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Big Day Out
Big Day Out headliners include Bjork, Dizzee Rascal, Neil Young and Iggy Pop. Image: Getty/Archi Banal

Pop CultureJanuary 17, 2022

Could the Big Day Out ever make a comeback? ‘Never say never’

Big Day Out
Big Day Out headliners include Bjork, Dizzee Rascal, Neil Young and Iggy Pop. Image: Getty/Archi Banal

Nostalgia for Auckland’s alt-rock festival is at an all-time high. Eight years after its demise, we ask the Big Day Out’s New Zealand promoter if it could ever return.

“Hang on a second,” Campbell Smith says when I call him on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “I’ll send you something … call me back.” True to Smith’s word, a few moments later, my phone pings. It’s a photo album containing six quick snaps of his current surroundings: the music manager’s Morningside office, where a collection of new posters hang on the wall.

With colourful circus-themed artwork, and names like Pearl Jam, The Killers, the Chemical Brothers and System of a Down embedded in big bold fonts, they’re instantly recognisable from billboards past as posters from the Big Day Out, the long-running, now-defunct, much-missed Australasian music festival.

Smith found the posters in his shed recently and decided to get them cleaned up. They’re a constant reminder of his past promoting the New Zealand events, something he describes as “the most fun thing I’ve ever done”.

“If you came to our office you’d see the esteem in which the Big Day Out is held by us,” he says. The posters are a sign he’s finally recovered from the constant grind of running a huge annual music festival every January. Now, he only remembers the good times. “It certainly is a hugely important part of my career. I’m very fond of it,” he says.

BDO
Campbell Smith’s Morningside office is covered in Big Day Out posters. Photo: Supplied

For nine festivals over 10 years, Smith helmed the Auckland leg of the Big Day Out, which began in Sydney in 1992, expanded to include an Auckland leg at a sprawling Mount Smart Stadium site, including a circus tent, in 1994, and was held there for 18 festivals until 2014, when it moved to Western Springs for one final show.

For many, the Big Day Out became a rite of passage, an annual pilgrimage to see the biggest and best rock acts, electronic artists, rappers, DJs and homegrown bands perform on the same stages across a hot, humid, heaving Friday in mid-January.

Yet, ever since that 2014 festival the Big Day Out has been awol. It hasn’t happened since.

Eight years on, two of those spent in lockdown, with many major concerts and music festivals blighted by Covid-19 restrictions, nostalgia for the Big Day Out’s glory years is at an all-time high.

An ABC podcast detailed the show’s incredible highs – and a few terrible lows. A recent Audioculture feature gathered memories from performers and punters, as well as an incredible collection of photos. Every week, someone mentions their fave Big Day Out memories in the popular Facebook group, Lost Nightlife of Inner-City Auckland, sparking a flurry of like-minded comments.

Right now, the post-Christmas air in Auckland feels thick and muggy. Real Groovy is packed with punters. Music blasts from speakers in cars blatting down Queen Street with the windows down. As someone said to me at a work Christmas function: “What we need, right now, is another Big Day Out.”

They’re right. It feels like the city is ready for a mid-January post-New Year’s party. With the Big Day Out gone, there isn’t one to be had.

Lily Allen
Lily Allen performs at the Big Day Out music festival in 2010. Photo: Getty

Smith agrees there are plenty of happy festival memories floating around. “What’s happened is, you’ve got a whole lot of people who are feeling nostalgic who went to the shows,” he says. “You’ve got a bunch from a younger generation who never got to go to one but know about it.

“I think now most people’s memories of it are really fond, and there are kids who never got to go.”

That’s not all: some of the younger acts Smith manages ask him about his days running the festival. “They know what the Big Day Out out is and have heard stories about what it was like and how good it was and never got to go,” he says. If it ever came back, they’d be super keen to play.

Which brings me to the real reason I’m calling Smith. Back in 2014, I broke the news that the Big Day Out was done. Sitting in NZ Herald’s office early on a sad June morning in 2014, I finally sourced a statement from the festival’s new owners C3 confirming days of rumours: the Big Day Out was no more.

“While we intend to bring back the festival in future years, we can confirm there will not be a Big Day Out in 2015,” that statement said. “We love working on BDO and are excited about the future.”

Later that day, a 1 News film crew came to interview me, and I appeared on the 6pm news that night looking angry, distraught and disheveled. That’s exactly how I felt. Despite Auckland’s 2014 Big Day Out going off, a fractured festival market catering to niche audiences, as well as poor ticket sales across Australia, meant the dream was over.

