just to the bands, the media, record labels and the audience but even the team including Vivian Lees. We sold 53 tickets the first day and sold out ten days from the show.

The BDO took ten years to be born. After that day in ‘92 the landscape would never be the same again. The vision was to unite the alternative scene by removing the musical boundaries. It didn’t hurt having Nirvana on your side. We were a small team, we worked our arses off. I worked all night building fences, around 2am I found two guys hiding in trees so I hired them to help build fences, ironic I know.

In short, exhaustion and euphoria mixed with ‘shit, it actually worked, how do we top that?’