Originally published at Time Out Sydney, 26 June 2014

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of the Big Day Out after a protracted illness.

Loving child of parents Kenneth West and Vivian Lees, the Big Day Out was born in Sydney in 1992 but soon called most mainland capital cities home, even travelling on occasion to New Zealand.

For over two (almost) unbroken decades she brought music, laughter, camaraderie and targeted demographic advertising to a generation of punters, bands, and youth-focussed marketing teams. However, rumours of ill health began in 2012, when she began to lose sensation in her Auckland leg.

The wasting decline soon spread, and by 2013 she was surviving only on expensive injections from C3 in the United States, applied under the local supervision of AJ Maddah, who had full custody after first one and then both parents tragically abandoned her.

However, this week it was announced that Maddah has also abandoned the bedside and treatment has been discontinued. It’s been confirmed that all engagements for 2015 have been cancelled, while C3 are putting on brave smiles in the face of their loss, they have admitted that resurrection is uncertain.

Beedio, as she was affectionally known, is survived by an estimated $15 million in debt and a generation of tinnitus sufferers.

In lieu of flowers, go see a local gig.

Published in Time Out Sydney, July 2013

Are You Am I giving up rock for new life as brewing magnates?

It seems astonishing, but this year Sydney’s You Am I are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of their debut album, Sound as Ever. Hence three quarters of the band – frontman Tim Rogers, drummer Russell Hopkinson and guitarist Davey Lane (absent is bassist Andy Kent) – are sitting in a café discussing their exciting new project.

It’s not the deluxe reissues of their first three discs. It’s not their nearly sold-out tour performing albums two and three (the beloved Hi Fi Way and Hourly, Daily). It’s the release of their first ever beer, naturally called Brew Am I, which is the obvious next step for a band who legendarily know their way around a tipple.

“Oh yeah,” Hopkinson laughs. “We’re beer barons now, man.”

“It’s to make up for our losses on the terrible ticket sales so far,” deadpans Rogers.

“Yeah, it’s awful,” Lane chuckles.

“Actually, the response [to the tour] has really taken us by surprise,” Rogers says, with surprising sincerity. “It’s just the right time to do it. It wasn’t someone asking us to do it – it came from the four of us.”

Each of the albums is being re-released with a bonus disc of rarities from each period, which has involved a lot of going through the archives for material from the band’s formation in 1989 through to 1996.

“Not that I was there,” Lane, who joined in 1999, points out.

“You were spiritually there, though,” Hopkinson retorts.

Well, the story goes that Lane was busily writing up You Am I guitar chords for the internet and obsessing over the band, wasn’t he?

Lane looks affronted. “No!”

Well, that’s what Wikipedia reckons.

Hopkinson laughs. “That’s because he wrote it.”

“I was just doing the guitar tabs for something to do in the school holidays because I had no friends,” Lane counters. “I was just uploading them for my friend who ran the website…”

“Hey, you just said you had no friends!” Rogers interjects.

There’s some work to be done ahead of the tour. Despite the first three albums’ position as bona-die Australian classics, Rogers may be the only person unfamiliar with them. “I was listening to those records on the drive up to Sydney and I was alarmed at how much I had forgotten. I’d forgotten how great my guitar skills were back then.”

“There are all these parts and harmonies that we do differently these days,” Hopkinson nods.

It’s luckily all the tabs have gotten online somehow, then.

“Exactly!” Lane says, laughing.

The band are now completely independent: no record company, no external management, nothing beyond the members themselves. “We felt that with Andy’s experience with management, Russ’s experience releasing records, and my and Davey’s experience with Class As, we could handle everything ourselves,” Rogers smirks. “Everything that we do now, it’s just asking: will this be fun for us? There’s no talk about ‘trajectory’ or ‘momentum’…”

“It’s not like we’re going ‘OK, let’s crack this market or that market’,” Hopkinson nods.

“We’re cracking the beer market instead!” Rogers says. “It’s the natural progression from our music.”

Talk turns to the tour, and what they plan to get up to. “I think it’s Andy’s turn for a-prankin’,” says Rogers, to wide approval. Although it sounds like the laconic bassist is a hard man to unsettle.

“We were on tour in Wolverhampton [England] in this quaint little hotel, all in beds next to each other, and the fire alarm goes off,” Rogers recalls. “So Russ and I jump up and go, ‘Struth! Andy, get up!’ And he rolls over, puts his hand on the floor, goes ‘it’s not hot’, and goes back to sleep.”

