The death of Jessica Michalik was a tragedy and a turning point for the Big Day Out.

It's about 9:15pm on January 26, 2001, when the first sounds of Limp Bizkit's headline set ring out across Sydney's Olympic Park.

German act Rammstein have just finished playing a stage directly next door, so a surge of people move sideways to get a spot in front of the American band.

"My memory is a lot of really angry male energy," says Liza Ryan, who was in the crowd.

"'Look at us, we are going to rock this place, let's turn this place upside down'," is how Big Day Out co-founder Vivien Lees remembers the band's mentality at the start of the set.

"And they did."

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Whatsapp Limp Bizkit at the Big Day Out in 2001.

At 9:23pm, security officials in yellow polo shirts, standing at the front of the mosh pit, signal for singer Fred Durst to stop the music. Some people down the front of the crowd are having problems.

"Instead of doing what they were asked to do, which was to stop playing the music completely, they kept on just noodling along," Lees recalls, a fact that would be raised years later at a coronial inquest. Durst tells the crowd to help one another, but also criticises the promoters over the mic.

Security guards start pulling people out of the crowd.

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Whatsapp The wild of the mosh pit at the Big Day Out.

"I saw people trying to be pulled out, I saw people screaming, I saw people in pain," Liza remembers.

Lees takes the microphone a few minutes later. There's urgency in his voice as he asks people to move back and think about those around them.

It has some effect, though a fight circle breaks out near the front of the crowd.

Within minutes of the start of the set, St John Ambulance staff are treating unconscious punters at the side of the stage. Dozens are on stretchers, a few are transferred to hospital.

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The mosh pit would later be described as hot like a sauna and wild like standing in the surf in a rough swell.

One attendee has his sunglasses crushed in his pocket from the pressure.

Another is bleeding from his ear and has his arms pinned to his side. Another is crying and hyperventilating and will leave with bruised ribs. Many people are knocked to the ground.

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Whatsapp Jessica Michalik, in her Grinspoon shirt, and her best friend Liza Ryan a few weeks before Jess's death.

About 9:30pm, 16-year-old Jessica Michalik is removed unconscious from the crowd.

"My last reactions with her were in the crowded area, in the mosh pit," Liza, Jess's best friend since childhood, tells Double J.

"I had her hand, and then I let it go."

A year earlier, a problem emerges

After a year off, the Big Day Out returned to a bigger venue in 2000: the Sydney Olympic complex.

The festival had become a rite of passage for young Australian music fans, a staple of the summer, with the Sydney leg traditionally held on Australia Day.

The 2000 festival would be Liza and Jess's first experience of it. The line-up was huge: Foo Fighters, Blink-182, Atari Teenage Riot.

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Whatsapp The crowd during the day the 2001 Big Day Out.

The headliners were Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was the band Liza was most excited to see — she particularly wanted to hear 'Soul To Squeeze', which they played during the encore.

But there was a portentous element to the set. A few songs in, singer Anthony Kiedis stopped the show.

"We have a little situation," he told the crowd.

Double J does the Big Day Out all through October This October, Double J celebrates the history and the legacy of the Big Day Out.

"It's not uncommon in a festival situation for people to get crushed like grapes up at the front.

"There's really not a lot you can do about it, because asking everybody to step back is not very potent of a solution. But if you could just bear in mind that you don't hurt somebody, that you don't want to inflict difficulty on somebody breathing ... and just change the whole vibe out there, so no-one's getting crushed."

The band makes a few aborted attempts to play 'Scar Tissue', but mostly they stay quiet, as Kiedis's pronouncements get increasingly pointed and people are pulled from the crowd.

"Stop fighting, surrender, everybody," he says. "Who the fuck came here to fight anyways? ... People are getting hurt."

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Whatsapp Big Day Out co-founders Vivien Lees (left) and Ken West.

About 10 minutes pass before John Frusciante breaks into that famous guitar riff and the show goes on.

"The Chili Peppers were able to control the moment and just calm people down," Lees remembers, "[but] this was starting to become an issue that was emerging for us."

