What a silly sausage
Just the wurst – Bluesfest boss sorry for snag tirade
THE director of Byron Bay music festival Bluesfest has admitted to writing a tirade of abuse to someone who questioned the lack of female musicians playing next year’s event.
The woman had labelled his Bluesfest 2019 line-up a “sausage festival” due to a nearly allmale bill including headliners Ben Harper, Jack Johnson and George Clinton.
Only four female-led acts, including Kasey Chambers, were among almost 30 acts in the first announcement for next year’s event in Byron Bay.
The male-heavy bill led to a social media campaign calling out Bluesfest’s gender imbalance and the festival’s poster winding up on Instagram page Line-ups Without Males, which removes all male artist names to highlight how many women have been booked.
After she raised the issue on Bluesfest’s Facebook page, event CEO Peter Noble wrote to the Melbourne woman saying: “You attacking events without doing any research on them and starting a media campaign based on your own isms and schisms is the sort of thing that worked well in Nazi Germany.
“Find someone to attack because you have a screw loose. Bet you are an under or underemployed white privileged nobody with too much time on your hands.”
Mr Noble said he would personally apologise for writing the post.
“After working from 5am to 11.30pm that night I exploded on someone for calling me a sausage festival,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have done it, I will contact that person and apologise.
“It is what was done in Nazi Germany, you keep saying a bad thing about someone long enough until you polarise and pillory them until people start to act in the same manner.
“I shouldn’t have said that to that person, I know that, I was just tired of being abused.
“I’ve not been rude to anybody else. I tried debating but that didn’t work.
“We pointed out we have twice as many females working in our office as men, and people said: ‘Yeah, but they’re out the back and nobody sees them.’ My site manager is female.
“The industry isn’t just for people strutting on our stage.
“Why are there less women taking part in the music industry, on stage, than men? That should be the question.”
Bluesfest, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next year, runs over five days around Easter in Byron Bay.