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The Shadow Knows

The Shadow Knows is a music fanzine looking at the careers, influences, and samples of our favourite artist. www.theshadowknows.com.au

Summersault — Australia’s biggest music festival of 1995

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The Summersault logo, cropped from a newspaper advertisement

The Summersault music festival has remained a highlight in the memories of all who were there (and some who weren’t). It featured Beck, Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, DJ Shadow, Foo Fighters, and more. An art exhibition accompanied the tour, and so did several musicians from English trip hop label Mo’ Wax, with their DJs performing side shows alongside the main festival events.

Founded by music promoter Stephen “Pav” Pavlovic, Summersault is currently being celebrated again as part of the Unpopular exhibition at Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. The exhibition features posters from the many shows Pav brought to Australia, video footage from Summersault, and artworks from the aforementioned exhibition.

Near the end of 2022, I spoke to Pav about his legacy, and that of Summersault.

Money Mark, Pav, with Beastie Boys’ Mike D and MCA at Summersault Perth. Photograph by Sophie Howarth.

Stephen “Pav” Pavlovic brought Nirvana to Australia right when their Nevermind album reached #1 on the US Chart in 1992. The band performed at the first Big Day Out festival in Sydney, and it helped secure Pav’s name as a promoter who could secure important international acts. Over the next few years Pav worked closely with the Big Day Out, and in 1995, the then 29 year old Pav decided to start his own summer festival called Summersault, which would run in competition with the Big Day Out.

“Just to wind it back a bit, after I did Nirvana, the next tour I did was the Beastie Boys,” Pav said. “We got along really well and I’d spend time visiting them in LA afterwards. There was kind of a crew of these bands that were all connected through their management. Sonic Youth, Beck, and Foo Fighters were all sort of under the same family as the Beasties, so we spent a lot of time together. Then through the Beastie Boys, I met the Mo’ Wax crew, James Lavelle, DJ Shadow and everyone.”

“So after the Beastie’s tour I was feeling a bit disgruntled with the Big Day Out and wanted to do something laser focused in terms of the type of bands, and not having 100 different stages. We wanted to do something more focused across two stages so you could see every band on the bill.”

At the time the Big Day Out had grown to include the Boiler Room, an area for electronic music squished between stages with rock bands. People had to decide between one genre or the other, and while it allowed many to discover new music, it made it impossible to enjoy both. So for Summersault, Pav wanted to try something different and came up with the idea of a series of festival afterparties featuring artists from Mo’ Wax Records.

“We were obsessed with Mo’ Wax and those records James Lavelle was putting out,” Pav said. “So, it was natural to get them involved and put on Mo’ Wax nights for people to experience the clubbier side of things, but in a good environment, and not between other stages.”

As the plan for Summersault developed, Pav called the Beastie Boys to book them in, and the rest of the festival lineup started to fall into place thanks to their close connections. Because everyone knew each other in some way, Pav said it felt more like planning a holiday camp for a group of friends.

Other ideas included hosting a film festival, art exhibition, and skateboarding demonstrations to tour alongside the Summersault festival, most of which would come together.

At the time, Pav had been reading Juxtapose magazine, where he read articles by Aaron Rose, a curator who ran The Alleged Gallery in New York. Rose opened the gallery in 1992 and hosted exhibitions of emerging artists like Mike Mills, Phil Frost, and Mark Gonzales. There was a strong connection between skateboarding and street art in the gallery, and this appealed to people outside of New York too.

“My life was changing,’ Pav said. “I could find creativity in food, clothing, books, and I wanted Summersault to be a reflection of all the things we were into, not just one thing. Not just rock music. So I reached out to Aaron, and I wasn’t really aware, but he already had a connection with the guys from Mo’ Wax so we tried to do something that was touching all these points of our world.”

Mo’ Wax had sponsored a London art exhibition called Dysfunctional in August 1995 curated by Aaron Rose. It featured work by the aforementioned Mike Mills, Phil Frost, Mark Gonzalez, and others, with many of the same artists then featured in the Summersault exhibition.

The idea was to take over the city. Summersault would run in the day, the Mo’ Wax nights would run in the evenings, and art exhibitions and film festivals could run alongside. Unfortunately, either due to time or money, some of those ideas didn’t quite make the cut. Summersault toured nationally, but the art exhibitions were only held in two cities, Sydney and Melbourne, while the film festival idea never quite got off the ground.

