September 21, 2020

Fear At The Top: Bluesfest’s Peter Noble on how the festival sector will survive COVID-19

Poppy Reid

On the last episode of Fear At The Top, The Brag Media’s CEO Luke Girgis spoke to Jaddan Comerford, the CEO and Founder of Unified Music Group, on how Unified has been hit by COVID-19.

On this latest episode of Fear Of The Top powered by Shure AONIC 50 headphones, Luke Girgis chats to Peter Noble, organiser of one of Australia’s largest music festivals, Bluesfest Byron Bay.

Peter Noble has been battling governmental red tape since the festival’s inception in 1990. In April last year, Noble warned Bluesfest could be forced to leave New South Wales if the policies handed down by the NSW government in an attempt to curb festival deaths continued.

Now, in the midst of a global pandemic, Noble was forced to postpone Bluestfest 2020 altogether. Since COVID-19 began its crippling effects on Australia’s music industry, Noble has been a vocal force in keeping festival fans updated and lobbying at a government level for assistance.

In Noble’s chat with Girgis for the podcast, he discusses how Bluesfest survived COVID-19, how the government is working with festival owners, and what 2021 Bluesfest will look like.

“The situation continues to change, it evolves so what people were hearing four weeks ago might be different to what you’re hearing now from my perspective,” said Peter Noble. “Of course I would love to have a standing event, social distancing within that is something that might be a challenge.

“Seated events, much like what you see at an NRL game or something like that in a coloured coded observer fashion , seem to be the way forward know,” Noble added. “The only thing we know is that we don’t know what will be happen […] I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I know that I’m going to adapt the event to whatever we need to do.”