Why bring flags when you can just sell drugs - Big Day Out 07 Part 2
Lily Allen – Boiler Room –3:00pm
I’m getting nowhere and must stop rambling at some point if I’m to maintain any hope of finishing this piece of writing. Next time I forget what I was trying to say, can someone please stop me from breaking off into a tangent? This task is enormous and hard enough to finish without so many non-sequiturs invading my head. I need to resist stopping my writing, because clarity and freshness of the day is key to communicating it effectively. This is as intellectually drained as I’ve felt for a long time.
OK, so it’s really dark now. Dark and loud, but a really crisp loudness. The only sources of light right now are the strobe flashes and lasers shooting out from stage. It must be dark, because my notes have begun to take on an air of unreadability, if that’s a word. For some reason, I started to think everything was moving in slow motion at this point.
The Boiler Room is a massive cavern and the stage seems miles away. As I drive through the crowds, I feel like something strange is happening. The crowd at this BDO seems to be different to events of yesteryear. It’s as though the bogan element has diminished or disappeared.
Bogan. What a great word. I must do research at some point to discover the origin of this word.
It seems like BDO has attracted a slightly classier crowd this year. Everywhere I turn, I see packs of made up girls, with expensive haircuts and pretty dresses. Clean cut is the new grunge.
Wait a minute? Is that the girl from outside?
To my left, I spot a skinny girl sporting a black singlet and short black shorts who looked remarkably similar to a junkie girl from outside the event at the entrance. If it was the same girl, she had come down and calmed down immeasurably, because the girl outside was a fiend and an animal. Desperation was etched across every line in her face, a contortion of evil, random and assorted drugs pulsing through her system. All of this swelled into a liquid emotion which passed upward through her body and out from her throat in the direction of any security guard willing to listen.
“My fucking boyfriend stole my ticket! I can’t believe it! He ripped the ticket straight out from my pocket, look! I paid $120 to stand outside here looking like an idiot! I’m going inside to call him!”
This girl in the Boiler Room certainly looked like the girl from outside, but much, much calmer, as though she’d taken some kind of tranquiliser. Maybe all she needed was a dose of happy music. Lily Allen were certainly providing that. A unique blend of funk, dance and cheese, it was good to see a horn section once again at a Big Day Out.
Years from now, historians will look back to study what we call modern music and ask the question, where did all the horns go?
Such a bad idea, taking notes on the back of my programme. Why do people who actually care what is on next not have programmes? I can understand people who want to wander around and make discoveries not carrying a programme, but for people who have a vested plan for the day, you’d imagine that a programme is a pretty fundamental element when executing the plan.
Of course, now I need to explain what I’m writing on the back of my programme. My explanation was that I’m a Rolling Stone magazine reporter, trying to write a story on the effect experimental drugs have on the experience of the average concert-goer. Of course, this was the explanation I came up with hours later when no one was asking.
When the couple standing next to me asked, I mumbled a fairly incoherent response that only drew up more questions that it answered. Caught in a web of white lies, completely of my own creation.
This is hard work, taking all these notes. You become a complete outsider, stuck on the inside.
It’s contradictory to the intent of my day. The idea was that a certain experience would occur and I would be able to document it as it happened. The problem with this logic is that while documenting my experience, I was stepping outside the experience of being part of the BDO and into the role of a journalist, observing the BDO occurring around me. It’s an uneasy feeling and I resolve to minimalise my note taking. This project is doomed for failure.
Time to move on again. People, people everywhere.
Outside the Boiler Room, there is an ice cream truck with a Caribbean guy on the roof with big dreadlocks. Is Caribbean the correct word? Is Rasta a politically correct expression? I was originally going to write Jamaican, but what if he was from Trinidad and/or Tobago? Surely, he’d get insulted.
More to the point, why was he on top of the truck? There are girls up there with him, who look more like crowd members than musicians, and one of them has a microphone, and…
OW!! DEAR G-D!!!!! MY EARS ARE BLEEDING!!!
This would honestly have to be the worst cameo performance in the history of mankind. Someone must take the microphone away from this girl immediately, and preferably have here removed for a savage beating.
It’s at this point that I notice something else different about the crowd. There are breasts absolutely everywhere. OK, not whole breasts, but cleavage. The suggestion of breasts. The promise of more breast.