The scramble for a headliner

Organisers were close to clinching a major headliner for the 2001 festival: Pearl Jam.

Lees was at the Danish festival Roskilde in the European summer of 2000 to meet with the band and their management. They had a handshake deal that would put Pearl Jam, one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, in front of Big Day Out audiences across Australia in January.

That night, Pearl Jam's set was a disaster. A crowd crush left nine people dead. The band were distraught and vowed never to do a similar kind of festival.

"This was literally weeks before our first announcement," Sahara Herald, the festival's national event manager, remembers. "So, we were scrambling to find a headliner."

Short of time and money — the Aussie dollar was weak, lessening their buying power — they landed on Limp Bizkit. The band was an in-your-face mash-up of rap and rock, and as pioneers of the burgeoning nu metal genre, they were huge at the time.

Listen to the podcast Listen to episode one of Inside the Big Day Out

But for all the fans they had, they also had a lot of haters.

"No-one felt like 'Hey, this is a great Big Day Out fit'," Herald recalls. "We didn't have that many choices."

A friendship forged in music

Liza and Jess became friends in primary school in Sydney. They were each the children of immigrants; they shared a passion for marbles and troll dolls. Liza says they bonded because each felt like an "oddball".

By high school, they were inseparable. At the centre of their friendship was music.

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Whatsapp Jessica Michalik (left) and Liza Ryan at the Big Day Out in 2000, waiting for Foo Fighters to take the stage.

"She had grown up listening to a lot of classics with her dad," Liza says. "My interests were pretty similar."

They would sneak off with Liza's brother's cassette of Nevermind. They'd listen to it on her Walkman. They fell in love with Grinspoon, Jess in particular; she wanted to get all the albums.

At the time, Grinspoon were building a steady fan base across the country. The pair saw them when the band made their first of many appearances on a Big Day Out line-up in 2000.

"The tickets go on sale for the 2001 Big Day Out and we kind of squeal when we see the line-up," Liza remembers.

"Of course, at that age, we always had to consult with our parents for permission and finances.

"That year, I actually bought Jessica her ticket."

The tour begins

Limp Bizkit and the BDO organisers began having disputes from the moment the band arrived in New Zealand for the first show of the tour, in Auckland.

"It was a bad chemistry," West remembers.

Organisers had tried to institute a plan for crowd control that involved getting a security person on stage to address the audience and having the band go quiet.

When they tried to do it in Auckland, after several people went down in the crowd, Durst told the security person "it's not my fucking problem," and handed him the microphone, saying, "You come and tell them". He then poured water over the guy's head as the man addressed the crowd. They were actions the NSW Coroner would later call "reprehensible".

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Whatsapp Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst during the band's Big Day Out appearance.

The two parties could not come to agreement on how to keep the crowd safe.

The American band wanted T-barriers, which run perpendicular to the stage, separating the crowd.

"If you have one stage, and you have a T-barrier, it can actually stop the movement," Lees says.

"But where we had a double stage, you can't really put a T in the middle. We didn't want to put two lots of Ts in. We didn't really have a solution."

The day arrives

Liza and Jess and their friends are pumped.

"We get to the bus stop and we are about to jump on the bus, and Jess is frantically going through her pockets."

Jess is freaking out. She can't find her ticket. Jess rings her father George, who is at home in Sydney's north.

"'OK, I'll be there in a jiffy'," he remembers telling his daughter that morning. He had found her ticket.

"No kidding, I didn't put any pants on. I was in underpants. I ran to the car because I knew how important this was for the group of six. I didn't want them to miss anything."

The pair see Powderfinger, they see Coldplay.

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Whatsapp Moshing up the front of the crowd.

They see the hyped Texan quintet At The Drive-In, whose set will go down in Big Day Out history. The mosh pit is chaotic. Despite the massive anticipation, the band walk off the stage after three songs. Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala berates the crowd for being violent.

Later in the evening, Jess and Liza see Rammstein. After that, there's only one band left to catch.