At the time, Pav didn’t think of these ideas as particularly ground breaking. He’d spent his career putting on the shows he wanted to see, so why not have a music festival with art exhibitions? But in 2022, as he began reflecting on Summersault, he realised it had been different.

“Recently I’ve been doing these oral histories of the Unpopular exhibition, and Mike and Adam of the Beastie’s were like, you were kind of a little bit ahead of your time. It wasn’t really happening that much yet, where festivals were more sort of a broader cultural statement, rather than just the music statement,” he said.

“I found festivals at that time to be like a clusterfuck of all this stuff happening over several hours in one space. I found it hard to concentrate. I couldn’t absorb everything. It was just over and done.”

Bands have also reflected positively on their Summersault experience. Kathleen Hanna played with her band Bikini Kill and met Adam Horowitz aka Adrock of the Beastie Boys. They’ve been together ever since. Many have spoken about how they were all treated as equals. They all had nice hotels, nice food, and were paid fairly, whereas some of the bands had been used to sleeping on couches when touring.

Andy Holmes, who worked for Mo’ Wax at the time said, “[Pav] and his crew at Golden Sounds did everything to keep the bands and public happy. Tickets were cheap, venues had every facility and the organisation was tight. This was a lesson in what could happen when people who give a fuck get hold of the wheel. It would be good to see it happen more often.”

Men From Mo’ Wax: Charlie Dark, James Lavelle, Money Mark, and DJ Shadow at Summersault. Photograph by Sophie Howarth

Alongside the bands and art exhibitions, Summersault also featured skateboarding demos with American pro skaters Ed Templeton and Tommy Guerrero demoing alongside locals from Kwala Skateboards. As an aside, Guerrero later released music on Mo’ Wax featuring artwork by fellow skateboarder Mark Gonzales, who had artwork in Summersault’s art touring exhibition and would also team with Mo’ Wax on other projects later. Guerrero was discovered by Andy Holmes, who also skated and worked for Mo’ Wax. Seemingly everyone at Summersault was connected somehow or would be in the future.

Around 50,000 people attended Summersault across the five shows, which visited Melbourne, Sydney, Gold Coast, Adelaide, and Perth. The largest crowds attended Sydney’s New Year’s Eve concert, with around 18,000 people in attendance. The New Year was brought in with all of the tour’s bands trying to remember the words to Auld Lang Syne (no one did), and We Are The World, before the Beastie Boys performed Sure Shot and Sabotage to close the night out.

In Perth, 10–12,000 people attended the show in 37-degree heat. American punk’s Jawbreaker handed out water to the crowd during their set, and Dave Grohl reminded everyone to wear sunscreen.

Stall holders sold merch, solicited petitions and handed out literature for causes like the Free Tibet movement, while food like vegan kebabs and hot dogs were available to buy too. In Melbourne, The Age’s Andrew Masterson wrote in praise not just of the music, but also the festival management, as bands performed with only minutes between sets, food and drink were plentiful, and security non-confrontational.

Each show on the tour featured the same international acts, Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Beck, Pavement, The Amps, Jawbreaker, Bikini Kill, and Rancid, alongside locals like Gerling, Caustic Soda, and Jebediah. Many of the bands were still at the early stages of their career, with locals Jebediah releasing their debut album in 1997, and Gerling releasing theirs in 1998. American musician Beck had released albums, but was widely unknown in Australia at the time. Performing solo with a guitar and harmonica, one reporter who saw him in Sydney initially thought the performance was a sound check. But Beck won over many fans with his mix of blues, folk, and hip hop, and when his next album Odelay released in mid-1996 it reached #20 in Australia’s album chart, and did even better in the US and Europe.

Thanks to the two-stage setup, fans could move between the two and seamlessly see all of the acts. But while the bands appeared in each city, the art show, Culture Is Our Business, only visited Sydney and Melbourne. One unhappy fan from the Gold Coast complained at the time, “What excuse could the promoters possibly have for neglecting us? If anything, aren’t we more in need of a dose of Culture than those snotty Southerners?”