Could the fire have not been in the ceiling, though?

They all stare for a second, before Hopkinson breaks the moment. “We’re not physicists, right?”

First published in Time Out Sydney 28 Mar 2013.

David Lee Roth – and I say this in the most affectionate way – is mad.

That probably comes as little surprise to anyone familiar with the man known as Diamond Dave, but it’s worth making explicit from the outset. Barely has the call connected before there’s a bellowed “Call me David Lee, that’s my family name. If you have to yell my name across a crowded concourse yell ‘D-Ro!’ – that usually gets the job done!”

Well, since we’re finally getting you down here there will be a potential necessity to be yelling your name out across concourses.
Hopefully! I’m coming a week in advance. And of course I have an agenda but tell me, Andrew: what should I be looking forward to doing if I’m there a week before the show?

You strike me as a man who would enjoy climbing the Harbour Bridge…
Well beyond that, what about house music? What’s happening on the dance floor in Sydney? Start there, that’s always an interesting place just in terms of human beings at their most extreme, you know? They have uncertain algorithms, the dance floor always delivers, all the best art work is on the bottom of a skateboard somewhere. So: start with the floor.

You’ll want to kick around Oxford St and Kings Cross – oh, and GoodGod, in the middle of the city. It’s also got a great diner inside, which is a genius idea and I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do it.
Of course building a kitchen makes all the symmetric sense in the world because everybody’s burning calories at 120 beats a minute. You could even register it on a graph at the DJ booth. “How fast are they burning calories, sir?” “126 a minute.” “Are you sure?” “Oh, I’m very sure.” [laughs]  You can meter that out.

So, you make an effort to get out and about when you’re in town then, it’s not just turn up, sit in the hotel, do the gig and turn back?
Well a good writer writes, a good musician listens to a lot more than he actually composes, and if you’re going to do lyrics – well, there’s a Freudian slip. That’s not even a slip, that’s a Freudian move: I said going to do lyrics. If you really want it to ring true, you’ll live it first. Go really get your heart broken! Go really find something that will happen to you, something that you celebrate! Go, you know, find the tragedy of something, the thrill of something. And I’m a fan of testing the deep end with both big toes. I think that’s the ambulance description of what I just did. I can’t really write that, but everybody on the floor knows what you mean! [laughs madly]

You’ve not slowed down at all, then?
No I enjoy people, even the people I hate. Do you speak to your television set, Andrew? I do, I speak to my television. “Are you kind and supportive? I’m not either.” [laughs] And I’m a book reader, you know: printed word, reins supreme for me still, whether it’s in courier font on the Internet, or whether it’s emblazoned on the Daily Tribune. It’s still the printed word for me, I even speak to books! [laughs more] I do enjoy people watching. and I don’t mean just from a distance. I mean let’s break some bread, or whatever it is that you guys are eating. “Are you eating this or is this the tablecloth?”. Have the translator ask him if I just ate the tablecloth, I think I just did. I mean I’ve been places like that. You know, “I think I just drank the finger bowl. Well, they make a good finger!” [laughs uproariously]. I’ve been places like that, and you just have to keep your sense of humour and use your smile like a ray gun. I’ve been living in Tokyo for the last year, in fact, and even going shopping for dental floss is an adventure in the Tokyo back streets.

So you’re actually getting some Australia-time in ahead of the tour?
Oh yeah. See, travelling through when you’re actually performing, I prefer to do it racehorse style. I really don’t pay attention to my surroundings at all. It’s eat, sleep, race, win. And uh, that’s generally the pace that you pay for. Because you know, nobody really cares about the BBQ day before yesterday Dave. It’s more “uh hey, I just paid $100 American to watch you do your thing, now do it.” And although a lot of musicians travel extensively, they see the world through the window, and when they try to describe it, it usually ends up being a one adjective trip:  everything was great. “How do you like Australia?” “Ahh it’s great.” “How do you like Australian people?” “Ahh they’re just great.” “Have you done anything since you were here?” “Oh we had some Australian food, it was great.” “How are you guys getting along?” “Great.” [laughs]

Well there’s a question for you: how are you guys [in Van Halen] getting along?
I see a split of great/great. [laughs] I see a split screen, right, and you’re falling asleep, feeding the cat. Studying a recipe book. [laughs] Totally dressed, standing up, “Ohh it’s just great mate, just great.” You’ve taken shorthand!

