A Natural Fact

If you haven't been to Bluesfest, you don't understand what you're missing out on. It's not like any other music festival in the world; sure, the music is incredible, but the location, the people, the food and the general vibe sets it apart. Peter Noble didn't start Bluesfest, but he's been involved right from the beginning. As the country's foremost blues promoter it made sense that he'd supply acts to the festival, which was initially helmed by Keven Oxford.

“When I first moved up to Byron in '91, I'd already supplied them Canned Heat for the first East Coast Blues Fest, and in '91 I supplied them John Mayall, I was hoping they'd invite me into the partnership, because I was the promoter, for the previous decade or more, of that kind of music in Australia,” Noble tells. “Believe me, there wasn't a whole lot of people wanting to do it – no one got rich doing it.”

It was in 1993 that Noble was offered the chance to buy into the event, though he is unsure to this day whether or not the offer came out of respect or desperation.

“When the guys asked me to buy into the festival in '93 – they'd gone outdoors and putting on outdoor festivals is a lot more difficult than people would think, it's such an expensive exercise – I basically bought in and paid out their debt,” he says. “I don't know if I was ever a welcome partner, I was more of a rescuing partner. I became involved in booking the event much more deeply from the '94 event on, when we had Taj Mahal and a few other people.”

That 1994 event was, in some ways, nightmarish. Weeks of solid rain meant Belongil Fields was a quagmire. Noble put a call through to Woodford Folk Festival boss Bill Hauritz – the two festival veterans have a well established mutual respect – who saved the day.

“I really believe it rained for 30 days and 30 nights going into that festival. I called up Billy Hauritz and I said, 'Mate, please help. What do we do?' and he suggested duckboards – pallets that have the extra rows removed so people can walk on them – 'I've got thousands of them up here, you get them down and I'll give them to you for the weekend.' [So] we built walkways and pulled off an event, and I learned instantly how to be a festival presenter and not get cancelled through inclement weather.”

There are shades of '94 in this year's bill – Terrence Simien, The Paladins, Backsliders and Phil Manning all return – but if there were to be one year and one artist that Noble sees as a turning point for what Bluesfest was to become, the answer is simple: 1996, Ben Harper.

“I think the '96 festival was the big watershed, it was the first year that Ben Harper played,” Noble recalls. “A whole lot of fans turned up, and they were not your normal blues fans – they didn't have a stretched black T-shirt with Jack Daniels on the front, wearing a beard and a beer gut – this was another audience that was coming all of a sudden. It was really important to get out there and figure out who this audience was, that didn't see themselves as a blues audience, but would go to a blues festival to see an act that saw himself as fine working an event alongside blues artists.

“It was like an epiphany – here's a guy you can hear has heard a lot of blues but isn't playing 12-bar – you could hear soul music and you could hear Bob Marley… I could never understate the importance of Ben Harper to Bluesfest.”

Noble says that it wasn't just Bluesfest that Ben Harper had the impact on, he says the Australian music industry as a whole owes a lot to what the Californian artist brought back in that era.

“There was a five- or six-year period where every record Harper put out went to number one, and all these artists who were coming up at the time were influenced by him – John Butler, Xavier Rudd, The Beautiful Girls and a thousand others – you could hear Ben Harper in all their music, he influenced them profoundly,” Noble says. “I don't know if John Butler says that today, or if Xavier does, but I put it to you strongly Ben Harper had a great influence on them picking up an instrument. It really turned Australia around and it was really important for us to be in on the ground floor with that artist.”

Peter Noble.

Not everything went to plan in 1996, however, with one headliner causing the organisers all manner of headaches. “I remember Gil Scott-Heron played that year too and he got busted with seven grams of crack cocaine at Brisbane Airport,” Noble recounts. “Somehow I managed to get him bailed out for the weekend and he came down and played Bluesfest, then on the Tuesday he was deported. I don't think he ever came back to Australia after that.”

