The iconic Australian music festival Bluesfest, founded by Peter Noble 21 years ago, has been named the 2010 Australian Event Of The Year.
The annual event held in Byron Bay beat the Royal Easter Show in Sydney and the Australian Tennis Open in Melbourne to take the honour at the Australian Event Awards in Sydney last night (October 7, 2010).
“We never even thought we would be part of the Event of the Year awards,” Peter Noble told Undercover News. “I didn’t think we would be a winner when you are up there against the real big ones like the Sydney New Years Eve Celebrations or the tennis in Melbourne or the Adelaide Fringe. You would have to be pretty egotistical to think you were going to beat them and I didn’t think we would”.
Noble started Bluesfest 21 years ago it began and remains one of the most diverse music events on the planet. “I’ve been in the music business for 45-years. I’m not a young fella anymore,” he says. “When we started Bluesfest 20 years ago we decided we were going to do something nobody had ever done before. We were not a franchise of another event copying what someone else was doing. Whenever I travel outside Australia I am often told by other events co-ordinators that we have created something very unique. We had everything from surf music to jam music to Svengali to Gypsy Kings”.
This is a special award for Peter Noble, but he also has another – a Grammy Award. “My label is the only Australian label to have not only been nominated for two Grammy Awards but to have won one,” he says. “To do it for a Zydeco band from Louisiana for the first ever Zydeco Cajun Grammy was pretty amazing too. I was so broke at the time I couldn’t go to LA to be at the Grammy’s even though I had a seat up the front. I didn’t have any money because it was all tied-up in Bluesfest. We won the Grammy and I didn’t even have enough money to get on the plane and enjoy the celebration”.
However, The Bluesfest Award means a lot because it means he has created an event that has become part of the Australian culture. “I think we have become part of the paradigm of a whole other music presentation that didn’t exist before we came along,” he says. “Thank God. We were all playing these little clubs with the blues and the roots and it was about time the music got heard. I was crazy enough to go up against the big guys with the real deal and we are almost winning at it”.
So after 21-years of Bluesfest, who is his favourite performer? “Ben Harper has always been a favourite,” he says. “The fact we discovered such wonderful people as Kasey Chambers. One day one of our office managers put on a CD and we bought the guy out. That was Jack Johnson. We were in front of the game with all those. John Butler is a favourite. Michael Franti is a favourite. Taj Mahal and Buddy Guy are favourites”.
As for who will headline Bluesfest 2011, we all I can say is that Peter did “plant” a rumour. We’ll tell you more over the weekend.
As a sidenote, the Byron Bay Council this week voted to extend the Development Application for Bluesfest at Tyagarah for the next 11 years up to the 2021 Bluesfest festival. The maximum crowd numbers have also been increased to 20,000 a day.
