Yay, today is the long-awaited Big Day Out fes­ti­val in Perth.

Actu­ally get­ting tick­ets was a tale of woe in itself… because this was the first time in the his­tory of the event (we’re in what, the twelth year now?) that the Perth show has sold out. C’mon, noth­ing sells out in Perth, ever. Seri­ously.

So any­way, we’re blithely putting off actu­ally buy­ing the tick­ets until last Wednes­day, when we get the news: no more. Another announce­ment: on Fri­day morn­ing at 9.30am, a “lim­ited num­ber” will be released (the nor­mal “at the door” tick­ets), at the Clare­mont Show­grounds only, cash only. 11.30pm Thurs­day night, Dave reads on the Big Day Out forums that there’s already a line of peo­ple wait­ing for the tick­ets, so we pack up our work clothes for Fri­day and head on down, plan­ning to wait in line until the morn­ing, then go straight to work.

Except, there’s like over 1000 peo­ple there already when we get there (about 1am). I decide I’m not wait­ing in line 8 hours when more than likely then won’t be enough to go around any­way, so we go home. Next morn­ing at work (after 2 hours sleep) we find some tick­ets on eBay and start bid­ding. Fri­day after­noon we get some — and only at twice the orig­i­nal price! But we have no one to blame for that but our­selves. Liv­ing in the most iso­lated cap­i­tal city in the world sucks some­times. I’m sick of bands leav­ing Perth off their Aus­tralian tour list and oth­er­wise miss­ing out (I had tick­ets to Vel­vet Revolver but they can­celled the Perth show and put on an extra one in Syd­ney, bas­tards). I refuse to miss out this time, espe­cially when it’s through my own stupidity.

Any­way, post­script to the story is that on Fri­day after­noon, around the same time as I was pay­ing wads of cash to the ticket scalper (she must have really cleaned up that day), the organ­is­ers decided to release 3000 more tick­ets. Bum­mer. Moral of the story: get your tick­ets early.

So any­way, today is the day and I’ll be enjoy­ing it twice as much as any­one else to get my money’s worth! High­lights (in ascend­ing order of hysteria-inducement) are sure to be Sys­tem of a Down, Slip­knot and Hate­breed. But I’d say most peo­ple are there for Beastie Boys and Chem­i­cal Brothers.

And, it’s extra-cool because tomor­row (Mon­day the 7th of Feb) is my birth­day, and we’ve wran­gled the day off work. Yay!