Ken West
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Ken West
Ken West (5 February 1958 – 7 April 2022) was an Australian music promoter and founder of the Big Day Out music festival. Career Born in Sydney, Australia, Ken West grew up in Cabramatta and studied at what is now UNSW College of Fine Arts in 1976 to become a kineticist and experiential artist. During the 1980s he worked as promoter, tour manager, and artist manager for Nick Cave, Laughing Clowns, I'm Talking, and Beasts of Bourbon. He promoted Australian tours for New Order, Lou Reed, Run-DMC, before starting the Big Day Out festival in 1992. The Big Day Out was founded by West and Vivian Lees. The first festival in 1992 was only held in Sydney, but subsequent years expanded around Australia, and later also included New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
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Big Day Out
The Big Day Out (BDO) was an annual music festival that was held in five Australian cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as Auckland, New Zealand. The festival was held during summer, typically in January of each year but was sometimes held as late as early February in some cities including Perth. The event was conceptualised after the Violent Femmes announced a tour of Australia. Promoters Ken West and Vivian Lees sought another act as middle-level support for the band's tour. They succeeded in securing Nirvana to play the Sydney leg at the Hordern Pavilion. The Big Day Out debuted on the 1992 Australia Day public holiday in Sydney and eventually expanded to Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth the following year. The Gold Coast and Auckland were added to the schedule in 1994. As of 2003, it featured seven or eight stages (depending on the venue), accommodating popular contemporary rock music, electronic music, mainstream international acts, and lo ...
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Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a Megadiverse countries, megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with Deserts of Australia, deserts in the centre, tropical Forests of Australia, rainforests in the north-east, and List of mountains in Australia, mountain ranges in the south-east. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south east Asia approximately Early human migrations#Nearby Oceania, 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period, last i ...
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Sydney
Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountains to the west, Hawkesbury to the north, the Royal National Park to the south and Macarthur to the south-west. Sydney is made up of 658 suburbs, spread across 33 local government areas. Residents of the city are known as "Sydneysiders". The 2021 census recorded the population of Greater Sydney as 5,231,150, meaning the city is home to approximately 66% of the state's population. Estimated resident population, 30 June 2017. Nicknames of the city include the 'Emerald City' and the 'Harbour City'. Aboriginal Australians have inhabited the Greater Sydney region for at least 30,000 years, and Aboriginal engravings and cultural sites are common throughout Greater Sydney. The traditional custodians of the land on which modern Sydney stands are ...
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Cabramatta, New South Wales
Cabramatta ('Cabra') is a suburb in south-western Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Cabramatta is located south-west of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Fairfield. Cabramatta has been a melting pot for all manner of Asian and European peoples in the latter half of the 20th century. Since the 1980s, Cabramatta has been a centre for the Vietnamese, as well as many residents from other Asian and European origins. At least as many as a quarter of Vietnamese speakers in Australia had some form of Chinese ancestry. Because of its high Vietnamese population, the suburb has earned the nickname 'Little Saigon'. Cabramatta European and Asian settlement In 1795, an early settler named Hatfield called the area 'Moonshine Run' because it was so heavily timbered that moonshine could not penetrate. The name Cabramatta first came into use in the area in the early 19th century when the Bull family named a property they had p ...
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University Of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensive universities. Established in 1949, UNSW is a research university, ranked 44th in the world in the 2021 ''QS World University Rankings'' and 67th in the world in the 2021 ''Times Higher Education World University Rankings''. It is one of the members of Universitas 21, a global network of research universities. It has international exchange and research partnerships with over 200 universities around the world. According to the 2021 QS World University Rankings by Subject, UNSW is ranked top 20 in the world for Law, Accounting and Finance, and 1st in Australia for Mathematics, Engineering and Technology. UNSW is also one of the leading Australian universities in Medicine, where the median ATAR (Australian university entrance examination re ...
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Nick Cave
Nicholas Edward Cave (born 22 September 1957) is an Australian singer, songwriter, poet, lyricist, author, screenwriter, composer and occasional actor. Known for his baritone voice and for fronting the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave's music is generally characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence.Stephen Thomas Erlewine and Steve Huey, AllMusic, _Biography))).html" ;"title="(((Nick Cave > Biography)))">(((Nick Cave > Biography))) Retrieved 30 September 2009. Born and raised in rural Victoria, Cave studied art in Melbourne before fronting the Birthday Party, one of the city's leading post-punk bands, in the late 1970s. They relocated to London in 1980. Disillusioned by life there, they evolved towards a darker and more challenging sound that helped inspire gothic rock and acquired a reputation as "the most violent live band in the world". Cave became recognised for his confronta ...
