A session in the Boiler Room was a key part of the Big Day Out experience. But its impact lasted well after summer ended.

The Big Day Out was a rite of passage, and a session in the Boiler Room was an essential part of the experience.

Dark, loud, and always packed full of writhing bodies, the Boiler Room was a space for some to see their favourite electronic acts, while for others, it was their first taste of what electronic music – especially in a live environment – was all about.

The stage emerged at the right place and the right time. Dance music was set to explode and become a key part of the soundtrack to popular culture.

The Volition days

Electronic music was a part of the Big Day Out pretty much from the outset, with calculated attempts to have that sound and culture be a part of the overall event starting as far back as 1993.

"Ken [West] always wanted to get some electronic stuff in there," Boiler Room booker and manager Ben Suthers tells Double J.

"So, for the 1993 shows, he sent Severed Heads out on the road."

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"I did an experiment in 1993, where I had Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and Severed Heads playing in what was called Machinery Square in Sydney," West told Gerling's Darren Cross on Double J back in 2017.

"It was in between the main arena where Iggy Pop was just finishing and [the audience] were heading over to see Beasts Of Bourbon.

"I thought, 'If they have to go through this area let's see how many stop' and it ended up half the audience stopped to watch Disposable Heroes."

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The experiment was successful enough for the festival to look at incorporating dance music into their plans.

"Ken and Viv [Lees] decided it was a big deal and they wanted to get more electronic music involved," Suthers says.

"Ken spoke to a guy called Andrew Penhallo, who was the owner of Volition Records. A whole pile of bands, like Severed Heads, Itch-E and Scratch-E, Boxcar, Vision Four 5, they were all signed to Volition.

"Ken went to Andrew and went, 'Let's do a dance thing'. Andrew came up with the name Boiler Room, and I worked with him putting those shows together."

With a line up stacked with Volition artists, the Boiler Room had a very familiar feel for a certain sector of the Australian dance music community.

"A lot of my label mates were also playing at the events, so it kind of felt like our room," Paul Mac, who was playing in Itch-E and Scratch-E at the time, says.

"It felt really family, like it really came from a kind of family unit.

"It was really exciting. Because it was new, it was big, it sounded great, the production values were awesome, and it was really loose."

The appetite for electronic music at a rock festival was minimal in the first couple of years of the Boiler Room.

"We started in 94, that was the first Boiler Room where there was actually just dance music," Suthers explains.

"Although when we got to Adelaide and Perth, the line-up would start with something that wasn't dance music and then we'd kick off at around two o'clock."

In that 1994 year, they were competing for audiences against the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Björk, Soundgarden and Ramones.

"Back then it felt very much like the underdog," Paul Mac says.

But this first iteration of the Boiler Room was not about to set the tone for how the stage would be viewed in the long run.

As the Big Day Out grew, so did the Boiler Room.

But the growth of this stage wasn't just a by-product of its festival scaling up. It was a sign that electronic music was evolving and finding a new audience in the process.

It was no longer relegated solely to big dance parties and psychedelic bush doofs.

"The genres were developing as Big Day Out and the Boiler Room was developing," Australian electronic music producer and DJ BeXta says.

That is perhaps the great narrative of the Boiler Room.

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While there were countless great parties and live sets, it was an integral part of a huge cultural shift among Australian music fans.

Public perceptions were changing. With access to a stage like the Boiler Room, rock fans could experience euphoria at the hands of a well-skilled DJ or live performer.

You could love Soundgarden and Pee Wee Ferris and see them both within 45 minutes of one another.

Here's how the Boiler Room morphed from being Big Day Out's underdog to its champion.

The different stages of the Boiler Room's evolution

"There are three or four periods of the Boiler Room," Suthers says.

"The first period was mostly Australian acts with maybe one international. We did 800 – 1,000-person areas for each Big Day Out. That was in '94 and '95."

Their small stature didn't make them any less influential, though.

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Whatsapp BeXta at the Big Day Out

Across her career, BeXta played dozens of Boiler Room slots across the country. But her first Boiler Room experience was as a fan.

"I was a punter at the Gold Coast venue, and it literally was a boiler room," she recalls.

"The first place that they set it up was a big tin shed. It was about 100 degrees and dusty and sweaty and just packed the whole day.

"My memory is just seeing electronic bands do their thing. Even at raves, most of the people on stage were DJs, and occasionally you get one or two live acts.

"Back then [the Boiler Room] was live act after live act after live act, with a couple of DJs in between. It was the opposite.

"A lot of it was Australian, they really supported the Australian dance music culture."

The earliest signs of growth came thanks to a band who'd go on to become Big Day Out veterans.

