Byron Bay Bluesfest marks its 25th anniversary

IT’S been 25 years since the very first Byron Bays Bluesfest. Take a look back at the best moments. AMAZING PICTURES

BOB Dylan enjoyed Byron Bay Bluesfest so much that when he came off stage in 2011 he told artistic director Peter Noble that next time he wanted to perform every night of the five-day festival. Fellow American singer-songwriter Ben Harper, meanwhile, said Bluesfest had no equal anywhere in the world. And he should know, having returned eight times since he was first “discovered” by Bluesfest in 1996. And he’s back on the bill this year.

News_Image_File: Bob Dylan performs at the Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2011. Picture: AFP PHOTO/Torsten Blackwood These are just two of many memories that resonate with Noble as he looks back on 25 years of a music festival that attracts some 80,000 people each year.

In his office, surrounded by Bluesfest memorabilia, Noble, 64, says satisfaction is not about awards but winning the approval of the musicians.

“When Ben Harper told me many, many years ago that he thought Bluesfest was the best in the world, I didn’t believe him … I thought he was just saying it, but since then so many other artists have said it that I’ve decided they must be right,” Noble says.

“I’ll never forget the time we decided to bring the legendary Irish singer [Pogues frontman] Shane MacGowan out. It was 2003, and I knew MacGowan had a reputation for drinking, but three times Qantas refused to allow him to board his flight from London to Australia due to the fact that he was being ‘disorderly’.

News_Image_File: Byron Bay Bluesfest organisers had to pull a few strings to get Pogues singer Shane McGowan into Australia for the festival. Picture: AFP PHOTO/Ed Jones“I’d been warned it would be hard to get him on a plane, but in the end, British Airways – which had been trained to deal with him over the years – got him here. When he finally arrived in Byron Bay, his opening line to the audience was – ‘Welcome, New Zealand!’ ”

Festival patrons could be a little difficult as well.

“I remember in the early days a male festival attendee was turned away from the gates because he wasn’t wearing shoes,” he recalls.

“An hour later the same guy came back – stark naked, but with shoes on!”

News_Module: Embeded promotion

And then there are the bizarre requests from the artists.

“I can’t name names,” Noble says, “but we’ve had demands for freshly shucked oysters on Good Friday, and a rare vintage cognac which was inadvertently given to the wrong artist, who consumed the lot, so we had to send a car all the way to Brisbane to try to find something close.”

Are you a diehard Bluesfest fan? Tell us your favourite memories in the comments section below or join the conversation on Facebook.

Another artist wanted three cases of Cristal Champagne, while a band refused to perform without the backstage provision of hot pepper sauce.

“If we can do it, we will, but sometimes things are beyond us,” Noble says.

“One artist wanted spring water sourced from a spring in northern Canada and nowhere else, and that was impossible.”

News_Rich_Media: Bluesfest 2014 - third announcement

Noble has been at the helm of the Byron Bay Bluesfest for 20 years. What began in 1990 as a four-day indoor event at the Arts Factory site in Byron Bay, with a capacity crowd of 6000, is now a festival under big-top canvas that owns its own 120-hectare site at Tyagarah, 11 kilometres north of Byron Bay. It runs across multiple stages over the five-day Easter period and has been nominated four times for Best International Festival at the US Pollstar Awards. In February, Noble won the fifth annual Rolling Stone Award for outstanding contribution to popular culture.

It was tough going in the beginning. Noble remembers his first Bluesfest.

“It wasn’t doing so well outdoors,” he says, “and that’s when a few of us invested, only to find out that things weren’t quite as rosy as they’d been portrayed. I had a record label that was doing okay, but that year we had rain of biblical proportions – it literally rained for 30 days and 30 nights – and suddenly it seemed like there was this bunker mentality in the company, let’s just hide and it’ll all go away.”News_Image_File: After 25 years, revellers at Byron Bay’s Bluesfest know to pack the gumboots. Picture: The Byron Bay Bluesfest coffee table book

But Noble, mindful his investment could quickly sink, took action. A phone call to a supplier of pallets and duckboards, free tickets to volunteers to spread them, and a constant round of dropping hay on the ground to soak up water and the festival was able to go ahead.

