Noojee Country Music Festival 2004

Well, I'm not quite sure what to make of this event. Last year it seemed to good to be true and that proved to be the case.

I rode the bike up on Saturday just to check out the layout and gig times. Good job I did. I thought that I started at 10:00 Sunday morning, only to find that I was starting at 9:00!

I had a gig Saturday night and didn't get to bed until 1:30 am. Up at 6:30, have breakfast, load up the gear and drive to Noojee. I'm set up by 9:00 and ask the man behind the mixer for the PA what time I finish at. "No idea mate, I thought you started at 9:30. No one's told me."

For some reason, this year, events weren't moving too smoothly. There was competition for the airwaves this year. There were three groups trying to get 'airtime':

* The organisers pushing/decribing events of the day.
* A Radio station that pushed sponsors of the event.
* Me.

The scheme worked out was that I'd play a song and before I started the next song wait for the organisers to say something or the Radio Staion to do a promotion. That seemed to work fine in the first bracket.

I was asked to stop at 10:15 and then to start again at 11:15. No problems.

I went up on the stage and tuned my guitar. I noticed that my effects unit was having trouble with the effects of the direct sun and had deformed somewhat. Boy is that sun hot!

The Radio station guy spots me on stage and figures that I'm ready to start and gives me an intro and hands me over. All very fine, but it's only 11:05 - I'm early. I started up and was told at the end of the first song, to play one more song and go away! I was apparently disrupting the flow of information coming from the organisers, so that the patrons of the festival didn't know what was going on. I played one more song, 'Albatross', packed up, collected my pay and wondered what that hell happened.