Culture Is Our Business

Culture Is Our Business included work from twenty artists who at the time were making their name through work on album covers, skateboard graphics, film, advertising, or graffiti. Aaron Rose said at the time, he hoped the exhibition would provide a “cohesive overview of what is happening within visual culture in 1995.”

The Melbourne and Sydney shows were held around the same time, so featured different artworks for the artists. Melbourne ran December 29 — January 7 at Centre for Contemporary Photography, and Sydney ran January 1–8 at First Draft.

Of the many artists included, some names stand out, with people like Spike Jonze becoming more well known in the mainstream by the end of the decade. Larry Clark was possibly the most familiar name at the time, as his controversial feature film Kids had just been released and was in local cinemas as Summersault began. For the exhibition, Clark’s photography from the film set were shown.

Spike Jonze was best known at the time for directing music videos like the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage, but for this exhibition his photographs were shown.

Another name that stands out is Tamra Davis who had just directed the Adam Sandler comedy Billy Madison. A year earlier in 1994 Davis had released her short documentary No Alternative Girls featuring interviews with musicians Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, and Kathleen Hanna, among others. The film focused on the riot grrrl music scene of the time, and was shown in Australia as part of Culture Is Our Business.

Summersault was held December 29 1995 — January 7 1996 and its rival the Big Day Out was held January 19 — February 4 1996. Although the two didn’t compete directly in terms of timeslots, the Big Day Out had tried to book some of the same bands. According to The Age at the time, Rage Against The Machine had agreed to do Summersault but then switched to Big Day Out. Perhaps trying to outdo each other, both festivals lost money, and the following year neither returned. At the time there were rumours about possible lineups for Summersault 1997, but Pav said the festival had been planned as a one off.

Although he continued promoting bands over the next few years, Pav realised his heart wasn’t in it anymore and was looking for the next step in his career when he was sent a demo tape of The Avalanches. Pav started Modular Records and released The Avalanches Since I Left You, one of the most beautiful and perfect albums ever created.

Now, Pav is looking back at Summersault and his time as a promoter again. His Unpopular exhibition is running at Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia until June 2023, which features posters from the many tours Pav brought to Australia, including many from the Beastie Boys, and of course Summersault. There’s artwork from the Culture Is Our Business exhibition, a hilarious video of a young Ben Lee interviewing Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys during Summersault, and a massive video installation featuring footage from the festival with a sound piece by Warren Ellis.

The Summersault festival was recorded, and some footage has made its way to YouTube over the years but the rest remains unreleased. There were three 16mm cameras which captured the entire Sydney festival and parts of the Gold Coast, and this footage has been edited into the installation.

The Miraculous Transcendental — Directed by Julian Klincewicz (2022)

“Julian Klincewicz has done this three-screen, multi-channel installation with all of it, and it looks fucking epic,” Pav said. “Warren Ellis from The Dirty Three composed a track for it. I didn’t want any of the band’s music because there’ll be just too much competing for the sounds. I wanted something that was a counterpoint to the music, because there’s enough going on visually. I think it was stunning. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and I feel like it’s a really nice representation of a time that doesn’t really exist anymore.”

The video moves between layered images of crowds moshing, to recognisable bands playing on stage. There’s the infamous moment when all the bands gathered to bring in the new year on stage alongside long stretches of abstract colour and film grain. The sound design truly separates you from the idea of witnessing a rock concert, and although I would have loved to watch the sets from the Beastie Boys or DJ Shadow, this is understandably more engaging in a gallery space where the audience is more accepting of an artwork of this nature.

For those unable to make it to Sydney, a book is planning for release this year and will feature extracts from the oral histories Pav recorded with the many musicians who were part of Summersault.

This article was originally published in The Shadow Knows Issue #4, March 2023. Buy the fanzine here or read more at our website.

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The Shadow Knows
The Shadow Knows

Published in The Shadow Knows

The Shadow Knows is a music fanzine looking at the careers, influences, and samples of our favourite artist. www.theshadowknows.com.au

James Gaunt
James Gaunt

Written by James Gaunt

An Australian writer with a passion for research. James edits music fanzine The Shadow Knows and writes regularly about Mo’ Wax Records. www.jamesgaunt.com

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