“I thought I should have got a medal for what I did that year, and on the last night somebody punched me in the face because the final band played 15 minutes overtime.”

The next year they had several dry weeks beforehand only to have it rain for the entire five days of the event.

“You could say my first few years were baptism by water,” Noble says.

“In fact, that’s when people used to call us the Muddy Waters Festival.”

News_Image_File: Elvis Costello performs during the 22nd annual Bluesfest in April, 2011. Picture: AFP PHOTO/Torsten Blackwood Despite the capricious weather, it’s the musos that keep visitors coming back. Over the years the lineup has included B.B. King, James Brown, Paul Simon, Robert Plant, Charlie Musselwhite, Joan Armatrading, Supertramp, Bonnie Raitt, and Melbourne-based roots-reggae outfit Blue King Brown (originally from Byron Bay, and one of the first local acts ever to play the festival). Musselwhite features again this year along with Jack Johnson (making his fifth appearance), Dr John, the Doobie Brothers, John Mayer, the Dave Matthews Band, John Butler, Joanne Shaw Taylor, Erykah Badu, Elvis Costello, Boz Scaggs, and hip-hop poet and activist Michael Franti.

It’s a testament to the esteem in which Bluesfest and Noble are held that when it came time to put together an official book to mark the festival’s 25th anniversary, so many musicians were keen to contribute.

In the book’s foreword, American Franti recalls a benefit concert he helped organise at Byron Bay’s Great Northern Hotel in response to the 2011 Queensland floods “when almost every musician from the festival showed up” to lend their support.

News_Image_File: Bluesfest CEO Peter Noble. Picture: Russell Shakespeare NOBLE grew up in Sydney’s inner west, in the suburb of Croydon Park. His father, Len, was the head of the then Commonwealth Electoral Office (now the Australian Electoral Commission), while his mother stayed home with Peter and his older brother, Michael, who loved New Orleans and R&B music. In 1975, at the age of 15, Noble joined a band called Clapham Junction as a bass player and he left school a year later to becomea professional musician.

“I was the only Aussie in an all-Brit band,” he recalls.

“The Beatles were the biggest thing that had ever happened on the music scene, and after they performed in Sydney [in 1964] thousands of garage bands sprang up overnight, including Clapham Junction.”

After a stint as bandleader for Marcia Hines, Noble moved to Portland, Oregon, in the US to try to fulfil his dream of playing in a band of black musicians. He managed it for a few months, touring with Stormy Weather as a bass player, but it didn’t work out, so he headed back to Portland. A brief marriage had also hit the rocks, and Noble was short of money and needed a place to live.

“I was walking down the street and saw a sign that said ‘American Entertainment’, and on the spur of the moment I went in and said to the guy there, ‘I can book bands. If you give me a room, you don’t have to pay me. I’ll work for commission only’.”

It didn’t take long for Noble to realise he’d found his métier, and within months he’d booked his first big gig – bluesman B.B. King.

Noble returned to Sydney in the early ’80s and was soon promoting blues gigs around Australia. In 1990 he upped sticks for Byron Bay, where he fed talent to Bluesfest founder Keven Oxford (who left the festival in 2004). The consortium that bought into the festival in 1993, which included promoters Michael Chugg, Daryl Herbert and Glenn Wheatley, bowed out in 2008.

That same year, Noble’s record label, AIM (the first independent Australian record label to win a Grammy with Terrance Simien in the Cajun music category in 2008), provided a windfall. News_Image_File: One of Noble’s first big bookings was for legend B.B. King - pictured here years later playing at the Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2011. Picture: News Limited“Festivals are not an easy way to get rich,” Noble says.

“Nobody has any idea of the overheads involved in putting something like this on, and the amount of things that can go wrong. I’ve almost lost my shirt several times, and it was years before I could pay myself more than $500 a week but I had AIM, which was doing well and that really supported my family.

“I was offered this rap record through overseas contacts, and when I heard it my first thought was, yuck – and I just chucked it to one side.”

News_Module: Join the conversation on Facebook

Fortunately for Noble, he reconsidered.

“It was Tupac [Shakur],” he says. “Of course I hadn’t heard of him – not my scene but it seemed everybody else in the world had, and that was how I made some serious money.”