In the early '90s, the music festival landscape was awfully different to what we experience today. Money was never a consideration in the event's early days, and Bluesfest wasn't even Noble's full-time job.

“Maybe that's the great thing about Bluesfest, is that my original partner Keven Oxford and I were definitely in it for the love of music, and the festival was a good ten to 12 years old before it ever turned a profit. Maybe it turned enough of a profit each year to pay your wages, but to actually make a profit so you could invest in your event. It was always a labour of love, we were working other jobs and getting paid $500 a week out of the festival while everyone thought we were making millions out of it.”

Thus the decision to base – and keep – the event in the Northern Rivers had little to do with the town's reputation as a tourist hotspot, it was simply because that's where the organisers lived.

“We started off as blues fans wanting to put on a blues festival where we lived. If we live in Warrnambool then we would have done it there,” Noble says. “The Arts Factory [the festival's home in 1990 and 1991] was arguably the best live music venue in Australia at the time in terms of programming. So there was a venue that was dedicated to what I would call real music – they'd take Buddy Guy over The Angels or Australian Crawl – you had people who cared about music, a lot of people who had moved to an area because they didn't want to live in the city anymore, they wanted to live a little more quietly.”

Noble is a blues fan, but didn't want to limit the festival to just the one genre. Expanding the festival's musical focus has allowed it the opportunity to grow and to present some of the world's best artists, but it has also meant the Bluesfest team must, year-in, year-out, endure the cries of treachery from blues purists.

“I started to widen the event – I don't know what my ex-partner would say about this – but he said, 'You bought into a blues and gospel event and now you're trying to put all this alt-country and other stuff on.' But I thought it was just about any good music that fits, let's not be so precious about it,” Noble says. “Musicians don't listen in genres, so how about having a festival that doesn't? A festival that just books good music and every now and then takes a punt, goes a bit wide and books something that doesn't quite work; it's better to book something that doesn't work than to just continue using the same method, you just become boring.”

Naysayers and so-called purists might complain, but Noble questions what it is they believe Bluesfest ought to be. It seems, to Peter Noble, that the event will forever push the boundaries in terms of the artists it presents.

Crowd at Bluesfest. Pic by Evan Malcom.

“Some people think booking Jack Johnson is a risk to some degree, the purists don't see him as being an artist who is in line with the Bluesfest ethos. Well I don't even know what the Bluesfest ethos is; all I know is that he really suits the Byron lifestyle – even to the point that he bought a house around here.

“I'd rather go belly-up than have not jumped into the deep pool, I think you've got to go on a tangent, of course there are things that are not going to work, but that's part of life. If you don't take a risk you're never going to know. I book acts on Bluesfest every year that in retrospect I think, 'Gee, I could have thought a bit better on that one', but you've got to take a few risks.”

SILVER JUBILEE

Peter Noble talks us through booking the 2014 Bluesfest bill.

“I tend to sort of just ride the wave; when all those young acts came in early – John Mayer, Dave Matthews, Edward Sharpe, Morcheeba – I just said, 'Well, let's get some more!' But then I thought we needed to make a strong statement of where we came from. I've booked more blues than I've ever booked.

“I could have tried to replicate last year's Bluesfest and I know there are people out there asking, 'Why didn't you just do a whole bunch of legends again? Why are your three headliners far more contemporary? For your 25th year, would you want those older acts?', but I don't see that. Pardon me, but I don't tend to promote like the other guys, I don't think. I just want to do creative music festivals.”

As some report doom and gloom for the Australian festival market, Peter Noble wants it known that Bluesfest is not, in any way, struggling to sell tickets. “We're not suffering at all. Our ticket sales are right on track to sell out. The business model that seems to be having buyer resistance is the one-day travelling event, not the destination festival. Woodford had their second biggest year ever last year, or as good as their biggest ever. So many four- and five-day events are doing fine, but this one-day model is suffering.”