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Feature: Niel Robinson - One Big Day

Author: Chris Young

Winner of last year's Rockquest, Christchurch three-piece Neil Robinson, were lucky enough to open the Fresh Produce stage at January's Big Day Out. Frontman Chris Young Shares some of his own big day fun with NZM...

We initially found out that we might be playing at the Big Day Out whilst recording our first single at York St studios back in November. Lorraine Barry, our mentor since winning Rockquest, mentioned she was meeting with the festival's booking agent to see what she could do about securing us a spot on the bill. Of course this caused great excitement amongst the band, three wide-eyed teenagers with a passion for Muse and the Streets. When it was confirmed we were booked to play we were ecstatic.

We were to fly up on Wednesday evening and back on Sunday, giving us two full days either side of the BDO to explore Auckland.
We didn't land in Auckland until 10:30pm and not much seemed to be happening when we arrived in the central city. We didn't let this hold us back though, wandering around until the early hours of the morning doing whatever we could find to do.

Lots of people in Christchurch seem to complain about Auckland for various reasons, but I love the variety a big city has to offer. Big cities always have more of everything, sure there are more arseholes, but being from near Manchester originally I am well versed in that fact.

Thursday was a great day. It started with an interview with a lady from Radio Live and then with my band mates Josh and Hayden we went to meet up with our good friend Jude. Meeting with Lorraine to pick up our backstage passes we were informed that the band were on the door list for the Big Night Out at the St James that evening.

So with that I went back to my hostel, met up with mates Will, Joe and with a bottle of Scrumpy we went back to another friend's room at the YHA. After about half an hour an angry old hostel manager came knocking on the door, falsely accusing us of throwing things out of Loro's window and kicked us out. By this time it was about 9:30pm and Hayden had already txtd to say he and Josh had arrived at the St James so I wandered down to meet them.

I spotted Josh and Hayden instantly, but something about the look on Hayden's face worried me. It turned out he had somehow managed to break his finger minutes before. The night before the Big Day Out is not the best time for your drummer to break his finger, believe me. So with that we sent Hayden back to his hostel to rest it and went to watch Peaches and the Violent Femmes play great sets before stumbling back to bed.

It was a great success, despite Hayden's broken finger, with the crowd really getting into us.

The next morning required rising (by my standards) bright and early for the big day ahead. I met up with Josh and Hayden outside their hostel at 9am to wait for our ride to Mt Smart Stadium courtesy of Rob and Haddon from the Electric Confectionaires.
Pretty much immediately upon arrival at the stadium we had to get set up to play as we were the first band of the day on the local stage. Our excitement kept growing as the stadium's gates opened and we watched a crowd gather and eventually swell to what looked like 2000 people, all waiting for us to play.

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