Big Heavy Stuff drummer Nick Kennedy has opened up about what it was like touring with Radiohead during their 1997 OK Computer tour, in a new interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
In the extended feature, Kennedy recalls how the Sydney band landed the Radiohead support slot thanks to a friend’s connection with bassist Colin Greenwood. “Colin rang her up and said, ‘Who should we get to support?’ She said, ‘There’s only one band you should get to support you: Big Heavy Stuff’. God bless her.”
While the tour gave them the chance to play huge venues across Australia, it came at a cost. “We needed 10 grand just to do the tour… So the band got credit cards and we paid for the Radiohead tour,” Kennedy says. “By the end of the tour… we broke even.”
The tour didn’t extend to New Zealand, for one simple reason. “We’d love to, but can we maybe get $700?” Kennedy recalls asking. “And they said, ‘No, no, you can’t’, so I was like, ‘OK, well, we can’t do it’. That was the reality of what it was like.”
Watching Radiohead play night after night left a lasting impression. “When I saw them play OK Computer, I felt like we were a garage band,” Kennedy says. “They had a million things going on… every member of the band was just concentrating.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Kennedy also reflects on the band’s focus on staying true to their music. “Artistic integrity was the big thing and not selling out was the big thing,” he says. “I struggle to know how you explain that to a younger person now, because if you don’t sell out, you’re not involved in the game anymore. And I guess it turned out that we weren’t either, you know.”
Read the full interview here.