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Laughing Clowns
Laughing Clowns, sometimes written as The Laughing Clowns, were a post-punk band formed in Sydney in 1979. In five years, the band released three LPs, three EPs, and various singles and compilations. Laughing Clowns' sound is free jazz, bluegrass and krautrock influenced. The band formed to accommodate Ed Kuepper's growing interest in expanding brass-driven elements he had brought to The Saints' third album, '' Prehistoric Sounds'', and by adopting flattened fifth notes in a rock and roll setting while using a modern jazz styled band line-up. Along with The Birthday Party, The Go-Betweens, The Moodists and The Triffids, the Laughing Clowns also spent extended periods in Europe during the early 1980s, and gained an international cult status. All four aforementioned groups have cited Laughing Clowns as an influence at some point in their respective careers. History Early years: 1979–1981 Laughing Clowns were formed in April 1979 in Sydney as a rock, soul, avant-jazz g ...
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Beasts Of Bourbon
Beasts of Bourbon were an Australian blues rock band formed in August 1983, with James Baker on drums (ex-Hoodoo Gurus, The Scientists), Spencer P. Jones on guitar (The Johnnys), Tex Perkins on vocals (Dum Dums), Kim Salmon on guitar and Boris Sujdovic on bass guitar (both ex-The Scientists). Except for mainstays Jones and Perkins, the line-up changed over time as the group splintered and reformed several times. Their debut album, ''The Axeman's Jazz'' was released in July 1984. Their debut single, "Psycho", was a cover version of the Leon Payne original. The group disbanded by mid-1985 and each member pursued other musical projects. They reformed in 1987 and issued a second album, ''Sour Mash'', in December 1988 on Red Eye Records. According to rock music historian, Ian McFarlane, it "virtually redefined the parameters of guitar-based rock'n'roll. The Cramps-influenced swamp-rock of old had been discarded for a more adventurous slab of gutbucket blues and avant-garde weirdness ...
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New Order (band)
New Order are an English rock band formed in 1980 by vocalist and guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris. The members regrouped after the demise of their previous band Joy Division due to the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. They were joined by Gillian Gilbert on keyboards later that year. New Order's integration of post-punk with electronic and dance music made them one of the most acclaimed and influential bands of the 1980s. They were the flagship band for Manchester-based independent record label Factory Records and its nightclub The Haçienda, and they worked in long-term collaboration with graphic designer Peter Saville. While the band's early years were overshadowed by the legacy of Joy Division, their experience of the early 1980s New York club scene saw them increasingly incorporate dance rhythms and electronic instrumentation into their work. Their 1983 hit " Blue Monday" became the best-selling 12-inch single of all time and a ...
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Lou Reed
Lewis Allan Reed (March 2, 1942October 27, 2013) was an American musician, songwriter, and poet. He was the guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for the rock band the Velvet Underground and had a solo career that spanned five decades. Although not commercially successful during its existence, the Velvet Underground became regarded as one of the most influential bands in the history of underground and alternative rock music. Reed's distinctive deadpan voice, poetic and transgressive lyrics, and experimental guitar playing were trademarks throughout his long career. Having played guitar and sung in doo-wop groups in high school, Reed studied poetry at Syracuse University under Delmore Schwartz, and had served as a radio DJ, hosting a late-night avant garde music program while at college. After graduating from Syracuse, he went to work for Pickwick Records in New York City, a low-budget record company that specialized in sound-alike recordings, as a songwriter and sess ...
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Run-DMC
Run-DMC (also spelled Run-D.M.C.) was an American hip hop group from Hollis, Queens, New York City, founded in 1983 by Joseph Simmons, Darryl McDaniels, and Jason Mizell. Run-DMC is regarded as one of the most influential acts in the history of hip hop culture and one of the most famous hip hop acts of the 1980s. Along with Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and Public Enemy, the group pioneered new school hip hop music. The group was among the first to highlight the importance of the MC and DJ relationship. With the release ''Run-D.M.C.'' (1984), Run-DMC became the first hip hop group to achieve a Gold record. ''Run-D.M.C.'' was followed with the certified Platinum record ''King of Rock'' (1985), making Run-DMC the first hip hop group to achieve this. '' Raising Hell'' (1986) became the first multi-platinum hip hop record. Run-DMC's cover of "Walk This Way", featuring the group Aerosmith, charted higher on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 than Aerosmith's original version, peaking at number f ...
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