What’s worse than having a bright red sunburnt face? Having a bright red sunburnt face with bright red bags under your eyes.

Yes, I got sunburnt at the Big Day Out on Sunday. I don’t even know how because I put a fair bit of sunscreen on. I went with some mates of mine – it was a lot of fun though, skin conditions aside.

I had to get up pretty early to drive in to Melbourne, and the whole way in my car was making strange noises. It was almost teasing me – ‘I might break down – but maybe I won’t! Maybe you’ll get to Melbourne but you never know, I might be a complete prat and break down on you anyway!’

I remember my car used to break down all the time because I’d use the choke then forget to turn it off after I’d been driving. That’s because I’m crap. I’d rather have a manual choke than an automatic choke, though. My mate used to have an automatic choke, and we’d be sitting there in his car while he tried to make the engine kick over:

My mate: It’ll start soon. Don’t worry.
Me: Are you using the choke?
My mate: Ah, that’s the beauty. It’s an automatic choke so it knows when to activate itself.
Me: Well, right now would be a really good time for it to work.

Anyhow, I eventually arrived in Melbourne. We lined up for around 45 minutes, and while we were waited, some guy started handing out samples of some guarana herbal extract. Everyone who got a sample pack of the herbal drink showed their enthusiasm for the product by chucking it on the ground.

As we were lining up, one of my mates for some reason started saying:
Mate: Is that the Corrs I can hear? I think I can hear the Corrs playing.
Everyone else: We don’t know you.

When we eventually got into the gates, we went and saw Gerling, who looked like they’d had far too much sugar for their own good. After that me and one of my mates went off to catch the Testeagles, and we were up the very front which was cool.

The Testeagles aren’t to be underrated, they played some very cool stuff. If you like industrial then don’t write them off with ‘Turn That Shit Up’ as a novelty song. It was a pretty cool set. The Testeagles played on the Essential Stage, which is in a giant shed. It’s great when the crowd really gets going, and so does the body odour.

One guy at the Testeagles who was crowd surfing seemed to have a good idea – he’d strapped a giant inflatable cushion to his back, so when he got piffed over the front of the crowd, he just landed on the cushion. Smart man.

After the Testeagles, we walked outside to witness one of the stranger stages at the Big Day Out. Every year at the BDO there’s something known as the Lilypad Stage, where basically they just do totally weird arse stuff like playing Twister where the object is to sniff the other player’s crotches. Well, it suddenly became quite difficult to move around in the crowd because the stupid woman on the Lilypad stage started asking the crowd ‘Who wants to see some tits? Yes, I think it’s time we got some tits up on the stage’. So all the guys were transfixed and the crowd stopped moving almost totally.

We eventually got back to the main stage to witness Atari Teenage Riot. Now I love Atari Teenage Riot’s music, I think it’s great, but when bands turn into too much of a political platform rather than a group who produce music, it kinda gives me the irrits. It came as no surprise when my mate (who had never seen ATR before) told me later on that he thought ATR was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen, which is kinda sad I guess.

Anyway, ATR basically seem to rant and rave totally randomly in between each song against nothing in particular. That’s the problem, I can never seem to quite figure out what they’re raging against in particular. It’s fine to scream things like “Bomb the malls!” and “Kill fucking McDonalds!”, but where’s it all leading? We were also told to ‘Start the riot!’ about 4,285,105 times. The thing that gives me the irrits, is that if some ATR fan actually did go and bomb a mall, you know that ATR would suddenly say ‘Oh, well, we don’t approve of that’. And it may be OK for ATR to rage against shopping malls, but oh make sure you buy their t-shirt…

Anyway. I’ve probably got Atari Teenage Riot figured out all wrong. But I think they’d just had too much sugar for their own good. They probably needed a big lie down after their set, but don’t get me wrong, their set was cool.

Not soon after we saw Atari Teenage Riot, I actually witnessed a riot almost start for real. I was wandering around looking for more sunscreen (I’d been told how red I was looking), I saw at least 100 people at one of the fences at the edge of the Melbourne Showgrounds (where the Big Day Out was) trying to push it down, and they succeeded in doing so! Suddenly at least 100 people all started roaring into the Showgrounds heading straight towards me, and I thought I was going to get trampled, so I ran behind a nearby vegetarian food tent.

This was a dodgy vegetarian food tent. Surrounding the whole tent was murky muddy water, which made me think twice about buying from them.

Then there wasn’t really anyone on except Blink 182, so reluctantly I went along with the others to hear songs about circumcisions etc. Highlights (cough) included the songs ‘I Want A Blowjob’ and ‘I Want To Fuck Your Dad’.

Then it was time for Jebediah. It’s been a little while since I caught them live, and they didn’t disappoint this time around, running out on stage in K-Mart style parachute pants tracksuits. Funniest moment of the whole Big Day Out was when they blew their speakers in the middle of ‘Leaving Home’, leaving the stage silent for around fifteen minutes. They somehow managed to get the whole crowd to sing the national anthem, amongst other things, but its to their credit they can still be funny as hell and entertaining even when their speakers were blown.

It was about this time that I cracked the sads and refused to stand in the sun any longer because I was so burnt, so we went and sat in the stands. Next on were Spiderbait – I fell asleep. Literally.

Then were the Foo Fighters, who were great. Although admittedly. I was basically just waiting for Trenty Reznor to come on. An hour later, Nine Inch Nails hit the stage for a pretty damned good set. I’d never seen them live before but they didn’t fail to disappoint.

I avoided seeing the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in favour of Something For Kate, a band I’ve loved for a while now. It was cool because the crowd wasn’t too big at their stage, everyone was checking out the Chilli Peppers. S4K played an awesome set, they just get better and better. They’ve definitely matured with time. At the end of the set people were chanting ‘More! More! More!’ for about 5 minutes, and a fair few people had left, when S4K’s singer Paul came back out on stage and sung a song by himself, simply because we were all yelling for more.

This song was unbelievable. It’s been quite some time since a song played live brought out such emotion in me, I had the biggest lump in my throat by the end. S4K have always been a band that seem to convey emotions very well in their music, but the way Paul was playing this, with such beauty and anger all at once, it really touched me. I’ve got new respect for S4K now.

I wish I had have seen Hardknox play. Grrrr.

*****

When I got back to work yesterday, Ms. J and The Rock were making all sorts of jokes about my sunburn:

The Rock: Hey, can you lob me that stapler?
Me: Sure.
Ms. J: Yep, because nobody can LOB it like the LOBSTER MAN.
The Rock & Ms. J: Bwahahahahahah.

I was asking The Rock for advice on how I can stop my sunburn from peeling:

Me: What should I use to get rid of the redness?
The Rock: Hello, Vera!
Me: Huh?
Ms. J: Yep! Hello, Vera!
Me: Who the hell is Vera?

Apparently they were saying ‘aloe vera’. I’d never heard of this stuff but it feels cool on my face, which is a good thing.

*****

Ms. J and The Rock keep talking about a porno they’ve seen called ‘Edward Penishands’. They swear it’s true, but I suspect they’re having me on. Is Edward Penishands a real porno? Anyone know?

*****

I was in the Geelong Coles supermarket yesterday and noticed there’s a door with a sign on it – ‘This door is alarmed’. Can you picture it? Somebody will go to open the door, and:

Door: SHRIEEEEEEEK!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2000 at 6:07 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.