1997

Big Day Out

Wayville Showground

Stan Ridgway

Dirty Three

Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In five years Big Day Out, the Australian version of the Lollapalooza roadshow, has become a summer institution. Promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees have officially declared this year’s model to be the last. Big Day Out is no more. Now the legend can begin. And history will be kind to this rite of summer. It has been, in every sense, good value. For the price of a stadium ticket, fans get to party for twelve hours while taking in the frenzied musical offerings of some forty different acts.

In 1992 BDO showcased, among others, the neophyte soon-to-be superband Nirvana, Violent Femmes, Henry Rollins and Yothu Yindi. This year saw the return of 1992 originals You Am I, along with Beasts of Bourbon and Seattle heavies, Soundgarden. It also welcomed such current indie favourites as Osaka’s Shonen Knife, American bands The Offspring and Fear Factory, and from the UK,  britpoppers, Supergrass and technopunks, The Prodigy. There is, as ever, a strong Australian contingent- Powderfinger, The Mavis’s, Dave Graney, and local heroes Mark of Cain and The Superjesus.

Unlike the interstate version, the Adelaide BDO has a touch of delinquency about it,. Scheduled at the end of January it coincides with the first week of term so Friday attendance sheets at most schools look downright pandemic. Perhaps it is this that gives the event such a sense of festivity and troop loyalty. Maybe the location, Wayville Showground, home of the Royal Show, also provokes a kind of subliminal  transference. Whatever it is, the punters came in droves. 26,000 by four o’clock according to local catalysts, Dianne Joy and Peter Curnow, who can take a bow for the faultless logistics of this major event.

The Day this year was as hot as stink and it looked like water consumption was keeping apace with the usual lager frenzies. The various cliques and sub-sets mingled amiably. Skaters and urban surfers, unreconstructed punks and wilting goths, ravers and junior hepcats, even senior citizens like myself, all dispersed towards the five performance venues. Where’s the Pope and Buellah’s Fix opened the batting and both Mark of Cain and The Superjesus turned in excellent sets.

Among the international acts, the seven piece band, Rocket From the Crypt,  looked like Mormons in alfoil. They played a sort of loose version of Devo while the guy in FBI raybans made the kind of moves Dave Graney gets silver medals for. Supergrass played weedy English pop and kept out of the sun. Singing Alright Time and Caught by The Fuzz,  Gaz Coombes worked the crowd cheerfully enough. But they weren’t a patch on last year’s Elastica, I should coco. Shonen Knife, in matching pink lame, parlayed cute Osaka pop. But, as usual, the acoustics at Stage Three were unkind so they sounded like the Shirelles in a bucket.

We are going to play some textures you won’t have heard much today, announced Dave Graney, in red lycra polo shirt and unmatching check flares, as he and the sinuous Coral Snakes settled in for some soft and sexy sounds. The king of pop was very …regal and like Powderfinger produced the sort of quality that makes Homebake a very attractive concept.

The Prodigy, bridesmaids last time, proved to be this year’s Most Cool. Liam Howlett worked the instruments like a one-armed paperhanger while frontpersons Maxim Reality, Keith Flint and Leroy Thornhill breathed and poisoned, vogued  and voodooed their music for the jilted generation. Having morphed their way through every musical style in five years, the Prodigy play a deadly mix of hellbent electronics and hungry punk. It’s only 7.15 and they’ve stolen the night.

The Offspring,  Orange County’s finest, also appealed as they crashed through their Ixnay on the Hombre repertoire. Dexter Holland and Noodles would like us to think they’re mean and rancid but listen to their single All I Want. Those perky harmonies, the peroxide hair, it could be…the Police.

I passed earlier on what seemed to me a rather perfunctory outing from You Am I but nothing prepared me the yawning disappointment Soundgarden turned out to be. BDO originals they now seem musclebound by their own celebrity, playing pompous stadium rock alternating with prissy  Matt Cameron solos like Black Hole Sun. They were still pontificating through Blow Up the Outside World when I headed back to the tunnel of sound at Stage Three. The Beasts of Bourbon are  playing like it’s the first day of the world, while at the Grove, local alchemist, Groove Terminator is melding his floor of sound.

Big Day Out will be a hard act to follow. It is a major gathering of the clans. and now it’s finished. We are heading for the gates for a last time. Walking through the hot night air with twenty thousand other refugees, my mohawk by now tilting rakishly, I check out the various regalia around me.  Mambo, Adidas, the N word. But  more often, beloved and much-laundered  t-shirts from previous legendary gigs. Ten points for Rage Against the Machine, fifteen for The Damned, thirty for Dead Kennedys. Best current merchandising, at  slightly less than the carnivorous top price, Fear Factory. Pouring out into nearby Wayville we go- the tired, the battlesodden, and the alcoholically sorrowful. The mosh army of the lower middle class returns to the burbs. Whatever will we do next year- go back to school ??

