January’s Big Day Out may have become the most successful youth festival in the country, and Auckland’s version may be the most successful of the Australasian tour, but the local cell sites fried. Voice calls on either network were a lottery for 12 hours. The sight of young people staring blankly at their non-functioning handsets was one of the enduring images of the day. Not all of them were looking down in anger. Happily for the techno-literati, Vodafone’s text messaging stayed up throughout. It was the heaviest day of messaging so far, says Vodafone.

Bridget Darby, boss of the Big Day Out’s New Zealand agent, The Sequel, saw it all coming. “Vodafone came to us and asked what they could do and they put two temporary boosters onto the site,” she says. “But after numerous meetings with Telecom we couldn’t find anyone to agree to put in a booster site [for 025 phones]. They told us that simply by boosting the overall coverage in the area it would handle that many people.”

It didn’t. On the day — Friday, January 21 — both 021 and 025 numbers were jammed. “The Vodafone people were actually on the site — and unable to use their mobiles. And the guy from Vodafone walked away saying, ‘Wow, now I understand …’”

The event made its economic presence felt all over Auckland. Stagecoach had to bring in buses to carry more than 12,000 passengers to and from the show. TranzMetro fashioned a temporary railway terminal near the stadium, expecting to carry about 2500 people to and fro, but ended up with 7000 passengers and put on nine extra runs until 1.30am to get people home. “We were a victim of our own success,” laments TranzMetro chief Shane Ellison. “There were so many people and the trains were so full that the conductor couldn’t get round to collect everyone’s fare. I think 50% of the people got free rides.” But TranzMetro did make enough to cover its expenses and Ellison believes it lifted the company’s profile. “You can’t put a value on that. And maybe it helped convert people to go to an event on a train. We’ll throw a lot more resources at it next year.”

The staging company Inter-stage billed about $100,000 for the day, as did the public address and lighting company Oceania. Spotless Catering took around $1 million and Ericsson Stadium itself took between 8% and 10% of the gross ticket sales (50,000 people at $75 — you work it out) plus separate fees for the Supertop and the adjoining soccer field.

One sponsor, DB, says it couldn’t be happier. “This really is the definitive DB Export moment,” says mainstream category manager Mark Jenner. “It’s about 20- to 25-year-olds enjoying themselves around cool music.”

Jenner won’t divulge how much DB spends on the event, nor even give a broad figure, except to say it’s in cash. So what does the Big Day Out do for DB? Jenner says DB comes back every year because it works so well. The brewer leverages the association for a whole month from Christmas — when some parents give their kids tickets to go — through to late January. He also likes the fact the event is not over-commercialised. “They know exactly what they want and they don’t sell sponsorship to just anyone that comes by. They’re very focused and targeted. We have a huge amount of respect for how [The Sequel] operates.”

Even the Amazon clothes shop in faraway Queen Street had a bigger week than Christmas as the kids flocked to buy their Big Day Outfits.

Final confirmation of the Big Day Out’s arrival: the corporate boxes at Ericsson, which used to be dark and empty, were fully occupied. There was blood spilled at some firms in the scramble for tickets.

The Herald duly noted the number of arrests and police thanked the newly legal 18-year-old drinkers for their responsibility. The Herald’s obsession with orderliness missed the real story: just how have a group of young entrepreneurs so successfully tapped into a generation? And how do they do it when so many others have failed, none more spectacularly than last year’s Sweetwaters?

The brains behind it

Auckland this year wasn’t just the biggest Day Out Darby has handled, but the biggest of any of the Big Day Out shows this year: bigger than the Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth. Probably.

“I know Bridget would like to claim that it was the biggest and I’m very happy for her to keep the crown,” chuckles Vivian Lees, who, along with his long-time business partner Ken West, runs Creative Entertainment, the company that owns the Big Day Out.

“But I believe that Sydney was just about 30 people bigger — and knowing Ken he would do that intentionally to make sure he reigned as the Big Daddy of the Big Day Out.”

