First attended as a 12 year old( with my family) in 1998 & it totally opened my world up to the joy of concerts & festivals - it spurred me to get to Big Day Outs in my late teens and 20s & love a good gig big or small.
As for parachute, Didn’t miss one through my teens and into 20s, even getting to perform at a handful & interview some great headliners in a media capacity. Very good memories for this Christian kid from a town like Palmy
Worked our ways through the stages, I think our first year was “debut stage” on side of a truck in Matamata. Last one in the Palladium at Mystery Creek
Really appreciated how possible Parachute made it for development of young bands. Made some great friends from around the nation too
Back in the mid-00s, I was attending a Pentecostal church, and we had a big crew attending Parachute each year; I think we were there each year from 2004 to 2008 before I left the church. Always a great time partly because of the good vibes and lack of alcohol/drugs. I also enjoyed the access to the artists - all the headliners did open Q&A sessions, and did signing sessions at the merch station. And most of the acts would play twice over the weekend, meaning clashes weren’t an issue.
Oh like a Womad kind of vibe? Cool ... I was surprised by how many Big Day Out and Warped-festival bands were on the headliners list. I always thought it was full of Christian-adjacent acts but it seems in later years it morphed into more of a mainstream thing.
To be honest, I always wondered why they didn't lean more into that. Each day of the event was kind of themed - Friday was fairly chill, Saturday was the rowdy BDO-style music festival day, Sunday was the church/worship music day; I've always thought that the Saturday could have gone more mainstream and drawn a bigger single day crowd - back in the day, there were plenty of mainstream American acts who popular but were clean enough for a Parachute. Like imagine Taylor Swift headlining Saturday night in 2009 off the back of Fearless, or Evanescence headlining in 2005 after the success of "Bring Me To Life". Snow Patrol, The Fray, scene bands like Red Jumpsuit Apparatus or Taking Back Sunday ... maybe it was a money thing, I dunno.
He did talk to me about this - he said he wanted bands like Kings of Leon but they would never play "a Christian festival" and as music became one big melting pot (the streaming era) it got too hard to do something that was so specific on a large scale.
Someone reminded me of this incident, which happened at Parachute, so it wasn't 100% sunshine and roses: https://pantograph-punch.com/posts/missing-screws-and-disappearing-months-living-in-the-shadow-of-a-traumatic-brain-injury
First attended as a 12 year old( with my family) in 1998 & it totally opened my world up to the joy of concerts & festivals - it spurred me to get to Big Day Outs in my late teens and 20s & love a good gig big or small.
As for parachute, Didn’t miss one through my teens and into 20s, even getting to perform at a handful & interview some great headliners in a media capacity. Very good memories for this Christian kid from a town like Palmy
Ben! What was your band called?!?
Chamberlain.
Worked our ways through the stages, I think our first year was “debut stage” on side of a truck in Matamata. Last one in the Palladium at Mystery Creek
Really appreciated how possible Parachute made it for development of young bands. Made some great friends from around the nation too
Back in the mid-00s, I was attending a Pentecostal church, and we had a big crew attending Parachute each year; I think we were there each year from 2004 to 2008 before I left the church. Always a great time partly because of the good vibes and lack of alcohol/drugs. I also enjoyed the access to the artists - all the headliners did open Q&A sessions, and did signing sessions at the merch station. And most of the acts would play twice over the weekend, meaning clashes weren’t an issue.
Oh like a Womad kind of vibe? Cool ... I was surprised by how many Big Day Out and Warped-festival bands were on the headliners list. I always thought it was full of Christian-adjacent acts but it seems in later years it morphed into more of a mainstream thing.
Not to mention all the Kiwi acts at that time: Six60 and The Black Seeds and Fat Freddy's Drop being three big names in the 00s.
To be honest, I always wondered why they didn't lean more into that. Each day of the event was kind of themed - Friday was fairly chill, Saturday was the rowdy BDO-style music festival day, Sunday was the church/worship music day; I've always thought that the Saturday could have gone more mainstream and drawn a bigger single day crowd - back in the day, there were plenty of mainstream American acts who popular but were clean enough for a Parachute. Like imagine Taylor Swift headlining Saturday night in 2009 off the back of Fearless, or Evanescence headlining in 2005 after the success of "Bring Me To Life". Snow Patrol, The Fray, scene bands like Red Jumpsuit Apparatus or Taking Back Sunday ... maybe it was a money thing, I dunno.
He did talk to me about this - he said he wanted bands like Kings of Leon but they would never play "a Christian festival" and as music became one big melting pot (the streaming era) it got too hard to do something that was so specific on a large scale.