Stan Ridgway’s set at the Tivoli would have had the significance of the Second Coming -if he’d ever been a first time. Among the modest sized crowd, gathered on day seven of the century celsius, were ticket holders from the cancelled Stan show slated for February 1987. Ten years and one day it has taken us for us to get to Adelaide, Stan bellows good-naturedly. Yessiree Bob. We may have lost our premolars, fifteen percent of our hearing, John Martins and several levels of Moodies ratings since then, but Stan Ridgway’s Quintet brought us momentary forgetfulness of all of life’s tribulations.

Stan led with the great ones. The Big Heat, I Wanna be a Boss, Can’t Stop the Show,  his voiceover singing style forever cool but, as ever, counterpointed by a deadpan carnie wit. With his necktie loosened and a cigarette in his hand,  he hunches over the mike while a naked light bulb swings above his head like a scene from Sam Spade.

His band plays fast and loud and the acoustic mix is splendid. From Black Diamond, there’sWild Bill Donovan,  founder of the CIA, sung like a heroic western ballad with harmonica garnishes and jaunty mocking choruses- American tabloid rockabilly. Big Dumb Town is another Ridgway signature. You’re a little too smart for a big dumb town. Big keyboard sweeps from Stan’s significant other, Pietra Wexstun, thudding bass from David Sutton. Joe Berardi’s faultless drumming is like money in the bank. Stan is strumming on his Fender 12 string and lead guitarist Mark Schulz transmutes electricity into liquid glory.

If anything the standards have only gained over time- especially with the kind of octane Stan is able to summon in a room temperature of a hundred and five. Overlords is Woody Guthrie rock and roll, the kitsch weepie, Camouflage sounds like a giant engine, and there’s the steal from Robert Creeley’s micropoem- Drive She Said. Also, for true followers of the Stanard canon, from the wailing Wall of Voodoo, Mexican Radio.

The Quintet plays two encores – Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons, Ring of Fire from the old Cash converter himself,  and new songs Passenger and Crystal Palace. Ridgway doesn’t miss a beat, even the band seems incredulous at his energy and his salesman antics, sweet-talking the crowd like a de-frocked TV evangelist. Ridgway is the James Ellroy of music. Check out his Drywall project and other recent stuff now available through TWA records, Stan Ridgway is a continuing renaissance. For the final encore he played,  Jack Talked Like a Man on Fire. So, let me tell you did Stan Ridgway. And yessiree Bob, I’ll be going  back to hear him any old decade he happens to be  passing through.

A band we may not see so often in future, judging by the demand in the US especially, is Dirty Three. When they are not being listed in US Rolling Stone’s best top five albums for last year or appearing on the Lollapalooza circuit, violinist Warren Ellis is touring with increasing frequency as a member of  Nick Cave’s pod of Bad Seeds.

In a packed-out hot Sunday arvo set at the Tivoli, instrumentalists Dirty Three play their  extraordinary blend of jazz grunge ragas. Led by Ellis, a frenetic gargoyle who looks like a cross between Marty Feldman and Christina Rossetti, the three – Jim White on drums and Mick Turner on guitar – they huddle down into a series of improvisations.  Like ripples in a pond  their modal, almost ambient sound gathers pace and intensity until before we know it we are in the eye of one of Warren Ellis’s melodic hurricanes, a place both terrifying and exhilarating.

Leaning at the microphone, Ellis introduces each piece with paragraph length titles that seem, like the music itself, to have just settled him like some strange creature of pentecost- I Knew it Would Come to This, or I Really Miss You a Lot. Some have profane subtitles. All are accompanied by some likeably rambling front bar wisdom from Warren before he drapes his pale skinny arms back around his battered looking violin and plays something else spectacularly lyrical and psychotic.

The Three play tracks from Horse Stories– Hope, and the long elegy, Sue’s Last Ride. Turner blows his amp part way through the ride and the band stop for repairs. Ellis fills in with a spirited reel, reminding us that swirling around in the Dirty mix is a lot of traditional Celtic sound as well.

Dirty Three play Leonard Cohen, a fragile reading of Suzanne and a dervish-like Indian Love Song. Another, we heard at last year’s Big Day Out- Everything is Fucked . Listening to it, you wouldn’t think so.  Ellis closes with another Horse Story, Warren’s Lament. The encore- and the crowd is in the mood for many more -is The Dirty Equation.

I’m not sure how to factor this equation together. Under all that stolly guzzling and ordinary bloke-iness Dirty Three are a very un-ordinary band. Their music gathers the imagination of Sugarcane Harris, Ornette Coleman and the free jazz movement, with cajun and Irish music with the dark genius of electric rock. The Dirty Equation is postmodern mathematics – and, as someone once said, it makes a beautful set of numbers.

“Tivoli Nights” The Adelaide Review, No. 163, April, 1997, p.32.