Anna Coddington: My first gig

Anna Coddington.

Anna Coddington talks about her first concert, the Big Day Out at Mount Smart Stadium in 1996.

Christmas 1995, aged 14. I was well into my grunge phase and drawing Nirvana, Tool, Rage Against The Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers logos over every book and bag I owned. I must have begged and negotiated with my parents and they came through on Christmas Day with the present of all presents: a ticket to the Big Day Out the following January .

My early BDOs have all blurred together a little but I have a picture of two pairs of Doc boots labelled "Mine and Rhyannon's Docs after the BDO", so I guess I went with Rhyannon, who was (and still is) one of my best friends. Funny to think how important it was to me that we wore Doc boots! Ha. I don't think we had parents or a chaperone with us. Maybe my older sister though. Or maybe my parents went too but we didn't have to hang with them? Not sure.

Anna Coddington in 1995 receiving her 1996 Big Day Out ticket for Christmas.

What I do remember very clearly though is walking up the stairs of the seated area as Rage Against The Machine tore into

Bombtrack

and wanting to lose my mind, but I had somehow ended up losing my friends and hanging out with this boring stoner dude I knew at the time, so I couldn't go crazy in the way I really wanted.

I found my friends again though and had an amazing time. I cannot now fathom how we found each other without the aid of mobile phones, but I think we made a meeting point and a time and stuck to it, old-school style.

Rage Against The Machine were definitely a highlight, along with Porno For Pyros and I think I was into Tricky then, but mostly, as a 14-year-old, just being there was the highlight. The vibe was very, very awesome for me at that age. It felt like "being part of something". Just that thing of tens of thousands of people in one place on the same buzz — it's powerful whatever the cause. And this was the first time I'd been to something like this unsupervised, so the freedom was real.

I went to most BDOs from that point on and they were all great, but there's nothing like that feeling of your first big gig with your friends, not your parents.

• Anna Coddington is heading around New Zealand for a joint national tour with LIPS this September, with a final show in Auckland at the Tuning Fork on Saturday September 26. Anna's new single, Slate, is out now.