The Opinionated Diner

there must be a reason for everything in this world, surely? Over at Myk Reilly's excellent blog (Myk was our in house graphics designer back in the early Box days.."Myk I need a poster and flyer by tomorrow please, for Justin Robertson, two colour, 1000 posters A0 stuck up"..you know the drill..he was good and he was a fan which, aside from the obvious talents required, was one of the reasons he was good..get those flyers online please Myk (but lets forget the "100 % Pure Dance" comp we did for PolyGram..not because the cover sucked but because the record did)) he's done this absolutely hilarious ramble about the Big Day Out. Peter linked to it too, and that's where I first noted it. My BDO tale is insignificant next to Myk's, but... I haven't been for three years, as I've been out of town each January but I think the only thing I really regret missing is dear old Kraftwerk. I saw them in Sydney about twenty four years ago and they were astounding, especially to a young only-just post punker from the Muldoonistic gulag called New Zealand, where no-one was allowed an idea that took them beyond their station and records, unless they were sanctioned as acceptable by the record company kartel, because of the import licensing paranoia, simply were not available. But I digress...Andrew White recorded some of Kraftwerk at the BDO on his cell phone and sent it to my messages. I actually had no idea who'd sent it until a month or so ago when he owned up to it. I checked my messages in Bali at the time and listened to large parts of Trans Europe Express on the phone...it was clear as a bell but cost me $800 in Vodafone charges sadly... So the last time I went to BDO was a few years back and I have to be honest I was pretty lax in seeing the bands. I went into the boiler room to watch Greg Churchill ("Disco Hoopla" fer fux sake..my god) and saw Nathan Haines play a very odd and twisted set with Manuel Bundy. Unfortunately my whole world, had, for a variety of reasons best not gone into here started to go a little pear shaped by late afternoon. I discovered the FMR private room had cucumber sandwiches and Heineken (which was a major improvement over the DB Export everywhere else..how can they still serve this recycled cat piss anywhere in the civilized world. I guess in Australia they'd give you Fosters which is worse, but, as they say in Indonesia, Oz is the land that taste forgot). And it was the drunken Australian FMR management that forced me back upstairs to the more public vip area, where I made no sense to the likes of Greg Johnson (who understood my lack of sense perfectly). All good and well until we all went down to Feel with Placebo for their afterparty. Feel at that stage hadn't begun it's slide from the coolest, most pretentiously elite bar in Auckland to a slimy to be avoided hell hole. And things progressed as they do, until the band was leaving, crew and all and someone decided myself, and my good and reliable friend, Blake were, for some bizarre and unfathomable reason, the most trustworthy people there to look after Placebo's drummer upstairs, who, needs, we were told, a close eye, after a drink or too...he was a drummer after all. I'm sure we agreed to babysit but the next memory is Blake and myself talking gibberish to Paul Dean at The Grand Circle (Blake looks like Ian Pooley's twin we're told so its easy to blag into clubs with him, but that's an altogether different story)..text...where are you?....you better come back. So back to Feel to see the drummer from Placebo (lovely guy I'm told) disappearing in some car to somewhere with some Feel inhabitant (many of whom,as the years passed, were to be avoided, but drummers don't know things like that) , having been tossed in the street after he'd smashed up all the furniture upstairs. It went from bad to worse after that and the next memory is in some vip (??) room, with Glen, at Sinners with some girl telling me that she'd had a baby six weeks earlier but was already back on the streets..... I might venture back to the BDO this year but I'm not going anywhere near cucumber sandwiches .....