Three Life Lessons I Learnt From My First Big Day Out, Aged Twelve

Last week it was announced that the Big Day Out, the Big Mumma of Australian summer music festivals, was taking a Ross’n’Rachel in 2015. For many, the death knell of this heavyweight festival giant is a tragedy — for a time in the ’90s and early 2000s, the Big Day Out was THE music festival, a right of passage akin to losing one’s virginity. Inspired by (or ripping off, whichever) the successful “all-in” festival model adopted by Lollapalooza, BDO kicked off in 1992 featuring a little band named Nirvana and has been a ‘Strayan icon ever since.

And now it’s gone. All gone.

All this absent-BDO talk has made me a little sentimental, and I can’t help but wander down memory lane and think back to my first Day Out. I learnt a great many things, about Life and Myself and My Feelings. In a word, it was Big.

The year was 1995, the halfway point of the final decade of the millennium. Some months prior, Kurt Cobain had signalled the end of grunge by taking his own life. We were lost, searching in a storm for a new leader, the already rudderless Generation X now slacking its way into stasis. Well, when I say ‘we’, I really mean ‘they’; I was only twelve years old, and had absolutely no business being at the 1995 Gold Coast Big Day Out, but by God I was going to make the most of it.

My Dad has what we in the business of colourful phrasing refer to as a “sense of humour” coupled with a “lust for life.” He didn’t just think taking me to BDO would be a fun idea, he thought it would educational. For anyone who thinks there would be nothing less cool than your Dad hanging around you in the mosh pit all day, you’re absolutely right. Luckily for me, I was given free range of the entire festival. As in, walk in through the gates, “have a fun day, son”, off I go. This was the age before mobile phones reached peak tween saturation, and I don’t think I even had money for a payphone in case I got lost/abducted by Courtney Love.

This was also years before the 2001 death of teenager Jessica Michalik in the Limp Bizkit mosh pit which caused a serious clampdown on both audience proximity to the main stages as well as moshing in general. Basically, I was out on my own and no one was watching me. What ensued was indeed educational, in that same way that Mowgli learnt how to survive in the jungle. Here’s what I learned.

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Life Lesson Learnt: Arrive Late. Only Losers See The Small-Time Acts

The first lesson was about punctuality. I was desperate to get there early to see a little-known band of Newcastle teenagers named Silverchair. The future Mr Imbruglia and Mr Real Psychic Housewife of Melbourne (and the other one) were playing at 11am, which in rock ’n’ roll hours is ungodly. Despite my urging, we didn’t arrive at Southport Showgrounds until early afternoon, and I was all “why are even bothering?” However, my wise father went to great pains to explain that you can’t get their early less your “buzz” wear off.

Oh well. No one ever heard of Silverchair again anyway.

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Life Lesson Learnt: Merch Is For Suckers

I remember being so keenly aware of people’s eyes on me that I convinced myself people were looking at me because of my Cross Colours t-shirt. Clearly, such homie street-wear was not welcome at an alternative music festival. How could I have been so foolish? It was completely beyond me that perhaps punters were staring because an unsupervised child was roaming around a music festival.

My tween insecurity was too great, so in an attempt to fit in I went back, found my Dad’s girlfriend and made her buy me a Big Day Out 1995 official tee. Of course, looking back I realise no-one wears that year’s merch, so I went from playing the part of homeboy-wannabe-pre-pubescent to what must have looked like a grossly underpaid festival staff member reminiscent of that Melbourne Cup scene in Kenny.

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Life Lesson Learnt: Shut Up And Dance

Emboldened by my new festival fashun, I was free to explore the various stages and sites that BDO had to offer. In what my future gay club self would describe as “telling”, I spent a lot of the day in the Boiler Room, which in those days was literally held in some small boiler room on the park grounds. This was before the advent of truly commercial dance music necessitated the “Boiler Room” be moved into an enormous tent, so it was just me and couple of hundred pill popping ravers dancing to Itchee and Scratchee or something similar.

It was here in the Boiler Room that I met two very concerned young women who could not believe I was there; they repeatedly came up to me on the dance floor wanting to know where my mother was. “Ladies, I’m dancing here!” I cried, before accepting their offer of gum and going back to doing that weird ’90s box dance with my hands.

As day turned to night I manoeuvred my way through the crowds, moshing to Primal Scream (still cool), The Offspring, and most importantly, OMC. Like most punters at their first big festival, my day ended with me feeling rather grumpy and in need of a nap. I found my Dad and his girlfriend exactly where they said they’d be, at the top of the hill by the bar and three sheets to the wind. A few weeks later I started high school, and the ensuing cred from attending a BDO did wonders in delaying the inevitable realisation I was a gay theatre weirdo, for which I am eternally grateful.

Life Lesson Learnt: Perfection Is Fleeting

As sunburn-y and bogan as large-scale Australian music festivals can be, they set the backdrop for our seminal experiences as young people, and form a key link in our shared narratives. Years later, in the mosh pit for Placebo (moving right along) I locked eyes on the boy I’d follow around for most of my twenties. Unlike sideshows and standalone gigs, festivals expose us to new sounds, new subcultures, and innovative new ways to perve on tradies.

Make no mistake though; these festivals are put on to make a profit, and when an event like BDO becomes financially cumbersome, no amount of “how does it feeeeeeel” will make its owners reconsider. While the new owners of Big Day Out are at great pains to point out 2015’s absent event is just a hiatus, it shines a light on the fact that the Australian music festival scene has become a crowded marketplace. Is BDO too big (day out) to fail, or like the dinosaurs will it succumb to evolution and die off? We won’t know until 2015, and I certainly won’t be attending in 2016 even if it does return. Once you’ve rocked out with your Dad, everything after seems passé.

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Nic Holas is a writer who focuses on the contemporary gay experience and being a person living with HIV whose writing has appeared in Hello Mr Magazine, Star Observer, The Needle Prick Project, and Cosmopolitan. You can find him on Twitter @nicheholas.