Interview: Ken West (founder of Big Day Out)
It’s a hot and uncharacteristically windy Gold Coast afternoon when I sit with Big Day Out co-founder and promoter Ken West. Before us is an empty Gold Coast Parklands which, in a couple of days, will be transformed into a festival hording ground for close to 50,000 music revellers – “it’s almost like a small community for one day” – as Ken rightfully suggests. Although this year brings forth some of the biggest heavyweights within the international music industry, it can be suggested that it has not all gone to plan for West’s crew. In what should be a year of celebration as Big Day Out remarkably enter their 20th Anniversary, it has been unfortunately marred by the exit of co-founder Vivian Lees in November, the removal of headliner Kanye West from Perth, Adelaide and New Zealand and of course, the immediate social media backlash or ‘vitriol’ against such pivotal decisions.
Interviewing Ken West is not so much interviewing; rather it is a process of navigating his violent stream of consciousness that aims to tick of all the bullet points in his agenda that he wants (needs) to address. He is relentless when the topic turns to social media, positively animated explaining his new business partner C3 Promotions and tranquil when asked about the future of the Gold Coast Parklands site. Even after twenty years of producing the greatest music festival in Australia, West admits that it doesn’t get any easier. With a new business partner, 2013 may be the fresh start the Big Day Out has been looking for and it’s without a doubt the festival will have more than one trick up their sleeve in the years to come.
I wanted to ask you about the reason why Vivian Lees left. You stated that one of the reasons he left was because he couldn’t handle the Facebook ‘vitriol’. How do you handle it, personally?
I don’t pay any attention to it. I take it as a litmus test. It’s kind of like if you’ve got a room full of people in the dark and what your dealing with is a lot of people with different agendas and you don’t know what the real agendas are. So you just have to do an overall view of it and go ‘Yeah okay. They’re not happy with the line-up.’ I understand that to a certain extent. It’s a tightrope thing. You’ve only got five minutes now to convince people – I used to have two months or more.
Big Day Out is always a complex, melting pot, high wire act of getting a complex world class event of a myriad of musical styles in one day and if you get it perfect, it’s a perfect storm and if you get it not quite right you have to rely on people going ‘Well, it’s the Big Day Out!’ Nowadays, it’s like you have to get through the process of people going ‘Yeah I’m automatically going to go and do that.’ To some extent the Kanye [West] and Soundgarden thing started to cancel each other out. Soundgarden fans didn’t want Kanye people and the Kanye people didn’t want them. But what is a Kanye person?
Predominately, this show is more of a softer show and so the harder metal fans think the Big Day Out is meant to be all about what they know. But they don’t understand the history of the Big Day Out; even long enough to go back to the Neil Young year. So it’s always been a chameleon to some extent but the backbone of it is that it’s the best festival in the country. It’s meant to elevate Australian bands and it’s meant to break acts. It’s not just a one trick pony. So therefore we’ve never gone with the idea that this year has to be bigger than the last. We try and pull things back because you can’t keep topping. The reason why it survived twenty years is because we chose deliberately to go from a Rage Against The Machine year to a Neil Young year. Or we go from a Tool/Rammstein year to a Kanye West/Noel Gallagher kind of thing – it’s simply a festival for what I consider real music fans that aren’t genre specific and that is what it needs to be. So it’s always going to be disappointment.
On Facebook, it’s always going to be a disappointment. You can look at a dance festival line-up and you go ‘Oh yeah!’ and you look at a Soundwave line-up and go ‘Woah! They’re the best in that genre.’ But it’s never going to be what anybody thinks is their ideal line-up. In the past people just went ‘Oh yeah, I can see what I want’ because it’s a smorgasbord. It’s a buffet. You do ribbons through it. I put ribbons through the time sheets and go, ‘If I’m a metal head, this is what I can do.’ Snakes and Ladders is kind of what I call it. Left to right – you got to get the audience flow between the whole thing. I’m starting with timesheets now for 2013 and 2014 and positioning acts because that’s really important to me. That’s the alchemy of it. You just can’t kind of put them all in a pot and hope you can stir it up later and pour it out and everything will be all right. I mean, if you got an act the calibre of a Kasabian or a Noel Gallagher they’re not just going to go ‘Yeah book us on and we will work it out later.’ They need to know what they are doing, like Noel will play in the Green Tent – which perfectly suits him.
