Bluesfest Australia

IN 2000, before he got big, before he started his grants program, before he busted into the BRW Rich List with annual earnings of $2.9 million, John Butler was just another guy with dreads, a slide guitar and some ideas about social justice. But then, one day, the weather changed. Literally.

“We were playing at the Bluesfest," Butler says. “We had just released Pickapart, which was our first song to get played on Triple J. But when we played at Bluesfest there were only about 50 people in the audience. For the second show, I tried to stay positive. I told my wife: 'This next show is going to be the bomb!' But the crowd wasn't huge for that either.

“But then, just when we were peaking, it absolutely pissed with rain and 3000 people ran into our tent. And the show just went berserk. It was like a suffocated fire - you lift the lid and it explodes. It was a total flashpoint gig, a lot of people talked about it and within the year we had a huge fan base on the eastern seaboard."

Nine years later, Butler has 800,000 CD sales and three ARIA awards under his belt and is regarded as Australia's most successful independent artist. His 2004 release, Sunrise Over Sea, debuted at No. 1 in Australia, with the subsequent Grand National (2007) reaching No. 1 on both the ARIA Albums Chart and Billboard Heatseekers in the US. Nothing if not adventurous, Butler recently contributed several pieces to the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann's blockbuster Australia , including some guitar accompaniment and what he calls “our own kooky Woody Guthrie-meets-hokey-comedy-jazz stuff".

In April, the band will return to more familiar ground when they play the East Coast Blues And Roots Musical Festival in what will be their only east coast show for the year, before recording a new studio album. In recognition of the band and Bluesfest's shared history, Butler has been invited to program Sunday in the Byron Bay event's famed Mojo tent.

“It's Bluesfest's 20th anniversary, so it's a pretty special honour," says Butler, whose line- up includes Paul Kelly, Blue King Brown, Saltwater Band featuring Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, State Radio, Jeff Lang, Ngaiire and Nicky Bomba.

For someone who began busking in Fremantle, Butler, 34, has come a long way, propelled as much by prodigious skill and unorthodox choices - notably his fondness for 12-string slide guitar - as for his championing of social activism and the environment. He has long diverted album and ticket sales towards issues such as indigenous health and carbon offsetting and has, since 2004, dispensed hundreds of thousands of dollars through JB Seed, a grant program set up with wife Danielle Caruana to encourage “social, cultural and artistic diversity in Australian society".

John Butler plays Sunday, April 12.

Belongil Fields
Pacific Highway, Byron Bay
9 April 2009 to 13 October 2009

Tickets
One day $130, five days $399
Phone Bookings
02 6685 8310