And large breasts.
Girls have been cheating a lot more in recent years as breast technology has improved and become more accessible. Push up bras, clothing designed to amplify breast presence and surgery have created a generation of breasts. Breasts are the new black.
I inform Boogie of this insight.
“Breasts are the new black”
“What!?!?!?”
Obviously, Boogie wasn’t on my wavelength. I explain that breasts are everywhere, a sentiment he concurs with.
All of a sudden, Boogie turns to me.
“Healthy is the new black”
Now, it was my turn to draw a blank.
“What!??!!?”
“Dude, when you said breasts are the new black, I looked around and the first set of breasts I saw was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Healthy is the new black’”
Coincidence? I think not. The universe works in strange ways.
WHOA! Who is this monster in my face? She looks like a girl, but a lot shorter, heftier and far too proximate to me for my liking.
“Yeah! Someone spilled on me!”
I pull away. Who knows what kind of venom this creature is capable of spitting out of her mouth?
Boogie is starting to feel a certain edginess to the crowd at this point.
“I can feel a fight brewing”
I have to admit, there is a certain electricity in the air at this point. Volumes of trashed people are wandering in every direction, floating around like random molecules. Electrons and protons, forces of attraction and repulsion. It’s true. A fight could break out at any minute here and over nothing. The day is nearly over for some of these people and it’s not yet 3:15 in the afternoon. Hard, fast and early, like a heavyweight boxer who’s thrown all his haymakers in the first round and completely exhausted himself. Fools! This is a 15 round boxing match and the only way to come out alive is to be dancing as hard in the final round as you were in the first.
Boxing? How did boxing come into this? Where will it all end?
Expatriate – V Energy Local Produce –3:20pm
My notes list this band as being called Expatriot. Whoever they are, they were easily an early highlight of the day. The stage is intimate, which is another way of saying small with a crowd to match, but as can often be expected by the smaller stages, they pulse with an energy that is seemingly unmatchable by crowds exponentially larger.
There’s something else about this crowd. They seem on average, much cooler than the rest of the BDO population, as though everyone present is a member of a secret organisation. Even the mandatory girls in team uniforms seem much cooler than other teams – each girls is beautiful, decked out in bright yellow 80’s gear – midriff tops, cut off at the shoulders.
Anyways, Expatriate are going off and everyone in there knows it. And everyone knows that everyone knows that the few people in there are the cool minority. Especially the band. They remind me of a super-band that hasn’t quite made it big yet, or hasn’t quite yet been discovered by everyone, but surely will be soon. The sound of New Order with the stage presence of U2 spring to mind as analogies. The lead singer doesn’t disappoint, pulling out his best Bono impression by leaning over the first of three rows of spectators and getting intimate with the crowd.
My Chemical Romance – Main Stage –3:45pm
The day is moving thick and fast at this point. My Chemical Romance are belting out their brand of rock and roll, which is proving to be a little to heavy for Boogie and Diana, so they move on in search of greener pastures. My mentality at this point is to ignore my instinct to follow them and to instead counter with logic. The logic being, that someone has gone to all the trouble to fly these guys out from far away and at some point they would no doubt be playing a local gig to a few thousand mad fans, with tickets costing a day’s earnings. As such, they must be worth a listen.
First things, first though. Getting to a bathroom is, at best, a mission at the BDO. It usually involves negotiating some stairs, which only fulfil the role of speedhumps to all human traffic flow. As such, I put it off for as long as possible, but with my bladder at bursting point, I decide to venture forth and empty my bladder.
There are 3 truths of all bathrooms at music festivals.
Truth 1. No matter what time it is, all bathrooms will have scungy floors, with some kind of viscous matter that is part dirt, part water and part caked urine or other matter.
Truth 2. You will never see more than 1 person wash their hands
Truth 3. There will always be girls in the male bathrooms.
One thing I have always had universal thanks for is my male bladder. Male bladders must be several times larger than female bladders. This generally means we can wait a longer time between drinks before we have to discharge. Regardless of this size difference, the process for a female to empty her bladder is, time-wise, several times larger than that for the male.
I’m not sure if the process itself requires more steps, or the same steps are more time consuming. After all, I’ve never experienced the joys of being a girl.
