Because it’s chock full of pub­lic hol­i­days, at least for me. Last Mon­day was Labour Day in West­ern Aus­tralia, where we cel­e­brate the stan­dard­iza­tion of the eight-hour work­ing day by… hav­ing a day off. Makes per­fect sense to me! Next week doesn’t tech­ni­cally con­tain a pub­lic hol­i­day, but because we’re going to Rock-it we scammed Mon­day and Tues­day off. The week after has Good Fri­day, fol­lowed by Easter Mon­day and voila! Four short work­ing weeks (includ­ing one three day week) in a row.

We weren’t going to bother to go to Rock-it, but my best mate is down in Perth from where she has been liv­ing in Kather­ine (think North­ern Ter­ri­tory, 300kms from Dar­win — about as far away from civil­i­sa­tion as you can get) and live music has become some­what of a nov­elty for her. I heard it’s sold out, but we got our tick­ets weeks ago so there won’t be any shenani­gans like with the Big Day Out.

Speak­ing of the Big Day Out, I’ve had a few com­ments on that blog entry from a dif­fer­ent audi­ence to my usual one… like com­menter Luke, I also think Slip­knot and Sys­tem of a Down “fukin kiked ass!!!” and I also am grate­ful they even both­ered to turn up in Perth, the most iso­lated cap­i­tal city in the world. I hope the same com­menter also caught Hate­breed on the small stage out the back because hear­ing 3000-odd peo­ple chant­ing the lyrics to I will be heard in uni­son was an awe-inspiring experience:

Now is the time for me to rise to my feet
Wipe your spit from my face
Wipe these tears from my eyes

Hate­breed are a bril­liantly bru­tal band, and in fact out of my three main rea­sons for going to the BDO this year, I can’t pick which was best.

Other com­menters on that post expressed less flat­ter­ing impres­sions of the event, but I’ll say this: it wasn’t badly organ­ised, but it was over­sold by 5–10 thou­sand tick­ets, in my hum­ble opin­ion. Hope­fully next year they will have an even big­ger lineup and hold two shows in Perth — I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I didn’t have any trou­ble find­ing a (sur­pris­ingly clean) toi­let with­out a long wait, and while secu­rity did hold peo­ple back from the Slip­knot mosh­pit early on (I know because it was hap­pen­ing right behind me) that was only to stem a sud­den rush, and they did open it back up later when peo­ple calmed down a bit. On the whole it was great, and even at the price I paid, well worth it.