Welcome to all – to our regulars, and especially to Festival newbies. We hope the experience will change your life as it’s changed all of ours. You’ll quickly realise that this is not your average outdoor music event – good seats where you can really see and hear the artists, audiences who respect the music by actually listening to it, a complete demographic from tots to grannies, a wonderful diversity of talented artists – many of whom you’ve may never have heard of, a warm sense of community and the legendary Fairbridge Festival vibe. You’ve told us over the years that it’s this vibe that’s the star of the show, and we aim to keep it that way.

Some thank-you’s right up front – to my programming colleagues Ruth Wise (Youth), Hilary McKenna (Dance) and Milu Shurman (Kid’s) and to my now-indispensable right hand, Phoebe Corke, who has looked after all the artist logistics this year and kept me sane. And of course to the rest of the Festival team, who will take a collective bow on the Mandja Stage on Sunday evening.

To the 2010 bill, which I have to say we’re extremely proud of, not least because it’s not every weekend you can see a ba-wu, two giant seagulls, a Swiss musical wok, an illuminated butterfly on stilts, a pedal-powered ironing board with strings and a former Eurhythmics backing singer all in one place. Regulars will notice a few new elements in this year’s “Crossing Rhythms” theme, the main one being the inclusion of some spectacular combined live music and dance shows on our Mandja Stage. (Mandja means meeting place in the Noongar language, in case you were wondering). You’ll see “Spice”, performed by local percussion geniuses Tetrafide along with the Temple of Fine Arts Dancers from Perth; Australia’s foremost flamenco troupe, Arte Kanela from Melbourne; and a specially commissioned show “The Three Tunes” choreographed by our own resident Irish dance guru Hilary McKenna. Mara!, the band described as “the Dom Perignon of Australian World Music” make a welcome return with their exciting Balkan-jazz fusion, and will take you through some circle dance steps in 11/8 time – it’s not as hard as it sounds!

The other major element this year is the presence of some of the country’s leading pounders of things percussive. I’ve already mentioned Tetrafide – add percussion virtuosi Greg Sheehan and Tunji Beier (performing with the legendary Linsey Pollak as Dva) along with Perth duo Taal Naan. We’re letting this crew loose on a combined “percussion heaven”, in place of our regular guitar extravaganza which gets a rest this year, and we expect sparks to fly.

That brings me to our stellar cast of international acts. Please be upstanding for Scotland’s heart-melting Eddi Reader, my personal favourite singer on the planet (sorry, Ros) and her stellar musicians Alan Kelly (Ireland) and Boo Hewerdine (England); Italian guitar whizz Beppe Gambetta; the colossally talented and entertaining Genticorum all the way from Quebec (yes, they really do make that exuberant wall of sound all by themselves); multiple-award-winning Canadian songwriter and teller of unforgettable song-stories James Keelaghan with accompanist Hugh McMillan; the remarkably atmospheric English multi-instrumentalist Andrew Cronshaw (definitely the first master of the ba-wu, kantele and fujara we’ve ever booked); the eternally popular Chipolatas back from England with new bag of tricks; emerging Chilean folk star Nano Stern, fresh from taking Woodford by storm; delightful English folk duo Martin and Shan Graebe; and last but not least, two luminaries of the English folk scene and sons of the north-east, singer/fiddler Tom McConville (the BBC’s Folk Performer of the year last year) and the great Vin Garbutt, songwriter and life-endangeringly funny raconteur in a class all by himself. And beware the Giant Seagulls. You can run, but they’ll catch you, so hang on to your chips.

Among the many fine Australian acts I’d just like to make mention of the punk-Gypsy dance stage melt-down which is The Barons of Tang (from Sydney), and as a special treat for swing fans the Lucky Oceans Darling Rangers, an all-star band assembled to play the classic “crossing rhythms” country-jazz fusion style called Western Swing. There’s heaps more on the program which I can’t begin to cover here, so check out the program listings. Suffice it to say that getting all this amazing talent in one place is a bit of a dream come true. As ever, we encourage you to check out as much as you can, especially acts you’ve never seen before, with our quality assurance that every act here has been booked for a good reason.

So welcome again, and especially to all of you who are involved in running, planning, volunteering for, setting up and clearing up after community events like this one. You know who you are, and you do an important thing. Have a fantastic festival!

Steve Barnes
Artistic Director

Fascinating festival facts for trivia buffs: Fairbridge Festival is (we think) the fourth biggest community folk/roots festival in Australia after the Big Three (The National, Port Fairy and Woodford) in audience numbers. About 8,000 individual people came in 2008, making up around 25,000 day attendances. This is the 17th festival, the first being in 1993. The festival takes about fourteen months to plan. About 350 acts apply to perform, out of whom we pick about 100. Of the 87 musical acts on the bill, only ten percent played Fairbridge last year, and about half are completely new to us. We have around 400 individual performers playing 319 separate gigs. Among the artists we have 13 Peters, 12 Johns and one Xave. More artists come from Fremantle than from anywhere else, one comes from Banjul (Google it), and none, sadly, comes from Tittybong. We have somewhere around 200 volunteers on site working a total of 67 person-days (those are like dog days only longer). If we ran all the shows at the festival one after another, night and day, in the same venue with no breaks, the festival would last for slightly more than ten days. If we took all of the strings off all of the guitars at the festival, joined them end to end and stretched them around the equator then they wouldn’t reach and none of the guitarists would be able to play. This is the first blurb in the history of the festival which contains all of the following words: “theology”, “pumpkins” and “kantele”. One of the sentences in this blurb is untrue, but not this one. The person who compiled these statistics badly needs to get a life.