Big Day Out
Angry, distraught, disheveled: breaking the news of the Big Day Out’s demise. Screengrab: TVNZ

But I still think about it all the time. That smell of sunscreen and sweat that hit your nostrils as you walked through the front gates; the overwhelming noise bleeding between stages; the camaraderie between screaming fans; those Fatima’s rolled pitas fueling moves between stages. And the music: Tool, Rage, Deftones, Bjork, M.I.A, the Chemical Brothers, Slipknot, Rammstein, Soundgarden, Hole, Nine Inch Nails. I experienced my first moshpit when the Prodigy performed in 1997, and have chased that feeling ever since.

Smith’s had life-changing moments at the Big Day Out too. “I remember standing at the back of Mount Smart when The Beastie Boys were finishing off,” he says. “There were 50,000 people in there and I remember thinking, ‘To have something to do with this, this is a highlight of my life, to have all these people in here having such a great time.’ I still remember that feeling of being there that day.”

Is that feeling over? Is the festival dead? Could the Big Day Out come back? When I ask him that question, Smith is quick to point out that he hasn’t had those conversations. Any discussion about the festival’s future is building “a make-believe world,” he says.

He also reminds me it isn’t up to him. “It’s not my decision to make. It’s owned by different people. I haven’t had any conversations with anyone about doing it again. I haven’t had any real conversations with anyone,” he says.

Big Day Out
Fans enjoy the 2011 Big Day out from the front rows. Photo: Getty

My brow furrows, but I press on. Smith says he’s moved on. He’s still promoting shows, including two legs of Auckland City Limits, a spinoff of Austin City Limits made with help by C3 Presents, the Big Day Out’s owners. He’s also working on a new festival, Outerfields, an all-New Zealand one-day event headlined by Benee, Ladyhawke and The Beths, in December, along with tours by Rufus du Sol and My Chemical Romance.

He’s clearly still in the game. So I ask Smith that if there were to be discussions, would he want to be involved? Yes, he admits. He’s not over it. Those posters in his office are a daily reminder that, just like the fans who went, the Big Day Out gave him some of the best times of his life too.

“You never say never,” he relents. “Anything can happen. Look at the last few years with Covid.”

Finally, Smith’s admitted he misses the Big Day Out as much as I do. “I would absolutely do it if we could.”


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Good Grief

Pop CultureJanuary 16, 2022

Why Good Grief could become the next Flight of the Conchords

Good Grief

Summer read: Overseas critics are raving about this deadpan Kiwi comedy, and it’s just been picked up by a huge American network after being turned down by TVNZ. Sound familiar?

First published October 7, 2021.

It happened slowly, across six months. The creators of Good Grief, a deadpan comedy that slipped under the radar when it was released here in January, had all but given up hope of securing funding for a second season. TVNZ, which commissioned the first, backed by NZ On Air, had said no. Then emails started landing indicating interest from an overseas network, each more hopeful than the last.

“It wasn’t one big reveal – it was little bits over time,” says Grace Palmer, who created and stars in the six-part series about sisters who inherit a struggling funeral home from their koro, alongside her older sister Eve. It was their first show together, and they’d been dreaming it up for years. But a second season wasn’t on the table. “We never thought anyone in America would want to make another fucking season of it.”

Slowly, the emails, from US broadcast giant AMC, the home of Emmy-winning shows Breaking Bad and Mad Men, changed in tone. Grace says they went from, “Hey, so it turns out AMC really likes the show and they’re keen to buy the first season,” to, “Hey, it turns out AMC might be interested in putting some money towards the second season,” to “OK, it turns out AMC is going to make the whole season.” 

Even getting the first season was a surprise. Neither Eve nor Grace can remember exactly when Good Grief became a TV show in their minds, but they have notes dating back years. They also remember a death in the family, a “really heavy time” lightened by two family members coming home from dressing the body. “They came back in hysterics,” says Grace. “One had to literally hold him over their shoulder while the other did the pants. We had that image in our head.”

They kicked around ideas, pieced it together slowly. Poking fun at death was always Good Grief’s central concept. “We’re all going to die, yet that sentence makes people feel very uncomfortable,” says Eve, who believes too many taboos surround the topic. “It sits on the outside of normal conversation and normal society. We go there when we have to then we scurry away and pretend it’s not going to be a reality. I think we thought there was a lot of comedy there.”

There is. Shot at a South Auckland community centre over 15 days in the winter of 2020, Good Grief’s six 15-minute episodes are extremely funny, full of awkward embalming practices, shoddy funeral home viewings and screw-ups during services. One involves a golfer whose clubs won’t fit in his casket. But it’s also heartfelt, the love between Grace and Eve’s characters Gwen and Ellie coming directly from their own relationship. 

And it looks great. Produced by Brown Sugar Apple Grunt Productions, Good Grief was made on a shoestring budget of $500,000, funded through an NZ On Air new storytellers initiative. An experienced team was at the helm: Kerry Warkia produced it, Kiel McNaughton directed it and Nick Schaedel helped Grace and Eve hone their story. 

