Big Day Out - History

History

The festival began in 1992 as a Sydney-only show with Violent Femmes as the headline act, along with Nirvana and a range of other foreign and local alternative music acts playing at the Hordern Pavilion. In the months preceding the event, Nirvana's Nevermind was released and became an international smash hit, therefore guaranteeing the success of the festival. In 1993, the festival was extended to include Melbourne, Perth, and Adelaide. West has revealed in an interview that he was looking to create "urban mayhem" and "controlled chaos".

Since 1994, the Big Day Out has annually travelled to Auckland (New Zealand), the Gold Coast, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth during a three-week period. The tour through the southern-hemisphere summer has become "the festival overseas acts want to be on". In 1997, organisers Ken West and Vivian Lees announced they were taking a year off, causing concern that the festival was coming to an end. On 17 January 2012, Big Day Out organiser Ken West announced that the Auckland Big Day Out on 20 January 2012, would be the last Big Day Out in New Zealand, and that they will be putting on the festival in Australia only in 2013.

The event reached the 100-shows milestone with the second of two Sydney events in 2010. With the impending milestone nearing, Lees boasted that the BDO has been able to build relationships with acts during their careers, which has become a part of the culture of BDO. The Australian said this has helped secure the BDO's world status and become recognised as one of the most successful and long-running rock festivals in the world, going on to say the festival is as much a part of Australian culture as the Melbourne Cup.

In 2010, the caravan of artists and crew contained 700 people, compared to the 70 who crossed Australia in 1993. West said even the Australian bands were taking bigger crews, "Through that the festival needs more production, more riders, more hotel rooms, more everything." A solid infrastructure has been built steadily over the years to help cope with the increasing demand of the festival, with requests for video mixers, back projections and backstage internet connections obviously becoming a lot more frequent than when touring began in 1993.

Due to increasing popularity of the event, in some years a second Sydney show has been held. The first time this occurred was in 2004, in recognition of the extreme popularity of Metallica. It occurred again in 2010, when Muse headlined, and also in 2011, with Tool and Rammstein headlining. the company that produces the Big Day Out, Creative Festival Entertainment. Ken has since partnered with Austin based C3 Presents and is moving forward with the 2013 show.