In 2001 we got asked to play the Busan rock festival in South Korea.
It was kind of a weird request but our fourth album, How it Works, had just gone gold in Australia and we had toured Singapore, Thailand and Japan about five times so I guess we thought word must be getting around and this could be a new territory for us, so we said yes!
Also, we were told Megadeth were headlining, so being pretty big metal fans, we were extra excited.
We got there after a long flight, met our lovely host and went straight to the hotel, which was a humongous brand-new skyscraper built in a third world-looking neighbourhood. There was someone living in a tent next door to the hotel and a cardboard box city across the road. We were tripping out on this.
We went for a walk and met some locals who were friendly and accommodating. After an hour or so we were sent to the venue (some kind of purpose-built stadium on the beach) and did soundcheck where we saw that Ross Hetherington, our drummer, had to climb up three sets of stairs past another drum kit to finally get to his kit on the top level.
There was a lot of talk in Korean about where to stand, but we didn’t understand much and thought “Let’s just turn up and play the set.”
The actual show was on the next night so we had a few hours to kill. Being an Australian band the promoters had managed to get us free meals at an Australian-themed restaurant called Outback Steakhouse where the menu had items like the Mad Max Burger and the Blooming Onion. This was kinda cool the first three times we ate there, then it got a bit old.
After dinner our host gave us a message from her boyfriend that read: “Please don’t steal my girlfriend, I love her and I’m afraid.”
Well, she was beautiful, but none of us are that kinda dude so we told her to tell him he was safe.
We slept well that night after many Blooming Onions and Australian-themed cocktails.
When we woke we went for a long walk around the city and the markets, filming and taking photos and basically falling in love with the place.
When it was time to go to the show we jumped in the van and drove to the venue/beach only to see 45,000 people going crazy to some band from Japan.
We were quite blown away by how big this show was going to be. Then we were told Megadeth had gotten sick and wouldn’t be performing and that we would be headlining!
“What? Little old us?” This was out of the blue and made me instantly shit myself with fear.
When we finally got on stage in front of this huge crowd we realised they knew all the words to our songs and we had a great show. Ross, our drummer, was so far away from us I couldn’t even see him.
We rocked the shit out of them! The only thing was, someone had neglected to tell us there would be pyrotechnics (probably Megadeth leftovers), so at precise moments in songs there were huge explosions that no one told us were happening.
I lost some hair and bassist Grant Relf lost his eyebrows in flames. The stage was an extremely dangerous place to be.
In the end we had the show of our lives and the pyrotechnics made it even more exciting – not knowing when and where they would go off. You had to be on your toes.
After the show we went back to the hotel bar and watched it all on national television with song titles coming up and everything. It was incredible.
We went on to get the footage off the Koreans for use on a DVD we released called Jarchives.
Bodyjar’s latest album New Rituals is out now
