Mark Kneebone in Albert Park, the site of the Laneway Music Festival. Photo/Dean Purcell
Mark Kneebone in Albert Park, the site of the Laneway Music Festival. Photo/Dean Purcell
In our new series, we invite music lovers to share the songs that have soundtracked their lives. This week, we speak to Laneway Festival promoter Mark Kneebone.
Welcome to the Jungle - Guns N' Roses (1987)
The intro, the guitar link, the wailing intro, whatever it is, it's the first song that ever hooked me. I listened to it on repeat. Appetite For Destruction was the first album I ever bought, and the first concert I ever went to was Guns N' Roses on the Use Your Illusion tour at Mt Smart Stadium. I was 13 and I don't know why my parents let me go: I was unaccompanied, me and a friend, to a show that had a gang fight in the middle of the pit. It was at that concert, I was like, 'I want to do this, this is what I want to be involved in'. At 13 years old it was a powerful thing.
I was never into metal until I got to about 15. My best friend was a total metalhead - I thought he was crazy. He was listening to Danzig and Biohazard and Machine Head. I thought it was crap. But this is one of the densest, heaviest metal songs of all time. I bought 200 albums based on this one song. I ended up running Roadrunner Records in New Zealand for four to five years, I ended up touring Slipknot, Trivium, all these amazing metal acts, all because of this song. What I loved about Sepultura is that they evolved, they slowed it down, it wasn't just about brutality and speed. This song opened me up to a whole genre that I still listen to all the time today.
Red Right Hand - Nick Cave (1994)
My friend Andre was living in this flat in Newmarket. I went around one day and he gave me a vinyl copy of Let Love In. Over the weekend, I fell in love with Nick Cave. It's the most sinister, dark, stranger-creeping-up-behind-you-with-a-weapon-type song ever. It pops up in the best places: it's the Peaky Blinders theme song. Whenever you need to unsettle an audience, just whack on Red Right Hand.
This got me into electronic music, which got me into drum 'n' bass, which got me into working in nightclubs, which got me into promoting, which got me into Laneway. The same friend who got me into Sepultura, Damian Vaughan, got me into Roni Size. It's a classic breakbeat with a little bit of vocal over the top. It was like, 'That's it, I'm into drum 'n' bass now'. I ended up promoting drum 'n' bass for years.
Scribe 2001 - P-Money and Scribe (2002)
I had just graduated university and I went to work at a small record label called Kog Transmissions. P-Money had an agreement to start a label called Dirty. He came in and said, 'This is going to be the first single'. It was Scribe 2001. This was my first taste of ever working with a hit. It's such a good jam, you couldn't miss. Channel Z was playing it, and suddenly these New Zealand rappers were on radio. My career, and that record label, suddenly took off on a very different tangent. What was a small record label, because of this song, turned into a major independent that was suddenly on commercial radio and doing deals with Universal. It was a platinum record, and it was the set-up for Scribe.
Collider - Jon Hopkins (2013)
He played Laneway four years ago, and he's playing this one too. This song, to me, is the perfect techno track. It's experimental, druggy, it's really weird, it's got delay all over it. You can listen to it as a stand-alone piece of music, you can listen to it in a nightclub, or in a festival setting. This is something completely different, and it's off a beautiful album. He's an amazing musician and his last two albums are mind-bendingly good.
Oh My Darling Don't Cry - Run the Jewels (2014)
Whenever there's a situation in my life where I need to get going or be in the mood to rob a bank, I put this on. It's the ultimate jam to get you going. I listen to it once a week. It's a great song to walk off a plane to too. I've toured them three times and Killer Mike is a true gentleman of hip-hop. I owe him a favour: one year at Laneway there was a push on a fence and we needed to brace it. I was like, 'Shit, what are we going to do?' I turn around and there's Killer Mike holding back a sea of kids, and he was laughing and giggling, going, 'Relax children'. We fixed the fence and it was all fine. They haven't been here in ages, which is a crime. Hopefully this year.