"In '96 we had a little step up, because it was getting a bit more successful," Suthers says.

"We dragged out The Prodigy and they closed the Boiler Room at the Hordern Pavilion. That was nuts."

In 1997, the Boiler Room secured Aphex Twin as its high-profile international guest.

Big Day Out didn't happen in 1998. In its place was to be Starbait, a festival headlined by The Prodigy and featuring Black Grape, Regurgitator and more. But a lack of ticket sales forced its cancellation.

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Whatsapp Keith Flint of The Prodigy at the Big Day Out

Dance music was undoubtedly still on the rise though, and the Big Day Out was in the right spot to capitalise.

"When Starbait got pulled, we started to put together the '99 Big Day Out; the comeback year, with a bigger Boiler Room and Fatboy Slim closing it," Suthers says.

"That year was the defining moment for Boiler Room."

This growth was exciting, but also proved hugely challenging. The festival didn't have the logistics right, nor did the police. But we'll get to that later.

"We would go to Auckland and be in this little room we used to be in in '95 and '96," Suthers recalls.

"Fatboy Slim would be closing, so 20,000 people would show up. So, you'd pick up the telephone and call the next venue. 'We're gonna need a bigger tent...'.

"We went all the way around the country like that. The way they programmed the show – with the main stages closing at 10.30 and the Boiler Room closing at 11.30 – meant the whole audience migrated over to the Boiler Room."

Suthers doesn't think this audience was necessarily artist-driven. The Boiler Room line-up in 1999 wasn't a blockbuster beyond the top line of the bill.

Rather, it was a sign that attitudes towards dance music were shifting.

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"The rest of that '99 year – besides Underworld in Sydney and Melbourne – it wasn't necessarily strong," he says.

"It was just the simple fact that in '97 and '98, that whole dance scene had sort of exploded. It had become a more mainstream sound. It was like a second summer of love.

"I think that's the point where Big Day Out became a rite of passage and a collection of musical tribes rather than just one thing."

A big audience and a reasonable production budget made the Boiler Room an enticing prospect for the world's biggest acts.

"It became known amongst the agents and the promoters as the part of the Big Day Out that was in darkness," Suthers says.

"It closed out the whole festival. We got really, really big really quickly."

This meant a shift in focus for the stage. Big audiences meant they needed big sounds and big production to match.

The Boiler Room had to replicate what it'd be like to be at the biggest and best nightclub in the world.

"In the early days it was trying to get audiences for live electronic music," Suthers says.

"In the middle section – from 99 to around 2006 or 2007 – it was about bringing a big room club vibe as much as possible. Trying to attract world class DJs and get that big sound in there."

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But the team behind the Boiler Room didn't want to completely abandon their connection to local scenes and fought to inject local flavour to each stop.

"There were so many exciting scenes in Australian dance music at the time," Suthers says. "Adelaide had this fantastic drum'n'bass scene, Melbourne had this hippy-led, bush doof, Clan Analogue stuff."

"In Adelaide, we played a lot harder and faster than anywhere else," Australian DJ and producer Groove Terminator (GT) recalls of his first Boiler Room experience.

"We were bloody serious. Like, very hard and fast techno. And I think that kind of freaked everyone out. It was pretty bangin'."

"Wherever we went we tried to create a situation where there was a huge slab of time, both at the start and later on in the day, that was available to celebrate those local scenes," Suthers says.

It turned out that, as the festival landscape began to change, this wasn't a completely sustainable approach.

"Unfortunately, as the years wore on, we lost the ability to do that for various reasons," Suthers says. "Not least of which was the inability to free up the time because of the number of acts we had to book to make the poster look good."

Which meant relationships with certain local scenes occasionally became strained.

"No matter what you try to do and how you try to engage with those smaller communities, you always piss someone off," Suthers acknowledges.

"You spend two months talking to someone about wanting to do something special at the Melbourne Big Day Out, then totally fuck them over because you ended up having to give the slot away to someone else.

"It's easy to create an under-swell of discontent among those smaller communities."

But even if certain ideas became hamstrung, giving a leg-up to smaller local artists remained a huge part of the Boiler Room's modus operandi.

"There's no doubt that in those 2000s years, we were the commercial behemoth," Suthers says. "But, at the same time, we always managed to develop strong relationships with small people.

"I always tried to find good DJs who weren't playing big rooms and get them a shot on a big stage. Get them exposed. Getting those people used to what it's like to play a really big stage.

"Nothing made me feel good like watching an opener in the Boiler Room. Or putting a local DJ on just before the last act."

"I think that they launched a lot of careers in that way," BeXta says

"They got artists who didn't have so much of a profile at that point and then they would put them in this big, high profile spot between internationals and give them that exposure and that opportunity for them to shine.