Lees lives in Melbourne, West lives in Sydney, and that’s the way it’s been for a partnership that has spanned most of the past 20 years. The two made their name in the early 1980s with a company called Edward Zimbliss (“we made up this fictitious name because neither of us wanted to get blamed if it didn’t work out”), touring acts like New Order and The Violent Femmes through Australia and New Zealand.

When they launched the Big Day Out in 1992 with shows in Melbourne and Sydney (it came to Auckland in 1994) it was hailed as a down under answer to the US Lollapalooza tour which had reinvented the rock festival into a one-day fast-food version of the old three-course meal. But while Lollapalooza is now a memory, the Big Day Out is one of the world’s best-known music festivals.

“One thing that separates our festival is that we really nit-pick,” says Lees. “We really select the bill. It’s not a matter of bunging together a bunch of available acts. We’ve got a pile two inches thick of letters from agents and we can choose anyone we want. That’s a luxury — we have a hot festival that has a reputation overseas for being fun, and for breaking and establishing acts.”

Auckland’s BDO hit its sweet spot. Doug Hood, whose company Looney Tours worked with Lees and West for more than a decade and was the original New Zealand agent for the Big Day Out (it became The Sequel after Hood left the business), has watched the momentum build.

“I spoke to Ken before this year’s date and he said ‘why do you think New Zealand’s going so well this time?’ I said ‘I thought it was just the time for it — there’s a time for everything’. And he said, ‘What, you mean the kids really feel like they own it?’ And that’s exactly right. The kids feel like they own the event.”

That sense among the customers that they, too, own the product is vital but fragile, warns Hood. Punters who got caught in the crush at Ericsson’s chokepoints this year might feel their goodwill has been abused and think differently next year.

It’s an issue of which Darby and her partner Nikki Tysall are acutely aware. They expanded the festival site to improve the experience this year, costing themselves most of the venue’s car parking. They’ll tweak it again next year, but won’t be letting in any more than 50,000:

“That’s what the venue holds”.

And then there were the newly legal drinkers: the 18-year-olds. “I was relatively surprised at how little a problem that was,” she says. “People kind of go, well, I’ve paid $75 for a ticket, do I want to get carted out and miss my favourite band? The police definitely looked at the Big Day Out as a test case for 18-year-olds, en masse, in a bar.”

These days, people also know to wear a hat and drink a bit of water, whatever else they might ingest. The Sequel helped with the H₂O, putting on two tankers of free, fresh water. Next year, they’ll put more taps on the tankers.

The Big Day Out occupies most of The Sequel’s three employees’ time from September to January — during which time the company must provide its own cash flow. Local costs for the event run to about $1.5 million, with expenses related to travelling artists shared across all six venues. The profit on the one day in Auckland isn’t so easy to break out from that — the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for example, were so keen to play that they signed up for a relatively small fee, plus a percentage of the gross. But a $500,000 profit on the day probably wouldn’t be a bad guess.

Darby notes that Lees and West are the only major promoters she knows who don’t count the “ticket drop” (that is, match ticket stubs against accounted sales) and Lees — despite his reputation as the money man to West’s creative spirit — sounds more like a punter than a promoter when he enthuses over this year’s Auckland show: “It’s a thing of legend to have a show that big. I don’t expect that we’ll do that again — who knows — but boy, oh boy, what a great day.”

He and West will spend our winter travelling to the big European festivals, checking out the acts. But they’ll still only book someone “where they actually strike a chord with us and where there’s more than just a business relationship”.

Next year’s plan is to take the show to a third country, by staging a Big Day Out in Cape Town. “It’s the height of summer and they haven’t got a festival there, so it’s a chance for us to keep on spreading our wings and have an adventure,” says Lees.

They’ll approach Cape Town the way they do every new city — trust their partners, make sure the local acts get a fair crack in the line-up — and start small. It will work, says Darby, not just because Lees and West are careful, meticulous businessmen: “They have what they’ve always had — a passion for music. That’s why the Big Day Out works.”

Lessons from the stage

Start small and pay up

Big Day Out founders Ken West and Vivian Lees started small and paid their bills right from the start. “The longevity of a festival like this is totally dependent on being able to pay your bills right from day one,” says New Zealand Big Day Out organiser Bridget Darby. “When the Big Day Out first played in Auckland we did it with half the international acts that were playing in Australia that year and we only got 8500 payers — but it paid the bills. And that was always going to sustain us from then on.

