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Event
Information:
The
Big Day Out (BDO) is an annual music
festival held in several cities in
Australia and New Zealand in late
January. It started in Sydney in
1992, spread to Adelaide, Melbourne
and Perth by 1993, with the Gold
Coast and Auckland joining in 1994.
As of 2003, it has featured seven or
eight stages (depending on the
venue) accommodating popular
contemporary rock music, electronic
music, mainstream international acts
and local acts.
The
festival began in 1992 as a
Sydney-only show with Violent Femmes
as the headline act, along with
Nirvana and a range of other foreign
and local alternative music acts
playing at the Hordern Pavilion. In
the months preceding the event,
Nirvana's Nevermind was released and
became an international smash hit,
therefore guaranteeing the success
of the festival. Kurt Cobain was ill
at the time of the show. In 1993,
the festival was extended to include
Melbourne, Perth, and Adelaide.
Since
1994, the Big Day Out has travelled
annually to Auckland, the Gold
Coast, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne
and Perth during a three-week
period. The tour through the
southern-hemisphere summer has
become "the festival overseas acts
want to be on". In 1997, organisers
Ken West and Vivian Lees announced
they were taking a year off, causing
concern that the festival was coming
to an end.
American band Pearl Jam were booked
to headline the 2001 tour almost 12
months in advance, as they had just
started to do festivals for the
first time since problems at
festivals in the early 90s. On 30
June 2000 at the Roskilde Festival
in Denmark, they ended their set
prematurely after the crowd surged
forward, crushing and fatally
injuring nine people. They pulled
out of the BDO, claiming that they
would never play at festivals again.
They did play Leeds & Reading
Festivals, UK, in 2006.
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