Dave, what the hell are you talking about?
You know, the travels before and after the tour are what add up to what you’re doing. You are really called into service – and it’s the service industry man, it’s blue collar man, I’m sweating by the second song. It’s construction work from that second song on. And Alex [Van Halen, drummer] and I we you know laugh routinely, we laugh like pirates, and the first half of the show, we give you that for free. That’s like the first seven minutes of any Broadway show, or pornography: no matter what, it’s just great!

Oh, that’s beautiful.
You’re paying for the second half. [laughs] It’s like getting married: the first half is always great. You’re paying for the second half, that’s the heavy lifting. [laughs]

So you and Alex laugh, but how are things in the band beside that? And you can’t use “great” as a response, by the way.
Your honour, can we please define great? [laughs] OK, here we go, your honour…because if we can define the word [laughs]… Van Halen is constantly in some sort of fraternal conflict. It’s like a great rugby team. I played that sport for a short period of time as a kid. And it was a great combination of team, spirit and individuals competing with each other, just as I imagine the best rock bands are. When everyone gets along just fine, that’s a vacation, that’s decoration. It’s when there’s sparks, and questions and innuendo and doubt… now that sounds like a career. [laughs] It sounds like a real football movie. How do you wanna live? Do you want your life to be like a real epic football movie or do you want it to be a fake one? Because fake is: we got together, we all got along, everything was wonderful. We won, we won again then we won, then we all got married and had kids who turned out to be Presidents and Senators…

OK, and…
[interrupts] Boring, boring! No: you want your football movie to be more like “four guys are recruited from four different places who’ve never played football in their life by an alcoholic coach whose on his last legs and can only work in a small rural school…” oh, this is great so far, you writing this down?

Absolutely, I’m going to pitch this film the second the interview’s done.
OK: and the main guy can’t throw with his left arm because nobody knows it but he needs glasses – oh this is good, this is good! – and the only doctor who can give him the glasses hates him because he slept with his daughter. Perfect! Just get it down, we’ll write the rest later. [laughs delightedly]

Man, I want to see this film.
Exactly, and we haven’t even gotten to the first game yet! And in the end, in the end of the end, this is the type of movie you want your life to be. You want your kids to remember it as a celebration. It might be painful to live through at times, but the most valuable medals are the most deadly, the heaviest. And uh, with that in mind, the conflicts in Van Halen are both myriad and legendary.

This is true.
Look, Van Halen doesn’t really get along. Alex and I do, like I said, we laugh like pirates every other morning. When I wake up in Tokyo, I wake up at 3AM, I have permanent jetlag and uh we start the day together, I call him in Los Angeles and the day is just kickin’ in for him. And we go through the whole bit at least every other day. So there is a mutual celebration, but like on all big teams, there is a, uh, a chemical reaction, certainly between Edward [guitarist Eddie Van Halen] and myself. We love our team, and we still compete with each other individually, as well as, as a team. I think you need that. And unfortunately a lot of folks grow out of it, or they have a therapist beat it out of them for $200 an hour. It’s kind of like somebody comes back after you haven’t seen them for a while, have you gone to any high school reunions? You know, you come back and somebody goes, wow, “yeah man I’m a doctor now”. Another one goes, “yeah, I’m a girl now.” What? [laughs] Really? Well we always knew, you were always too good at softball.

So is that what happened with Michael [Anthony, original bassist sacked under mysterious circumstances and replaced with Eddie’s 20 year old son Wolfgang]?
[laughs, dodges question] See, sometimes you get your colleagues or friends to come back and say “yeah man, I just finished seven years of therapy,” and it turns out you like the rage better. [laughs] “I like the damaged goods better – you were more popular, more fun, when you were ruined!” And you know, you can run into that. So that has not happened with Van Halen: you hear it in the music, you see it in the stage show.

So there’s not gonna be a Metallica-in-Some Kind of Monster-style Van Halen therapy session any time soon?
No, but at least we have the channel, that music and the stage show, which is wildly therapeutic. And all of our carefully, self-generated bad publicity is an art form, and most of our bad publicity is self-generated, that’s why it’s always accompanied with a great photo, if you were wondering. [laughs]. I’m kinda like the Wizard of Oz, but with a little reefer, you see? [howls with mad laughter]