“That’s a big difference between what we do and [what] Sweetwaters [did]. We go to an established venue that has fences, resource consents for 50,000 people, toilets and electricity. From what I can gather, Daniel Keighley’s resource consents alone cost him around $250,000 — and that’s not even starting to build the site. He had electricians working out there for months, plumbers, all that.

“That Sweetwaters site was the best thing I’ve ever seen. It really was an amazing site. I’d love to put the Big Day Out on a big piece of land like that — but the cost of doing it would just be prohibitive.”

Don’t get greedy

“While Ken and Vivian keep it at a $75 ticket price it’s even less enticing for other promoters to come in and try to compete. The other promoters just don’t understand why you wouldn’t put your ticket price up to $100 and make more money,” says Darby.

Don’t sell out

“We really struggled in the first year — the only sponsor we had was a beer sponsor to pour the beer on the day,” says Darby. “It was hard to sell a festival concept. Six years down the track we’re inundated with corporate people wanting a piece of the Big Day Out.

“We had the agencies calling up the week before saying, ‘We want to come and bring cameras and hold focus groups’,” says Nikki Tysall. “And we said, ‘No, you can’t do that. The people come to the Big Day Out to do what they want to do and we’re not going to put them in that position’. Most of them call up and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got this great audience and we want to target these kids’ — and we say, ‘What are you going to do?’ And most of them don’t know. Very few of them come to us with a great idea.

“We had a shampoo company wanting to come and give away samples of shampoo and conditioner,” sighs Darby. “And chocolate companies that wanted to come and throw chocolate bars at the kids from the punter barrier … the kids can see through it.”

The list of corporate sponsors for the Big Day Out is a short one. DB and Coca-Cola are long-term “pourage” sponsors; Levi’s sponsors the Boiler Room dance space; Ericsson the motorcross; Globe and Hardware the skate ramp. Auckland’s 95bFM is the key partner in the media. “I’m sure in Australia, Coca-Cola or one of the tobacco companies would open their chequebook and say ‘name your price’ for naming rights to the Big Day Out. The reality is that the Big Day Out, with a $75 ticket price, pays for itself. We don’t need sponsorship — which is a great position to be in.”

Don’t spend the ticket money till the show is over

“With the Big Day Out and other reputable promoters, all ticket money is held in trust until the day after the show,” says Darby. Obviously with Sweetwaters, that didn’t happen. The ticket money was used to bankroll the festival.

“I think it’s only a matter of time — maybe when one more airline collapses — until the government legislates about money being held in trust. At the moment it’s based on the goodwill of the promoter.”

Know your stuff

Over the years, the Big Day Out line-up has become both more dance-oriented (matching the changing tastes of its public) and a little more mainstream. Key decisions about not only what major acts play the tour, but when they play, are made by Lees and West.

“The thing about Ken and Vivian is that they still have such a good feel for it,” says Tysall. “When they announced Joe Strummer on the bill, everyone was fairly ho-hum about it, but now, afterwards, it’s Joe Strummer that people are talking about.”

A tale of two festivals

It was late 1997 and Big Day Out co-founder Vivian Lees has a problem. Some other guy has announced a three-day festival that starts in the same city, on the same day as the Big Day Out. His name — Daniel Keighley — and the festival is Sweetwaters.

“When I found out that he had the same date chosen, I rang him and said look Daniel, this just doesn’t make sense — two festivals on the same day in Auckland is not going to work.

“So I said, ‘We’ll move forward a week and you move back a week and then at least we’ll be two weeks apart’. And he said, ‘No, I’m not going to change’ and so I said ‘Okay, we’re moving forward, that’s our date and we’re not going to blink’.

“And that was the last time I heard from him, apart from when he rang up and offered to buy our show — to incorporate our show into his show, when he couldn’t get any acts.”

So Keighley got his date, and his fate.

“I told Daniel three times that his date wasn’t Auckland Anniversary Weekend,” sighs Darby. “And each time he insisted that it was.”

As history now records, it wasn’t.