Former music festival in Australia and New Zealand
The Big Day Out (BDO) was an annual music festival that was held in five Australian cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as Auckland, New Zealand. The festival was held during summer, typically in January of each year but was sometimes held as late as early February in some cities including Perth.
The event was conceptualised after the Violent Femmes announced a tour of Australia. Promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees sought another act as middle-level support for the band's tour. They succeeded in securing Nirvana to play the Sydney leg at the Hordern Pavilion. 
The Big Day Out debuted on the 1992 Australia Day public holiday in Sydney and eventually expanded to Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth the following year. The Gold Coast and Auckland were added to the schedule in 1994. As of 2003, it featured seven or eight stages (depending on the venue), accommodating popular contemporary rock music, electronic music, mainstream international acts, and local acts. Auckland was taken out of the tour schedule in 2013, but the festival returned to the city for its last run in 2014.
After the partnership between Ken West and Vivian Lees was dissolved in 2011, Lees sold his stake in the event to American festival promoters C3 Presents. In early June 2014, C3 attained full ownership of the Big Day Out festival and announced the cancellation of the 2015 event on 26 June 2014 with the option for the festival to return in the future left open. Despite this, the event has yet to return in subsequent years and as of 2022 there are currently no plans for any event to be held in future. Founder Ken West died in April 2022 at the age of 64.
History.
1992–1997.
Annual music festivals had been gaining momentum for some time, and the United States had launched Lollapalooza in Chicago, Illinois in 1991. Australia had seen various music festivals but nothing annual. Big Day Out was founded by Ken West and Vivian Lees–the festival began in 1992 as a Sydney-only show, with the headline act, Violent Femmes, playing alongside Nirvana, and a range of other foreign and local alternative music acts, at the Hordern Pavilion. In 1993 the scope of the festival was extended to include Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide. West revealed in an interview that he was looking to create "urban mayhem" and "controlled chaos".
In 1994 the Big Day Out was extended further to include Auckland, New Zealand and the Gold Coast, and was held over a three-week period. The geographical locations of the 1994 festival occurred on an annual basis until 1997, when organisers West and Lees announced a year-long hiatus, causing concern that the festival was nearing the end of its existence; however, the festival returned in 1999.
1999–2013.
Following the start of the 21st century, the festival was involved in two major controversies. Firstly, 16-year-old Jessica Michalik was killed after she was crushed at a 2001 Sydney show during a performance by the band Limp Bizkit. Michalik's death temporarily placed the future of the BDO festival in jeopardy, but the event continued after the Sydney Coroner's Court criticised the crowd control measures at the site and inflammatory comments made by Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst after the crush occurred.
The festival celebrated its 100th performance in 2010. In the period leading up to the 100-show milestone, which occurred at the second of two Sydney dates in 2010, Lees claimed in an "Australian" article that the BDO's ability to build relationships with acts during their careers had become an important part of the BDO culture. In the same "Australian" article, journalist Iain Shedden described the BDO as one of the "most successful and long-running rock festivals in the world", aligning the festival with the established Australian horse-racing event, the Melbourne Cup.
Lees also explained the growth and increased complexity of the festival in the 2010 "Australian" article, stating that, while a crew of 70 people crossed Australia in 1993 for the inaugural event, the 2010 festival consisted of 700 people. Lees highlighted the increased needs of Australian bands in his explanation:
It does get easier but it's also getting bigger and that makes it more complicated ... You're more confident about what you're doing and having some gravitas, but at the same time, because we're having more and more expectations put on us by everyone, the complexities are increasing. Even Aussie bands that used to take five or six people on the road are now taking 11. That seems to be the magic number, even for a new starting-off band. What they are doing is working to put on the best show they can. Through that the festival needs more production, more riders, more hotel rooms, more everything.
Due to the increasing popularity of the event, a second Sydney show was occasionally held. The extreme popularity of Metallica in 2004 led to this addition, followed by another second-show addition in Sydney for the 2010 event, when Muse was the headline act. A second Sydney date returned in 2011, in response to the co-headline acts, Tool and Rammstein.
In November 2011, the business partnership between Lees and West was dissolved, and the latter next partnered with Austin, United States (US)-based company C3 Presents, which runs the Lollapalooza festival in the US. C3 purchased a 51 per cent stake in the company following a split that was caused by "internal and external" pressures, whereby Lees severed all connections with the business. Prior to November 2011, Creative Festival Entertainment was the production company of the BDO festival.
On 17 January 2012, West announced that the Auckland BDO event, held on 20 January 2012, would be the last Big Day Out in New Zealand, explaining that the festival would only be held in Australia in 2013. However, in April 2013, the promoters said that they were seeking to reschedule an Auckland event in 2014 (at Western Springs Stadium instead of Mt Smart).
