6 hours ago
1
David Free
March 18, 2026 — 5:05am
When Byron Bay Bluesfest folded last week, just 20 days before its scheduled 2026 kick-off, I was devastated but not surprised. I don’t have the heart right now to calculate how many Bluesfests I went to over the years. This one would have been almost my 20th. I could, if I wanted to, check the drawer where I keep my old programs. But I won’t feel like doing that for a while.
I bought my ticket to this year’s Bluesfest months ago. But as a seasoned fester, I’d begun to sense in recent weeks that all wasn’t right. The usual barrage of build-up emails hadn’t been coming. Ominously, the daily playing schedule hadn’t appeared.
Then on Friday, March 13 the dreadful news broke. For the first time in my life, I got an email from a liquidator. “At this stage,” it said with a raw honesty you had to kind of admire, “it seems unlikely that you will be refunded any money.”
I should probably feel incensed right now. Throwing in the cost of my non-refundable flights, I’m more than a grand out of pocket. But if the Bluesfest era has ended, we’ve all lost something more precious than money. For those of us who treasured the yearly pilgrimage to Byron, this feels like a death in the family. If the carnival is over, I can’t let Bluesfest go without telling it how much I loved it.
The annual thrill of getting wristbanded on day one. Moving between tents in the heat of the day, and the cool of the coastal night. The organic donuts. The food tent. The half-hour waits between shows, the hardcore fans already up at the railing, watching the roadies set up.
The CD tent, back when there were still CDs. The emptied-out feeling on Monday nights, when most people had gone home. The scree of dropped cans in the lit-up tents, the volunteers with their bin bags and trash tongs. The phantom wristband you felt on your skin for days, long after the real one was gone.
The inaugural Bluesfest happened in 1990, at the cosy Byron venue called The Piggery. By the time I attended my first Bluesfest, in 2002, the locale was Red Devil Park, home of the local league team. Soon the festival moved to larger grounds at Belongil Fields. Finally, in 2010, it shifted to what is – was – its permanent home at Tyagarah, 10 minutes up the road from Byron.
Bluesfest set perilously high standards for itself, which is probably why, in the end, it burnt out instead of fading away. There was a year when Robert Plant and Iggy Pop played simultaneously, on different stages. A festival that made you choose between Plant and Pop was a festival that had already become, in at least one sense, too big for its own good.
Peter Noble, the festival’s director, must be hurting way more than I am right now. I’m not inclined to kick him when he’s down. Instead, I’m thinking of all the things I’ve seen that I could scarcely have dreamt of seeing, if Noble and his team hadn’t spent decades bringing the biggest names in the world to our shores.
I got to see Plant sing Black Dog. I got to see Jeff Beck play I Put a Spell On You, with a barefooted Joss Stone on vocals. I saw B. B. King play The Thrill is Gone, and Buddy Guy play Feels Like Rain. I saw Gregg Allman, with a cast on his wrist, sing Statesboro Blues.
I saw Toto play Africa. I saw Rodriguez get led to the mic by a sighted assistant and sing Sugar Man. I saw Tim Rogers, during a solo acoustic set, break down in tears while singing Paragon Cafe.
I saw Booker T. play Green Onions, and Ray Davies play You Really Got Me, and ZZ Top play Legs. I saw Tim Finn do the Dirty Creature dance. I saw Toni Childs close a show with the spine-tingling I’ve Got to Go Now.
I saw Sinead O’Connor sing Nothing Compares 2 U. I saw Don McLean do Vincent and American Pie. I saw Santana play Smooth in a crammed and steaming tent, while curtains of tumbling rain veiled the night outside.
I saw John Fogerty play Bad Moon Rising. “We’re doing some songs from the new album tonight,” he said. Then paused. Then said: “This. Ain’t. One of ’em,” before hitting Bad Moon’s joyous opening chords.
I saw Tex Perkins spit high into the air above him during The Honeymoon is Over, then deftly sidestep the descending loogie. I saw Cold Chisel play Cheap Wine. (“It’s about f---ing time this festival had an Aussie headliner,” said Barnesy.) I saw Jeff Lang, Australia’s finest guitarist, play London.
I saw Paul Simon sing The Sound of Silence, alone in a spotlight with an acoustic guitar. Never before, and never again, did I hear a Bluesfest crowd go so quiet. It was the sound of silence, all right: the sound of several thousand people all holding their breath at once.
I saw Brian Wilson play the whole of Pet Sounds. I saw Bob Dylan sing Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright. (Actually he butchered it, but this is no time for recriminations.) I saw Crowded House, just last year, sing Don’t Dream It’s Over.
I saw younger acts ripen into their prime over multiple Byron appearances. Jason Isbell. The Tedeschi Trucks Band. Gary Clark Jr. Taj Farrant.
I saw Eagles of Death Metal in 2016, four months after terrorists murdered 86 members of their audience and four members of their crew at the Bataclan. The band itself barely escaped the slaughter.
One or two songs into their Bluesfest show, a spontaneous and huge ovation began in the tent. It was a surge of human solidarity – the antithesis of the obscenity at the Bataclan. It kept going, kept getting louder. The band stood there without playing. Their frontman was weeping.
I saw Jimmy Barnes, in 2024, play his comeback show after open-heart surgery. Just months earlier, he’d been at death’s door. By the third song of his set he was screaming at full tilt, as if knowing no other way to perform.
With time left for one last song, Barnes brought on a guest: Ian Moss, wielding his cream Stratocaster. They played When the War is Over. Barnesy and Mossy with their arms around each other singing Chisel together. It had come so close to never happening again; we were there to see it when it did.
The song ended. Barnes’ hour was over. And Bluesfest sets never ran long. But wait. Barnes and his band weren’t leaving. Neither was Mossy. They started another song. It was Flame Trees. When the song was done, complete strangers in the crowd turned to each other in awe, wondering if they’d just witnessed the best thing ever.
And then the band launched into Khe Sanh. I still can’t think of that moment without welling up. To put it mildly, you had to be there. The idea that there’s no longer a “there” to be at – the idea that that magical site will fall silent forever, inhabited only by ghosts – seems too awful to be true.
I don’t want it all to be over. I can’t believe it is. I remember one of the greatest Bluesfest set-closers I ever saw: Noel Gallagher singing Don’t Look Back in Anger. The house lights came up as he sang. Soused English backpackers swayed around on each other’s shoulders, singing along to the choruses.
“All the things that you’ve seen will slowly fade away,” Gallagher sang. “But don’t look back in anger … At least not today.”
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