What I do know is that nature has played a very cruel trick on women, for not only do they take longer to partake in the bathroom process, but they have further been cursed with the universal truth that girl’s bathrooms will always have longer queues than boy’s bathrooms. There are no exceptions to this rule, including the modern traditions which dictate that the queues to the cubicles in the men’s room will always be longer than the queues to the urinal. Thank g-d for party drugs.
The thing that very few females actually get to realise as a matter of experience is the pure brutality, the masculinity, the hormonally charged atmosphere that is the men’s bathroom. There is a certain amount of shame that a girl needs to sacrifice to succumb to the temptation to alleviate the suffering of one’s bowels through usage of a men’s bathroom.
After all, it’s not often I find myself nodding in agreement with a drunken yobbo screaming out “Show us your dick, or fuck off”. Not only that, but looking around the cramped restroom, I see the rest of the room nodding in silence. This moron hasn’t just shown off his own low intelligence – he’s achieved consensus. Somewhere, at some similar music festival long ago, a creature crawled out of this primeval soup and became a modern day politician. How does such nonsense rule supreme when we are reduced to the mob?
OK, remember what you’re writing about – GET A GRIP, MAN!!!
My Chemical Romance are energetic, and I use that word simply because I struggle to find a compliment. What they possess in energy, they lack in originality. They are a symptom of music as a consumable item – they fit a certain image and target a certain demographic. I can’t figure out what they are doing at this festival – apart from the fact that they add a certain international flavour.
Australia suffers from a cultural cringe at the best of times, the prevailing attitude being that if it’s foreign, it must be superior, with the most superior force being that of anything produced in the U, S of A. Therefore, an American band imported into our clearly inferior Australian music festival must be, well … better. After all, we’re paying more for the privilege … they MUST be good.
Unfortunately for the organisers of the festival, I see through their clever ruse. This band has been brought out specifically to fill the bill – a big name act to draw in the punters. Surely they realise that the rest of the audience is as cynical as I am? Or is this just my marijuana-induced paranoia speaking through my head again?
Speaking of which, surely it’s time to catch up with my mates. After all, Boogie and Diana have all of the supplies for the day and supplies are crucial for pacing oneself at a music festival, especially one that prides itself on being a Big Day Out.
TO BE CONTINUED
I’m getting nowhere and must stop rambling at some point if I’m to maintain any hope of finishing this piece of writing. Next time I forget what I was trying to say, can someone please stop me from breaking off into a tangent? This task is enormous and hard enough to finish without so many non-sequiturs invading my head. I need to resist stopping my writing, because clarity and freshness of the day is key to communicating it effectively. This is as intellectually drained as I’ve felt for a long time.
OK, so it’s really dark now. Dark and loud, but a really crisp loudness. The only sources of light right now are the strobe flashes and lasers shooting out from stage. It must be dark, because my notes have begun to take on an air of unreadability, if that’s a word. For some reason, I started to think everything was moving in slow motion at this point.
The Boiler Room is a massive cavern and the stage seems miles away. As I drive through the crowds, I feel like something strange is happening. The crowd at this BDO seems to be different to events of yesteryear. It’s as though the bogan element has diminished or disappeared.
Bogan. What a great word. I must do research at some point to discover the origin of this word.
It seems like BDO has attracted a slightly classier crowd this year. Everywhere I turn, I see packs of made up girls, with expensive haircuts and pretty dresses. Clean cut is the new grunge.
Wait a minute? Is that the girl from outside?
To my left, I spot a skinny girl sporting a black singlet and short black shorts who looked remarkably similar to a junkie girl from outside the event at the entrance. If it was the same girl, she had come down and calmed down immeasurably, because the girl outside was a fiend and an animal. Desperation was etched across every line in her face, a contortion of evil, random and assorted drugs pulsing through her system. All of this swelled into a liquid emotion which passed upward through her body and out from her throat in the direction of any security guard willing to listen.
“My fucking boyfriend stole my ticket! I can’t believe it! He ripped the ticket straight out from my pocket, look! I paid $120 to stand outside here looking like an idiot! I’m going inside to call him!”
This girl in the Boiler Room certainly looked like the girl from outside, but much, much calmer, as though she’d taken some kind of tranquiliser. Maybe all she needed was a dose of happy music. Lily Allen were certainly providing that. A unique blend of funk, dance and cheese, it was good to see a horn section once again at a Big Day Out.
