Haigh Fest was awesome, and so much more besides..

So, another Haigh Fest has been and gone, another 8,500 or so music fans rocked out to another twelve phenomenal bands, and you guys get another overly-sentimental blog from me about how awesome the whole thing was.

Yep, I mentioned last year how difficult it was not to attach too much emotion to Haigh Fest and this year was certainly no different.

There comes a point, usually as May turns into June and it's full steam ahead with the pre-festival hype, that I realise Haigh Fest has pretty much consumed my whole life, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Sure, I'm supposed to be professional, and it's still a job, but what a job it is.

Haigh Fest is the April days spent sorting through around 70 applications from all kinds of great bands, the long night at Haigh in mid-May to select just 12 to play at the festival, and the many evenings and weekends given up in June to go and meet those 12 and for interviews, such as this one with Faith in Fools, this one with The Lottery Winners, and all the others I did.

It's staying up until midnight answering questions on the Haigh Fest Facebook page , encouraging people to come down on the day and trying to provide diplomatic responses to a small number of criticisms, even when some of your friends urge you to just write Oh, f**k off!


It's building the Haigh Fest website and setting up the live blog and retweeting positive feedback on Twitter.

It's getting on the stage as compere to warm up those 8,500 or so people, bellowing into the microphone and introducing the bands. It's taking that mic and doing my best impression of DX from late-90s WWF/E wrestling ('Are you ready? No! I said, Are. You. Ready? Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, Haigh Fest 2011 proudly presents to you...' - yes, I'm a geek), then going for a walk amongst the crowd to check everyone's having fun.

Thom from The Lottery Winners works the crowd

Haigh Fest is so much more than even that though.

It's the colleagues you work with, the real team effort behind the whole event and the way, at a certain point when everything's in full flow, you'll turn to each other with a modest nod and mutter 'yeah, it's going alright.'


It's the photographers, filmmakers, musicians and other friends you make throughout the event, catching up with bands from last  year and other folk you haven't seen in a while.

It's reassuring nervous performers that they'll kick ass on stage, then watching them walk off 25 minutes later, brimming with sweat and pride, huge smiles on their faces knowing that they did exactly that.

It's accepting genuine thanks from those bands for putting them on the bill, and thanking them genuinely for putting on one amazing performance after another.

Haigh Fest is watching Sam Millar from Smitten Kitten turn into a Rock God, leaning against the crowd barrier and making his guitar scream.

Smitten Kitten by Tess at Personal Portraiture

It's standing stage-left as The Lottery Winners do more to entertain their audience in 25 minutes than some bands do in an entire career, then being blown away as Jeramiah Ferrari tear the place apart. It's chatting to Finding Emo about suddenly becoming Teenage Hearthrobs and to the girls in the front row who were determined to marry them.

Haigh Fest is, in a word, awesome.