So it’s always going to be a disappointment, during that first five minutes. Unless I panned it out to the big guns, which would probably lead to a bit more pandering than we considered but not to the point where it makes the show less dimensional. I think it’s too narrow as it is. I think it needs to be broader than what it is – musically. That’s my starting point, so we are probably going to get more shit-canned until people understand it.
How do you get people to understand it?
I don’t know. Do some interviews I suppose. I suppose it’s the only way. The only other thing is don’t tell them what bands are on. (Laughs) Don’t tell them! No, what you do is you just have to write out the idea that at this point in time, the narrow musical events are doing very well, because they are kind of new.
Like St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival for example?
Laneway is struggling this year because; I hope they don’t think that’s wrong in saying it, because we are all struggling to some extent this year. You’ve got that problem where you go ‘If I go and buy that big name, I can’t go out and get these little things.’ They have a finite budget, so they’ve gone for less complicated and newish stuff, which are all great acts, but if anything, they are finding out the same problem that people aren’t actually as imaginative and adventurous as you think. You should be very careful thinking ‘They’ll understand this.’ Because the urgency in buying tickets is gone because of the glut of events and because the fact that Eminem and Foo Fighters took half of Australia’s economy out and that there is a limited amount of money. So you can’t get too confused by it because a lot of people will say ‘Nah, it’s not worth it’ or ‘I’m not going’ instead of saying they’re broke. So you’ve got to read between the lines on all that stuff too. Not many people like to say they can’t afford it, so they will say I don’t like it. It’s easier. Or their arrogant, ‘I’ve got plenty of money but I don’t want to go to that’ – but you don’t hear that. That’s been a symptom for quite a while.
So on the Facebook front, it’s like, okay, if you have posted 2,000 times on the fucking site that you hate the show you’ve got a real problem. I mean what do you do? Are you working for another promoter? Who are you? You know? Are you a full time person who is paid to shit-can other events? I mean who’s got this time to go on and post on something they don’t like. Is this the way the world is going to end?
(Laughs) It could.
(Laughs) It could be it. Total end of social order. I fear for that. The music world have all toughened up on it and we are like ‘Whatever, here it goes again.’ We are all off and running on ‘Hatebook’. But then you see the things in the paper; even today there is a two-page spread in The Daily Telegraph about a pregnant lady and a seat – it’s about whether someone should give up their seat for her. I’ve never seen anything like it on Facebook. People were abusing her endlessly on it. People are calling it generation ‘I’ and it’s all about ‘me’. You have got no sanctuary anymore to actually put anything out that is seriously emotionally important without some jackass writing something on there. It might be about somebody who has died or someone who is trying to do a tribute for someone who died or whatever and then within minutes there will be somebody saying they deserved it. It’s horrible.
Do you think it’s because of that sense of anonymity?
I can’t take anything seriously from: one – a person I don’t know, two – a person that I don’t know what their agenda is and three – why they would even bother. So I have this incredible distrust of that thing. The problem is that it is the new form of negative marketing that is being spread right across. Even the guys at Motorola said they were having problems from opposition phone companies posting on Motorola’s Facebook about how fucked their phones are. And that’s from other companies. It’s like how are you meant to find the truth? And so unfortunately naïve people…
Follow suit?
Yeah, they tie in with it. It’s very difficult. One of the main reasons for doing this is because of the pride we have in what we do, doing a great job and thinking that people like what we do and you get rewarded by having great shows and musicians who think it’s fantastic and all that kind of stuff. Those initial stages where there is so much vitriol, I go ‘Why do we bother? Why would I bother? If this is really what people think, I’ll just go and do something else.’
Is that what Vivian thought?
Not officially. He’ll deny that officially. But I do agree with him in denying with it officially and I probably shouldn’t have said it in the first place but I really did feel for him at the time. We just kept telling him to ‘Stop reading it!’ and ‘Turn it off!’ I just couldn’t believe these people. I don’t even know who they are. It’s probably this and it’s probably that. Guess what? There are twenty promoters out there that could be doing it. There are people who work for the promoters that could be doing it who are asked ‘Oh can you go shit-can somebody else?’ You don’t know, because it cannot possibly be people that stupid and that without a life where they spend their time putting hundreds, even dozens is enough, to go it’s not rational. You know?
