On tour with the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth and Foo Fighters: raw music documentary captures Australia’s ‘best summer’

In 1995, US film-maker Tamra Davis travelled to Australia to capture the one-off Summersault tour on her camcorder. Thirty years on she has made The Best Summer, an intimate snapshot of an era that can never be repeated

There are only a few shots in Tamra Davis’ documentary The Best Summer that were filmed this century. They’re the very first ones: shaky footage of a clattering box of videotapes being loaded hurriedly into a car boot as Davis evacuated her home in Malibu during the Palisades fires last year. Almost everything else in the film was in that box, forgotten for nearly three decades, a time capsule of a one-off tour of Australia and Asia featuring some of the most influential musicians of the 80s and 90s.

Summersault, pulled together by twentysomething promoter and future Modular Records founder Steve “Pav” Pavlovic, brought Sonic Youth, Pavement, the Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Beck and more to five Australian cities over new year’s 1995/96. It had started as Pav booking a Beasties tour that snowballed as the bands – many of them close friends – liked the sound of a break down under.