24/01/2023
Bring back the BDO!!! 🙏🥰
On this day in 1992, the inaugural “Big Day Out” music festival began at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney (January 25)
Big Day Out 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, who had just released the LP “Nevermind” and the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” a couple of months before, in late 1991.
It started out as a Sydney-only show, with Violent Femmes headlining, then Nirvana, and a range of other foreign and local alternative music acts such as Celibate Rifles, Cosmos Psychos, Falling Joys, The Clouds, Ratcat, The Hard Ons, Henry Rollins, and Yothu Yindi, all at the Hordern Pavilion.
Big Day Out 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.
2014 remains the last Big Day Out.
Big Day Out was for many their first ever live music experience, and is remembered fondly by 90s music-lovers around Australia.
Click on the link below to watch Nirvana playing “About A Girl” which was part of their set list on the Big Day Out 1992:
https://youtu.be/AhcttcXcRYY
