Chemical Brothers prompt fond Big Day Out memories

 British electronic duo the Chemical Brothers.

Very early one morning in the summer of 2005, I caught a bus from my hometown of Bundaberg to attend my first Big Day Out on the Gold Coast. For my friends and I — who were soon to begin our final year of high school — the key attractions for making this 10-hour round trip included a couple of our favourite American heavy metal acts, Slipknot and System of a Down, and Australian bands such as Powderfinger, Grinspoon and John Butler Trio. My enduring memory from my first festival, though, was the final show of the night: The Chemical Brothers, a British electronic duo booked to close the Boiler Room stage.

As I made my way deeper inside the darkened tent and into the throng of moving bodies, I promptly had my tiny mind blown. It was a total sensory overload that became an early highlight of my concert-going life. I’ve seen hundreds of shows between then and now — most of them enjoyable, a few godawful and a handful truly life-changing — but late last month I had the pleasure of seeing the Chemical Brothers again, as part of their No Geography tour. Accompanied by enthralling visuals and played at a chest-rattling volume, it was up there with one of the best electronic sets I’ve seen, alongside Nicolas Jaar’s mesmerising Against All Logic show at Dark Mofo earlier this year.

The pair and their music had been percolating in my mind for a few weeks leading up to the gig, as I’d been enjoying Inside the Big Day Out, a podcast from Double J — recently reviewed by Eric George in these pages — that tells the story of the rise and fall of what was, for a time, the world’s largest travelling music festival. Hosted by Gemma Pike, the podcast features interviews with many of the key players and musicians who toured with the festival over the years, as it grew from a single event in Sydney in 1992 headlined by Violent Femmes, who had the unenviable task of playing after Nirvana. Pike and her team do a great job of contextualising the festival’s place in Australian music history.

For another Big Day Out nostalgia fix, I highly recommend Double J journalist Dan Condon’s article, Inside the Boiler Room, which includes an excellent anecdote from Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands about headlining the 2000 event in Sydney. After a punter whipped a fire hose off the wall and began spraying the crowd, the fire alarm was triggered, prompting this strange vision: “It looked like people in Day-Glo clothes were floating above the heads of the crowd,” said Rowlands. “Then we became aware that it was police on horseback who had somehow come in to the rave. I can’t really remember what happened after that. It was so intense. It was so sweaty. And so good.”

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