When the idea of staging a music concert at the foot of Big Red on the edge of the Simpson Desert was first mooted a few years back it seemed to me like genius. Bringing together popular Australian bands and mixing the sound with the sand of the distant Aussie icon only had one problem – it’s a bloody long way from anywhere.
Now in its third year, the event took a while to gather momentum with only a thousand or so fans making the trek in the first couple of years. So, even with a stellar lineup, organisers were a little caught off guard when hundreds of cars with vans and campers started lining up early Saturday morning, more than 24 hours before the first act was due on stage.
The format this year emphasized the rock side of country and introduced pure rock and roll. It was a formula that seemed to work with more than 3100 people streaming in from all states of Australia with a demographic that was predominantly in their 40s and 50s. To highlight the isolation of the venue, MC, Wilbur Wilde, announced that a calculation from entry forms indicated that concert-goers had between them travelled in excess of 10,000,000km to get to Big Red.
Full article in October’15 issue of On The Road magazine.