The 2012 festival was beset by difficulties and was described as "disastrous" by the "Faster Louder" website in June 2014. Headline act Kanye West did not appear at the Perth and Adelaide events, while a media report at the time alleged that "staging and fencing contractors had not been paid, sponsors were angry and the festival was beset by internal rifts, namely the firing and then apparent re-hiring of CEO Adam Zammit."
In 2013 the festival received staunch opposition from the Town of Claremont's mayor Jock Barker, who stated that music festivals in general introduce "appalling antisocial and criminal behaviour into a residential area." Although a study revealed that large-scale music festivals contribute approximately A$5.2 million to the state's economy, in addition to increased tourism and employment levels, Claremont councilor Peter Browne supported Barker's position by stating that the benefits of events such as the Big Day Out are "hopelessly outweighed by the intolerable noise, the late finish, the high level of criminal activity and general social misbehaviour in and outside of the grounds." Despite such opposition, the Claremont Showground venue in Perth, Western Australia was used by the BDO organisers for the 2013 event. The Perth leg of the 2014 BDO was held at the Arena Joondalup venue.
West announced to the media on 17 September 2013 that Arash "AJ" Maddah, a fellow Australian music festival promoter, had joined the Big Day Out enterprise. Although West explained that "the BDO team will now be C3, AJ Maddah and yours truly", Maddah stated to the media: "It's Ken's vision and I'm working for him. For 20 years it's been my ambition to work for the Big Day Out. It's been a great festival for 22 years. I don't need to fuck with that." As of the date of the announcement, Adam Zammit was the CEO of the company and Fairfax Media reported numerous job cuts.
An October 2013 Fairfax Media article then reported that the company's office space in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Surry Hills was being sold for A$5 million and an unnamed source informed Fairfax that the BDO company had also "recently lost some or all control over the lucrative sideshows." During the same time period, Lees publicly revealed that West had sold his stake in the company and the festival was facing serious problems.
2014–present.
Shortly after Maddah joined the BDO team, the headlining act for the 2014 festival, Blur, cancelled eight weeks prior to the commencement of their first 2014 BDO show. The band announced the cancellation on their Facebook fan page:
Devastated to report that Blur won't be performing at BDO in 2014. It's a shock that it has come to this. Only 8 weeks to go, the band feels that with the constantly shifting goalposts and challenging conditions of the organisers, they can't let it drag on any longer and want to make this announcement, to be clear to Blur fans that they won't be there. We've done our very best to work with the organisers and considered every option to make it happen, but they've let us down and let everyone else down too.
West previously explained in July 2013 that he had attempted to secure Blur for 14 years and their high status meant that they were considered a "white whale" act: "That [securing Blur] was a long negotiation ... Blur were going to be a headliner in various years but they couldn't get it together and more importantly they weren't connecting as a band." BDO organisers were as shocked by the cancellation as those people who had purchased tickets, as they had not received prior notification. Social media was the forum in which the public and media received updates, with Maddah first stating on Twitter that, in the time he had been with the festival, he had only seen the BDO team work as hard as possible to fulfil each of Blur's requests. Maddah later stated on Twitter that refund options would be available for those ticket-holders who no longer wished to attend due to Blur's announcement.
The second 2014 Sydney show was then officially cancelled on 26 September 2013 due to poor ticket sales—the show was merged into the first show on 26 January. In an official statement, West explained, "Perhaps we were a bit ambitious expanding to two dates in Sydney for this year's Big Day Out." Overall, the attendance figures for the 2014 festival were equivalent to around 50 per cent of the 2013 event. Approximately 15,000 tickets were sold for the Perth leg of the festival, leading to an announcement that the Big Day Out would not return to the western capital city. Maddah confirmed to the media that 31,000 people attended the Sydney leg on 26 January.
Maddah participated in an interview with the triple j radio station in February 2014 and said that he had not expected the festival to be financially successful in 2014:
I was under no illusion that it was going to be [anything but] a financial catastrophe—to say the least—this year. That was not even remotely in my mind, that I was going to walk in there and make any money this year.
Maddah further explained that the festival lost around A$10 million, but at the time of the interview, he was still awaiting the final financial results. Maddah cited overhead cost issues from the Perth leg as detrimental to the festival:
When you look through the financial history of most of the national festivals, the east coast has to subsidise events in Perth ... That's another reason why Big Day Out ticket prices were so high this year, because generally speaking you lose money in Perth. You've got two days to get there, three days to get back, all the trucking, all the production... a hotel room that you would pay $180 in Sydney is $320 a night in Perth in the same hotel chain. The price of hiring everything is ridiculous over there. Combine that will dropping public support for festivals over there and attendance figures and then for all your trouble you get a kicking from the local government and state government. It just got to a point where it's become unbearable.
On 25 June 2014, the Australian "Music Feeds" website published an article after it received documents showing that Maddah "stepped down as Big Day Out director and transferred his stake in the Australian festival entirely over to American partners, the Austin, Texas-based