This year's Big Day Out, which attracted close to 40,000 revellers to Mt Smart Stadium in Auckland yesterday, was one for the ages.
When in past years it has been a festival reflecting the current obsessions of that year's rock generation, this year's slightly damp affair was an all-encompassing time warp.
There were no mass armies of metallers, goths, or miserable looking emos, as in years previous.
It was a show, more than any other in the Big Day Out's 16-year run, when there was something for everyone.
And the crowd, who ended up wandering from stage to stage - and from decade to decade - in the drizzle had one of the most diverse, and as it turns out, best line-ups yet, to choose from.
And that's whether it was Iggy and the Stooges churning out the Raw Power-era songs of the early '70s; Shihad playing their classic 1999 album The General Electric; or Primal Scream doing the same to their 1991 Screamadelica album.
Yes there was a heavy dose of nostalgia, but no-one seemed to mind, because there was plenty of everything else.
From the South African hip-hop rave freak show Die Antwoord, to the camp metal of Rammstein and the arty heaviness of Tool, and, to end, the unhinged explosions of Nick Cave's Grinderman.
~ BEST OF THE BIG DAY OUT ~
• Best group hug: The stage invaders who shared the stage with Iggy Pop.
• Best morning crowd surf and guitar throw: Andrew Wilson from bratty Dunedin trio Die!Die!Die!, who looked and sounded like they were still waking up during their late-morning set.
• Best time-travel experience: The 1968 to 1958 flashback between the side-by-side sets of the Greenhornes (Americans playing British blues-rock really well) to the Jim Jones Revue (Brits playing American rock'n'roll with a Gene Vincent/Jerry Lee Lewis swagger).
• Best first-up party: Kids of 88 were a little bit of what the Boiler Room masses needed with their songs about sugar pills, S&M, and doing naughty things back at their house much later than their midday slot.
• Best stage move: Having no sides on the new Boiler Room tent. We can breathe. Bliss.
• Best who knew?: That psychedelic instrumental dance rock was so big.
• Best unashamed Oz rock: The big-hearted, no-shirt hard rock of Airbourne, whose frontman, Joel O'Keefe, clambered dangerously high up the stage scaffolding to deliver a guitar solo before declaring Auckland was the "home of rock'n'roll".
• Best soul in the afternoon: Plan B, the Brit white boy who started his set beatboxing better than the guy on Police Academy before unleashing his blue-eyed soul on the unsuspecting cruisers on the top field.
• Best covers band: Retro-rock Aussie outfit Wolfmother.
• Best lull before the storm: John Butler Trio. If the plan was to calm the main stadium down for headliners, then mission accomplished. His set featured the first incidence of banjo or busking on the main stage.