Josh Thomson, Sophie Hambleton, Eve Palmer, Grace Palmer and Vinnie Bennett from Good Grief (Photo: Supplied)

It debuted, via TVNZ OnDemand, to little fanfare. Despite being packed with familiar TV faces – The Project’s Josh Thomson, Fast & Furious 9 star Vinnie Bennett and Westside’s Sophie Hambleton have starring roles – it landed with a whimper. Eve and Grace did just a couple of interviews to promote it, and few, if any, reviews were published.

“It definitely wasn’t a big deal,” says Eve. There was no marketing budget. “It was just us,” says Grace. “I just reached out to a bunch of people on social media and asked them to watch it and if they liked it to share it.” The one shining light? Feedback from those who did see it was good – especially among their peers. “The cool thing was a lot of people at our age and stage, women in their 20s, said they loved it,” says Grace.

Good Grief found its way to AMC through Warkia, thanks to an introduction from Chris Payne at the New Zealand Film Commission. Warkia says the trail blazed by Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi and Rose Matafeo overseas, as well as demand for indigenous, female-led talent, did the rest. The international success of The Casketeers, via Netflix, and Wellington Paranormal, surely helped too. “If it’s universal enough to travel, but it has the specificity that makes it unique, there’s a hunger for that,” Warkia says. 

The small team refused to celebrate until a contract showed up. Then it did. In late August, the industry know-it-alls at Deadline reported that AMC didn’t just want to use its network of cable channels to deliver Good Grief to a worldwide audience, it was also willing to entirely fund a second season. “I think they were shocked at what we made it for,” says Eve. “It was nothing.”

An American network picking up the bill for the second season of an Aotearoa-made series is a rarity, and may even be a first. No one spoken to for this story can remember it happening before. Eve assumed executives would want to make changes to appeal to an American audience, but, AMC told her and Grace to keep doing what they’re doing. “They said they enjoyed the heart and humour … they love Flight of the Conchords and Kiwi comedy and there’s an appetite for it.” Eve’s reply? “I asked if it would need subtitles.”

Now that Good Grief has been taken off life support and resurrected, it’s become a very big deal. Major overseas publications are plugging it, viewers are digging it, and they’re watching it in America, Canada and the UK through Sundance Now, an AMC-owned streaming service. The New York Times sent out an email recommending the show to its millions of readers last week, saying it was more “quirky comedy than a bummertown weepfest”. An SBS story asked: “Is New Zealand the funniest country on Earth?”

That’s not all. In the UK, The Sun called it “silly, tender and smart – and a lot of fun”. In a separate story headlined “The show you have to watch this week”, Deadline profiled Good Grief alongside Squid Game, the killer South Korean hit that’s rapidly become one of the world’s most-watched shows. “It’s very surreal,” says Eve. Grace agrees: “The fact that it’s overseas and critics like it is mind-blowing.”

It’s a situation that brings to mind Flight of the Conchords, when Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie were forced to take their show to HBO after TVNZ rejected their pitch. We all know what happened next. “We didn’t have heaps of support from TVNZ for a second season,” admits Grace. “They weren’t that interested … they had other projects they wanted to support.”

Yet she and Eve say they’re not upset. “We never thought that it would get picked up in New Zealand to get made [in the first place] so that was a surprise,” says Grace. The pair say plenty of local shows are competing for access to a small funding pool. “I totally understand if NZ On Air and TVNZ want to share the money out,” says Eve. “I think that’s awesome.” In a statement, a TVNZ spokesperson said they were “thrilled” Good Grief had secured overseas funding, and confirmed the second season would screen via TVNZ OnDemand.

In that story for Deadline, AMC’s president of original programming, Dan McDermott, said the team “were in love” with the show.  “We jumped at the chance to work with Eve, Grace, Nick, Kiel and Kerry to commission further adventures with them.” Eve and Grace are working on those adventures right now, facing a Christmas deadline to turn in scripts for season two. “There’s a lot more story that we want to tell,” says Eve. “They’re always in our heads, these people.” They hope to begin shooting – Covid-19 – permitting next year.

Yes, the budget for season two will be bigger, but that doesn’t mean Good Grief will change. The second season will remain just as dark, and hilariously bleak, as the first. “It’s a shit town with a shit funeral company. It’s all a bit shit,” says Grace. That, she says, is what makes their show relatable to audiences both here and overseas. “No one’s glamorous. We shot it in winter and it all looked a bit glum. It was meh. It all sort of worked.”

Updated 11am: A spokesperson from TVNZ has responded: “Good Grief received a full publicity campaign when the series launched in January, which included a number of interviews, highlights and reviews. This show was supported with publicity and with marketing spend.”

Watch season one of Good Grief via TVNZ OnDemand.

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