But it wasn’t straightforward – the money came not just through Australian record sales, but also through a settlement with Universal Records in the US after Tupac’s death in 1996. The company wanted to take back the entire estate, and weren’t keen on the idea of an Aussie record label retaining Australian rights.

“I settled for a ridiculously low amount,” says Noble, “but it did buy a nice house in Byron back when local real estate was still cheap – we call it ‘the House that Tupac Built’.”

News_Image_File: Bluesfest CEO Peter Noble and partner Annika Oman. Picture: Russell Shakespeare The “we” Noble mentions includes his life and business partner of 15 years, German-born Annika Oman, 48, the festival’s general manager.

“I first met Annika because her husband was one of my friends, and he became my best friend,” he says.

“My second wife and I were godparents to one of their children, and they were godparents to one of ours, so even though I was attracted to her I was a gentleman and that was that.”

Oman’s husband died 17 years ago. Noble, who had separated from his second wife, started dating Oman nine months after her husband’s death.

“It was devastating for all of us,” Noble says, “and for me it meant a lot of soul-searching but in the long run I wasn’t willing to stand by and let somebody else snap her up; she is such an incredible person.”

Mixed emotions flit across his face and just for a moment he seems pensive, almost wistful. Then he laughs, a loud, booming laugh that fills the office: “They say if you want an efficient office, marry a German, and by god, they’re right!” Between them, Noble and Oman have five children and five grandchildren.

News_Image_File: ZZ Top peform at the Byron Bay Bluesfest. Picture: Byron Bay Bluesfest coffee book. So what does it take to be a successful festival director? “The most important things are to be creative and to work with integrity,” Noble says. Beyond that, though, are the qualities that perhaps those of us who are more risk-averse don’t have in such abundance. One is nerves of steel; another, as Noble puts it, is “having a hide like a rhinoceros”.

“One criticism that used to hurt me a little was [from] the people who said that I wasn’t running a true blues festival,” he says.

“Right from the start, I knew the audiences for pure blues were finite, and I could also see the audience for a wider range of music was growing. If Bluesfest was to survive it had to reach out to that wider audience, and in turn introduce that audience to the blues. So to that criticism I say, ‘yes – I’m guilty’.”

News_Image_File: Ben Harper and harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite collaborate at the 2013 Byron Bay Bluesfest. Picture: News Limited. It was Ben Harper’s first appearance in 1996 that confirmed to Noble he was on the right track. “We all saw the audience it brought us – and then many years later, what do you get? A collaboration between Harper and blues harp legend Charlie Musselwhite. Fantastic.”

Noble won’t be drawn on his favourite artist, but there have been numerous friendships formed. The Queensland blues duo of Hat Fitz and Cara Robinson has clocked up 23 festivals in a row, and the pair’s regular appearance and growing international fan base reflect Noble’s commitment to Australian acts.

News_Image_File: Husband and wife duo Hat Fitz and Cara Robinson are regulars at the Bluesfest. Picture: Supplied“We’ve also kept a family atmosphere going with things like the busking competition,” he says. “A young man from Merimbula [NSW], Kim Churchill, won it in 2009 with his great mix of folk, rock and blues, and now he’s one of the stars at this year’s festival. Local school bands also get a chance to perform, and the smaller tents give first-timers a go.”

There’s plenty of behind-the-scenes action as well, including a stoush with Byron Shire Council when it attempted to change the shire’s multiple major event policy to allow only two major events a year, which could have placed Bluesfest in jeopardy when its consent expired in 2020. One year later (and, according to Noble, thousands of dollars in legal fees), Byron Council received a directive from the NSW state government that blocked the council’s planned changes. Now, with a new council, permanent approval for the festival is pending. “Byron can now continue to do what it does best and be a leader in the arts,” he says.

“We want the site to be used [beyond a single once-a-year event],” adds Noble. “It’s here for the community, not just for Bluesfest.”

With the planning of next year’s event well under way, and acts already being considered for 2016, Bluesfest has become, under Noble’s directorship, a wonderfully diverse and colourful colossus – not dissimilar to the man himself.

The Bluesfest photo book (rrp $30 plus postage), published by Bluesfest Pty Ltd, is available from bluesfest.com.au, onsite at the festival and in local bookshops. Bluesfest 2014 plays over the Easter weekend, April 17-21.