"I was lucky enough to be that person a couple of times. One year it was myself playing live, and then Aphex Twin."

Anyone familiar with both artists' work will understand that this would make for a jarring transition. But the audience in the Boiler Room were generally quite game.

"I think my set ended up at about 165 BPM, and then he comes on with like… not much four-on-the-floor stuff going on," BeXta laughs. "And he had his stage diving characters, it was just crazy…

"The crowd hardly changed. The people who came for me, stayed for him and then stayed for the next people. I love that."

The festival landscape began to change rapidly in the 2000s and brands like Future Music, Parklife and Stereosonic would compete for the Big Day Out's dance music dollar.

The focused nature of these EDM festival line-ups meant the Boiler Room was forced to pivot to embrace another side of dance music culture.

"At the rise of LCD Soundsystem – 2006, 2007 – we ended up trying to move towards indie a little bit more and away from the club sound," Suthers says. "Because the other guys had the club sound nailed."

At every step, the Boiler Room didn't just maintain relevance, it sought out the emerging trends in dance music and ensured that they were representing music on the cutting edge.

"I think the programming has always been exceptional with the room," GT says.

"I think Ben [Suthers] who ran the thing did an exceptional job with the curation and the booking. It was very ahead of the curve in terms of world trends."

Stories from the Boiler Room

Just about anyone who set ever foot in a Boiler Room has a story to tell about the experience.

Even the most hardened artists, who've seen the inside of every major club and festival on the planet, have a story from the heady stage.

That defining Boiler Room line-up of 1999 might have made for an impressive experience for revellers, but it was an exasperating moment for one of the headliners.

"When Underworld played the Boiler Room in 1999, I remember Norman Cook was on before us," Underworld's Karl Hyde says. "We'd been friends for a long time.

"For some inexplicable reason, he finished his set literally just before us with 'Born Slippy'! We were just gobsmacked. Like, 'What the hell, Norm!'

"Then he proceeded to sit on the front of the stage for our show, which was just weird. Maybe he was just going through a phase."

GT's fondest Big Day Out memory came courtesy of a particularly strange performance from a man who has never been a typical performer.

"Aphex Twin was playing," he remembers. "We were like, 'We have no idea what the show is going to be. The music's out of control. It's crazy'.

"He came on and sat down at his laptop and lay down on the stage.

"I was like, 'What!?' It was amazing. I was gobsmacked with that, that takes some serious balls to get on stage and do that."

For Paul Mac, the chance to connect with those who you've admired from afar often offered the biggest thrills.

"I saw a lot of really good performers that blew my head open, like Aphex Twin and Simian Mobile Disco and LCD Soundsystem," he says. "But [the highlight] was the access to the whole community.

"You'd end up meeting Dizzee Rascal or other artists that you really liked. Aphex Twin stole our bloody vodka rider one year and I was furious, but I got to say hello to him. Backstage stuff and bumping into people and meeting so many heroes was often fun."

'Get your fucking horse away from the kids!'

But the most intense story comes from one of the most iconic Boiler Room sets of all time.

The Chemical Brothers headlined the stage in the year 2000, capping off the festival's biggest line-up to date.

"We moved venue several times in Sydney and constantly bumped into issues with capacity," Suthers says.

"The Chemical Brothers in 2000 was in the Sports Hall. It was a big room with a capacity that the Showgrounds thought was around 6,000 people.

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Whatsapp Revellers begin to climb the ledge in the Boiler Room at the Sydney Big Day Out in 2000

"But the 2000 Big Day Out was huge - it had the Chili Peppers, it had Nine Inch Nails, it had Foo Fighters. Over in Boiler Room, it had Basement Jaxx, it had Goldie, it had Chemical Brothers and so much more.

"When the Chems came on, they filled the room. And filled the outside of the room."

"We were playing in the Boiler Room and it was a pretty intense feeling in there," The Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands says. "It was really properly going off."

"The floor's full, the Chems are on stage, and there's this ledge that's about 12 feet up all the way around the outside of the room and that's full of people who have climbed up," Suthers recalls.

"One of the guys got the fire hose out and started hosing, so now the fire alarm is going off. There's this whooping noise in the room. I thought it was part of the Chemical Brothers' set, it just sounded like a rave."

"I think we were playing 'It Doesn't Matter', one of those heavier, more techno-y kind of things," Rowlands recalls.

"I remember hearing this noise and looking over to Ed and going 'Oh, that's cool! What's that? That's something new in the mix tonight!'

"I was looking for what channel it's on: 'Maybe it's this synth? Maybe it's that effect feeding back or something?'.

"Ed is looking back at me going, 'No, no, it's not me!'"

