A history of the Big Day Outwith The Living End

Thu 13th Oct, 2011 in Features

When we got in touch with Chris Cheney from the The Living End and explain that we’d like to ask him about his experiences playing at the Big Day Out we were greeted with a laugh. “We call it the Big Day Off so you generally forget what’s happened in the previous years” he explains. However with a bit of prompting Cheney managed to remember some of the many stories he has to tell from his many tours of duty with the summer’s biggest touring festival.

The Living End have been lucky enough to play at the festival four times – in 1999, 2003, 2006 and 2009 – and will return to do it all again next year. We began our trip down memory highway a over a decade ago with Big Day Out 1999 – the year that The Living End made their festival debut on a lineup that included Hole, Marilyn Manson, Korn, Regurgitator, Jebediah and Powderfinger.

Big Day Out 1999

The big deal for me was seeing all these massive bands like Hole, Marliyn Manson and the Manics. For me apart from actually getting the gig – like “Holy hell we’re on Big Day Out, can you believe it?” – was the fact that they were on the bill because I was a huge fan. The opportunity to see the play not just once, but like every day was pretty exciting for me.

We were on early afternoon on the main stage – we’ve never played the side stages. The other thing I remember about that tour was that there was a pretty incredible hype around our band at that point and when we’d walk out on stage it felt like the crowd was ready to explode. Prisoner of Society was kind of an ‘it’ track at that moment. Up until that point we hadn’t really done many festivals – we’d only done one or two, maybe – the rest were just club shows. It was the first major festival we’d been on and the timing was just perfect.

Andy [Strachan] – who plays drums for us now – says that he remembers being there and being in the mosh. He says that when we walked out it was just scary because there was this rush and people went absolutely ballistic. We were probably a bit removed from that – up there playing – but the way he describes it there really must have been a hype around that band at that point. It was a very exciting time.

There was a lot of weirdness backstage with Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson. We were waiting one day to meet the Manic Street Preachers, standing near their room with a camera because we really wanted to get a photo [laughs] – fanboys! And I remember Marilyn Manson walking out of their room, because he’d been in talking to them, and he saw the camera and walked over and took a photo of himself. He must have thought we were waiting for him and I felt like saying “we’re not waiting for you!” ‘cause he was the big star at that point and he probably thought everyone wanted to talk to him. We we’re just like “we’re not interested in you! We’re waiting for the Manics!” I’ve still got that photo somewhere – self portrait: Marilyn Manson.

I remember thinking it was pretty weird that Courtney and Marilyn Manson had requested some Australian wildlife backstage. There was this little barricaded area back stage where this tree and a koala. Maybe they didn’t feel that they could get out to a zoo so they wanted the zoo brought to them. They got their photos taken with it, but I just thought it was a bit cruel to have it stuck back stage in this really alien environment. And there was a pool backstage as well that I think Marilyn Manson slashed with a knife or something and the water went everywhere.

At that stage we’d toured a couple of times with the Jebs, we’d done a thing called the Split Personality tour with them in ’98 when the Prisoner EP was just coming out. That was really exciting too – I think we took it in turns to headline each night, but I was a bit of a fan of theirs and didn’t really know if we were worthy to be headlining, or co-headlining, during that tour. But Prisoner was getting so much airplay that by the end of the tour we were well and truly on the map.

We met the Powderfinger guys on that Big Day Out tour. The Gurge: I remember playing with them at the Palace in Melbourne in about 1995 (I think) we were the first on the bill and they were HUGE. We couldn’t believe that we were on the same bill as them. So it was weird a couple of years later to be almost equal billing with them on the Big Day Out because I remember thinking that we would never be as successful as bands like Regurgitator and Spiderbait. Those bands were just HUGE to me; great bands.