Years from now, historians will look back to study what we call modern music and ask the question, where did all the horns go?
Such a bad idea, taking notes on the back of my programme. Why do people who actually care what is on next not have programmes? I can understand people who want to wander around and make discoveries not carrying a programme, but for people who have a vested plan for the day, you’d imagine that a programme is a pretty fundamental element when executing the plan.
Of course, now I need to explain what I’m writing on the back of my programme. My explanation was that I’m a Rolling Stone magazine reporter, trying to write a story on the effect experimental drugs have on the experience of the average concert-goer. Of course, this was the explanation I came up with hours later when no one was asking.
When the couple standing next to me asked, I mumbled a fairly incoherent response that only drew up more questions that it answered. Caught in a web of white lies, completely of my own creation.
This is hard work, taking all these notes. You become a complete outsider, stuck on the inside.
It’s contradictory to the intent of my day. The idea was that a certain experience would occur and I would be able to document it as it happened. The problem with this logic is that while documenting my experience, I was stepping outside the experience of being part of the BDO and into the role of a journalist, observing the BDO occurring around me. It’s an uneasy feeling and I resolve to minimalise my note taking. This project is doomed for failure.
Time to move on again. People, people everywhere.
Outside the Boiler Room, there is an ice cream truck with a Caribbean guy on the roof with big dreadlocks. Is Caribbean the correct word? Is Rasta a politically correct expression? I was originally going to write Jamaican, but what if he was from Trinidad and/or Tobago? Surely, he’d get insulted.
More to the point, why was he on top of the truck? There are girls up there with him, who look more like crowd members than musicians, and one of them has a microphone, and…
OW!! DEAR G-D!!!!! MY EARS ARE BLEEDING!!!
This would honestly have to be the worst cameo performance in the history of mankind. Someone must take the microphone away from this girl immediately, and preferably have here removed for a savage beating.
It’s at this point that I notice something else different about the crowd. There are breasts absolutely everywhere. OK, not whole breasts, but cleavage. The suggestion of breasts. The promise of more breast.
And large breasts.
Girls have been cheating a lot more in recent years as breast technology has improved and become more accessible. Push up bras, clothing designed to amplify breast presence and surgery have created a generation of breasts. Breasts are the new black.
I inform Boogie of this insight.
“Breasts are the new black”
“What!?!?!?”
Obviously, Boogie wasn’t on my wavelength. I explain that breasts are everywhere, a sentiment he concurs with.
All of a sudden, Boogie turns to me.
“Healthy is the new black”
Now, it was my turn to draw a blank.
“What!??!!?”
“Dude, when you said breasts are the new black, I looked around and the first set of breasts I saw was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Healthy is the new black’”
Coincidence? I think not. The universe works in strange ways.
WHOA! Who is this monster in my face? She looks like a girl, but a lot shorter, heftier and far too proximate to me for my liking.
“Yeah! Someone spilled on me!”
I pull away. Who knows what kind of venom this creature is capable of spitting out of her mouth?
Boogie is starting to feel a certain edginess to the crowd at this point.
“I can feel a fight brewing”
I have to admit, there is a certain electricity in the air at this point. Volumes of trashed people are wandering in every direction, floating around like random molecules. Electrons and protons, forces of attraction and repulsion. It’s true. A fight could break out at any minute here and over nothing. The day is nearly over for some of these people and it’s not yet 3:15 in the afternoon. Hard, fast and early, like a heavyweight boxer who’s thrown all his haymakers in the first round and completely exhausted himself. Fools! This is a 15 round boxing match and the only way to come out alive is to be dancing as hard in the final round as you were in the first.
Boxing? How did boxing come into this? Where will it all end?
Expatriate – V Energy Local Produce –3:20pm
My notes list this band as being called Expatriot. Whoever they are, they were easily an early highlight of the day. The stage is intimate, which is another way of saying small with a crowd to match, but as can often be expected by the smaller stages, they pulse with an energy that is seemingly unmatchable by crowds exponentially larger.
There’s something else about this crowd. They seem on average, much cooler than the rest of the BDO population, as though everyone present is a member of a secret organisation. Even the mandatory girls in team uniforms seem much cooler than other teams – each girls is beautiful, decked out in bright yellow 80’s gear – midriff tops, cut off at the shoulders.