"Suddenly we realised on the side walls, there were all these big fire alarm lights going off. I started turning down the drums and various parts of the song and the sound was still going on. There was a fire alarm going off in the room."

"Then the police arrived on horses to close it down," Suthers says.

"It was this surreal sight," Rowlands remembers. "It looked like people in Day-Glo clothes were floating above the heads of the crowd. Then we became aware that it was police on horseback who had somehow come in to the rave.

"I can't really remember what happened after that. It was so intense. It was so sweaty. And so good."

"I'm out the front trying to work out how to deal with this situation, because we didn't have a system for closing down the room," Suthers says.

"The cops are there on horseback. You've got a crowd and now you've got this guy on a horse with a gun. 'Dude, get your fucking horse away from the kids! You're gonna step on someone's foot!'"

What was the Boiler Room's great legacy?

"Bringing dance music to bogan Australia," Suthers laughs when asked to sum up his stage's legacy. "Bringing dance music to a wider audience.

"Whether it was live dance music in the start, club music in the middle, or trying to expose great indie dance music at the end, we were always trying to do something that was just good music.

"Trying to get a whole bunch of people who maybe only ever listened to Nirvana, listening to dance music. That's its legacy."

"It was pulling everybody together," Ken West told Darren Cross. "You got to walk out of there with a wealth of knowledge.

"Nowadays it's very much about the segregation, you want to hear your music and don't want to hear anything else and you think that's great. But in actual fact, you're not challenged in any way."

Selling dance music to a rock audience was a challenge, but it was key to ensuring the genre's growth.

"Our experience was that they didn't know that they wanted it," Suthers says of introducing rock fans to dance music.

"They would come over and they'd hear this music and go, 'What the fuck is that?!'

"Back then it was very much you were either into rock music or you were into dance music," Paul Mac says.

"I think the Boiler Room provided a really cool melting pot. Kids would discover dance music, they'd come in their black t-shirts and stay the entire time. They'd discover this new sound."

"A lot of people were pretty dismissive of samplers and all that sort of stuff," GT recalls.

"People would come up afterwards and say, 'I hate dance music. I would never listen to dance music. It's just terrible. But you just opened this world up. And so now I'm going to go searching'," BeXta says.

"What can be better than that?"

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Both GT and Paul Mac believe the Boiler Room deserves a certain amount of credit in bringing their most popular songs to the mainstream.

"A bunch of us had breakout records that probably wouldn't have been breakout records – like Josh Abrahams, Paul [Mac], and myself – it probably wouldn't have happened otherwise," GT says.

"Itch-E and Scratch-E got pretty lucky with 'Sweetness and Light'," Mac says. "triple j were really supportive of it and it ended up being the Hottest 100. I don't think any of that would have happened if there wasn't a Boiler Room national audience.

"So, I think it was really influential in letting some dance music into the consciousness."

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Getting rock fans to appreciate the music was one thing. Getting them to understand the culture surrounding it was another.

"[The dance music scene] seemed like a secret society," GT opines. "I guess that's what drew me to dance music in the first place. I found my people.

"The dancefloor was always a safe space, and everyone was welcome. The dance floor is our church and this is our religion.

"To introduce that to everyone else and [have them] realise it's not just a bunch of kids hooked up on pingers and going nuts. It's a legitimate, proper experience. A lot of very, very smart people making some very, very smart music. That really opened eyes."

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Whatsapp Itch-E and Scratch-E at the 2010 Big Day Out

While the most memorable Boiler Room sets might have come from some of the world's biggest acts, Suthers acknowledges that it was the quality of our homegrown scene that made the concept possible.

"If it wasn't for the strength of those local acts and DJs we put on those first couple of years, who had shown some resilience in the room, we wouldn't have had a chance to do The Prodigy in '96, or Aphex Twin in '97," he says.

"We wouldn't have had this movement that enabled it to go to the next level."

Today, electronic music is a behemoth in the Australian music landscape. The culture has changed, and the Boiler Room deserves to take responsibility for some of that.

"It started as a really small thing," BeXta reflects.

"My first live show in at the Perth Big Day Out was in the side room at the RSL club next to the oval where [the mainstage] was. I could touch the ceiling, it was that tiny.

"In 2001 at Olympic Park in Sydney, I looked out – the room capacity was many thousands – and it's packed. The production's amazing, the lighting is amazing and I looked out and had flashbacks to those little sweaty RSL clubs that we were playing only a couple of years [earlier].

"To see the Boiler Room and dance music, something I'm very passionate about, grow and be supported so well, that was a bit of an emotional moment.

"And, you know, seeing people from all different walks of life just getting into a bit of banging hardstyle... It was really good."