"Jess was always willing to check out a band," Liza says.

"She wouldn't be getting her money's worth if she didn't check out the headline band."

The final set of the night

Liza describes the punters who were waiting for Limp Bizkit to come out as "dudes that probably drank too much in the sun all day, and now are rushing the crowd because they just gotta see Fred Durst".

"The energy, the chaos. It was a mess."

She remembers watching what happened next from the side of the crowd.

"I got this horrible pit feeling in my stomach."

Sahara Herald: "I can only imagine the fear that those people were in."

Ken West: "It was frightening."

Vivien Lees: "You are walking over to where St John's Ambulance are at the side of the stage. It's just a sight of mayhem, with 20 or 30 people in stretchers. [We] probably had about three or four ambulance transfers and one person who was in a very bad way."

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Whatsapp Crowd surfing at the Big Day Out.

Liza got worried when Jess wasn't at the meeting point. When she got home, she rang Jess's house. Jess wasn't there.

She soon found out Jess was in hospital.

After being pulled from the crowd, Jess was taken to the first aid area, where paramedics couldn't locate a pulse or breathing. She was taken to Concord Hospital, where a few days later she died. The coroner later said she had been crushed to death.

"I've gone over it so many times in my head," Liza told Double J.

"What if I hadn't let go? What if I had of dragged her out? What if I had of said 'Limp Bizkit suck, let's get the hell out of here'?"

An innocence is lost

Lees describes Jess as "our archetypal audience member".

"It makes me emotional to think about it now, because that is the kind of person that we put our show on for," he says.

"I can't even express the level of devastation," Herald says. "Personally and professionally."

Limp Bizkit don't finish the tour. They never make it to Melbourne, Perth or Adelaide. They get on a plane and go home.

The Big Day Out, to that point, had been media darlings, Herald says. It could do no wrong.

That all changed the day after the Sydney show. To West, it seemed like "the age of innocence" had gone.

A coronial inquest was opened into Jess's death. It lasted two years. The inquest found no-one was negligent.

The coroner did criticise Lees and West for their crowd-control measures and their reactive, rather than proactive, approach.

Fred Durst was criticised for his inflammatory comments during the rescue effort. The band, who declined Double J's request for an interview, returned to Australia in 2012 for Soundwave. During their shows, they paid tribute to Jessica.

"It most certainly did make us all re-evaluate what we were doing, on every level, and I am not just meaning professionally either," Herald said.

"We'd all been working our asses off to deliver a show that was meant to bring joy. And it didn't."

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Whatsapp George Michalik, Jess's father, didn't want the Big Day Out to end because of her death.

George Michalik fought for the Big Day Out to survive. It was part of Jess's memory.

"Big Day Out was Jessica, and Jessica was Big Day Out," he said.

After 2001, the Big Day Out team rolled out 12 new crowd-safety measures — things like crowd-care volunteers, more water, video monitoring.

Most importantly, they designed a D-barrier, which creates an area of space between the mosh pit and the rest of the crowd that can be used to relieve pressure.

A friend and daughter forever

Phil Jamieson of Grinspoon remembers seeing a photo of Jess's parents in a newspaper. They were sitting in Jess's room and on the walls were posters of the band.

"Ken and Vivian reached out and I think the family also reached out for Pat [Davern, guitarist] and I to play at her memorial," Jamieson says. "To this day, it's one of most difficult things I've ever done."

The following year, Grinspoon were back at the Big Day Out. They played 'Chemical Heart', a song written in tribute to Jess.

"I am still a proud dad of Jessica and I still consider myself as a father," George says.

Liza says her best friend was an amazing person: vibrant, loving, kind.

"We tried as kids to be musicians, and failed miserably," Liza says with a laugh.

"We were at that age where our parents were on us, like 'what are you going to do when you grow up?' And she was like, maybe I can be an event coordinator? Maybe I can be in the music world in some way, where I can make a difference, be around it, enjoy it?

"Something like that really would have fit her really quite well."