Every technological breakthrough is five years behind etiquette. Sometimes it’s quicker, sometimes it’s less. First time mobile phones came out everybody was talking in the movies, having them full blast in the restaurants and things like that. It takes a while for etiquette to come through, but in this case I don’t know whether etiquette is going to come through. I was thinking about starting up a new one which was ‘Negative Land’ where you get struck off if you say anything positive, and then people will be trying to put positive things on there so they can get struck off. (Laughs). That’s the other thing – they like being struck off. They go ‘Oh yeah I got thrown off such and such.’ They keep posting more and more going ‘Well strike me off then’ and we’re just like ‘Go away!’ So yeah that’s that side of it.
Moving onto the Gold Coast site at Parklands. You’ve got it secured for the next year and maybe the next two years after that. Is it all still up in the air?
Yeah it’s up in the air. I just know that it is here and there is a hospital being built over there. I’m presuming it’s double-glazed.
Do you want to keep it in the area? You recently mentioned Tweed Heads as a possible rivalry contender for the festival.
I said that would have been the only rival only because that’s when you start getting into the politics. I’ve got a small leverage there I can use, being close to a border. It’s very important for the survival of the show to be in a stable situation. But having said that, this is the most stable situation we’ve got and until that is destabilised then I don’t really have anything to worry about.
So there are no headaches just yet?
Nah. It’s all business as usual.
Would you ever consider taking it north, maybe up to Brisbane?
No. Not this time of year. It’s always about this time of year when there is a fun vibe. People come up from Byron to the Gold Coast and people from Brisbane come down to the Gold Coast. People from the coast usually don’t go up to Brisbane. Why would you leave the coast in summer? Not that this is a beach – it’s bloody windy and crap. But it will be here for as long as we can keep it here and then we will get the warning shots first and start getting into action about what we are going to do.
Unless there was a program like what was initially talked about where the government were going to commit a hundred million plus to create a new Parklands sort of thing but that turned out too hard and that would have had to have started three years out. It’s infrastructure and it’s not a simple job. The thing that is most loved about this more than anything is that it’s got great drainage. The cyclone risk is the whole thing here really, but even when we have had cyclones here and it has rained eight inches in a day, by the next morning it’s dry. It’s got to be purpose built with perfect drainage in such a large area, so when it does pour down rain, you don’t want anybody to drown. I mean you can literally have that in certain situations. If you get drunk, fall over and somebody stands on you, you could drown. It is unusual, but it can happen.
You recently signed up with C3 promotions as your new business partner. What does that specifically mean for the future of the Big Day Out?
Specifically it means C3 are my new business partners which is phenomenal and now means we’ve got a full American plough. And considering most of the international negotiations are with Americans who they deal with daily. They put together Austin City Limits and do about 800 shows a year and do Lollapalooza. The fact that they seem to be happily working with Perry Farrell – I thought, well I’m not quite that nuts, so it will probably be great. The great thing about it is they are younger so they are in their late 30’s and early 40’s. They are not jaded. They think anything is possible and they just think this is going to be a lot of fun. I haven’t heard anybody say in a long time that this is going to be a lot of fun, because its been very hard for me in terms of a dysfunctional working relationship with my previous business partner. We kept going on the basis that the less we talk with each other the better. We just got on with our jobs. The shows were fun but the rest of the time wasn’t that much fun. So in this case what we’ve got more than anything is a solid future, some financial injection and more importantly some great information and skill flow between the two of us.
They really respect the event – the only people who have done that. Especially having been dealt with the Lollapalooza thing, which they basically pulled out of the garbage bin – as I like to see it. They have done an amazing job at re-establishing it in Chicago. They fully understand the complexities that we deal with, that sense of a melting pot. They really understand that this is really hard; it’s really hard to compress what a major three day festival is into one day. And we do it really well and they respect that. But the main thing is that we will be able to have much more at-the-source conversations, meaning management work out what’s best for career building for a band and not being in any bidding matches. So it’s like, you either want to be on or you don’t want to be on. We will work out a fair deal, if you want to be on and if you want to start shopping it, we don’t want to know about it. That’s how it always used to be with the Big Day Out. So I’ve managed somehow to miraculously find a team that actually cared because they contacted us to say ‘I’ve heard you are having troubles with the Big Day Out, do you need any help?’ I think I cried for five minutes after that. That was a pure sign that these were who I needed. Not like ‘It might be a business opportunity for us.’ They also said that a lot of things at Lollapalooza were taken from the Big Day Out. So they learnt so much from the Big Day Out – which they have used back at Lollapalooza in terms of presentation and staging artists. They used to take the acts for Lollapalooza after we chose them for Big Day Out. They’d go, ‘That one worked, we better get them’.
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