Anyways, Expatriate are going off and everyone in there knows it. And everyone knows that everyone knows that the few people in there are the cool minority. Especially the band. They remind me of a super-band that hasn’t quite made it big yet, or hasn’t quite yet been discovered by everyone, but surely will be soon. The sound of New Order with the stage presence of U2 spring to mind as analogies. The lead singer doesn’t disappoint, pulling out his best Bono impression by leaning over the first of three rows of spectators and getting intimate with the crowd.
My Chemical Romance – Main Stage –3:45pm
The day is moving thick and fast at this point. My Chemical Romance are belting out their brand of rock and roll, which is proving to be a little to heavy for Boogie and Diana, so they move on in search of greener pastures. My mentality at this point is to ignore my instinct to follow them and to instead counter with logic. The logic being, that someone has gone to all the trouble to fly these guys out from far away and at some point they would no doubt be playing a local gig to a few thousand mad fans, with tickets costing a day’s earnings. As such, they must be worth a listen.
First things, first though. Getting to a bathroom is, at best, a mission at the BDO. It usually involves negotiating some stairs, which only fulfil the role of speedhumps to all human traffic flow. As such, I put it off for as long as possible, but with my bladder at bursting point, I decide to venture forth and empty my bladder.
There are 3 truths of all bathrooms at music festivals.
Truth 1. No matter what time it is, all bathrooms will have scungy floors, with some kind of viscous matter that is part dirt, part water and part caked urine or other matter.
Truth 2. You will never see more than 1 person wash their hands
Truth 3. There will always be girls in the male bathrooms.
One thing I have always had universal thanks for is my male bladder. Male bladders must be several times larger than female bladders. This generally means we can wait a longer time between drinks before we have to discharge. Regardless of this size difference, the process for a female to empty her bladder is, time-wise, several times larger than that for the male.
I’m not sure if the process itself requires more steps, or the same steps are more time consuming. After all, I’ve never experienced the joys of being a girl.
What I do know is that nature has played a very cruel trick on women, for not only do they take longer to partake in the bathroom process, but they have further been cursed with the universal truth that girl’s bathrooms will always have longer queues than boy’s bathrooms. There are no exceptions to this rule, including the modern traditions which dictate that the queues to the cubicles in the men’s room will always be longer than the queues to the urinal. Thank g-d for party drugs.
The thing that very few females actually get to realise as a matter of experience is the pure brutality, the masculinity, the hormonally charged atmosphere that is the men’s bathroom. There is a certain amount of shame that a girl needs to sacrifice to succumb to the temptation to alleviate the suffering of one’s bowels through usage of a men’s bathroom.
After all, it’s not often I find myself nodding in agreement with a drunken yobbo screaming out “Show us your dick, or fuck off”. Not only that, but looking around the cramped restroom, I see the rest of the room nodding in silence. This moron hasn’t just shown off his own low intelligence – he’s achieved consensus. Somewhere, at some similar music festival long ago, a creature crawled out of this primeval soup and became a modern day politician. How does such nonsense rule supreme when we are reduced to the mob?
OK, remember what you’re writing about – GET A GRIP, MAN!!!
My Chemical Romance are energetic, and I use that word simply because I struggle to find a compliment. What they possess in energy, they lack in originality. They are a symptom of music as a consumable item – they fit a certain image and target a certain demographic. I can’t figure out what they are doing at this festival – apart from the fact that they add a certain international flavour.
Australia suffers from a cultural cringe at the best of times, the prevailing attitude being that if it’s foreign, it must be superior, with the most superior force being that of anything produced in the U, S of A. Therefore, an American band imported into our clearly inferior Australian music festival must be, well … better. After all, we’re paying more for the privilege … they MUST be good.
Unfortunately for the organisers of the festival, I see through their clever ruse. This band has been brought out specifically to fill the bill – a big name act to draw in the punters. Surely they realise that the rest of the audience is as cynical as I am? Or is this just my marijuana-induced paranoia speaking through my head again?
Speaking of which, surely it’s time to catch up with my mates. After all, Boogie and Diana have all of the supplies for the day and supplies are crucial for pacing oneself at a music festival, especially one that prides itself on being a Big Day Out.
TO BE CONTINUED
posted by The Groin at 1:35 pm
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