First in-person festival since 2019 is like “redemption” for Bluesfest director Mark Monahan

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It will feel “a bit like redemption” for Mark Monahan and the Bluesfest crew when the first notes of the much-anticipated 2022 festival hit the grassy expanse of Lebreton Flats on Thursday.

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After the final notes of a killer 2019 festival sounded, with The Killers and Snoop Dogg among a star-studded lineup, Monahan said she barely took a breath before she began planning for the 2020 edition.

“2019 was a great year for us, and we came out of that festival already actively planning the next one,” Monahan said with her RBC Ottawa Bluesfest set to return live and in person for the first time since that summer.

“We knew within a month after the festival ended that we had Rage Against the Machine, we probably had Alanis Morissette, so things were really coming together for 2020,” Monahan said. “And we all know what happened.”

Bluesfest teased some of the headliners it had booked for the festival in December 2019 and tickets quickly went on sale. Covid was already making headlines in February when the full 2020 lineup was announced.

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“The first inkling we had of any trouble was with Blues in the Schools, and we always do a big wrap-up at the end of February,” Monahan recalled. “And I remember the schools and the artists getting nervous about whether we could actually do a final performance.

COVID-19 had made landfall in Canada and in the city at the time and, Monahan recalled, “A lot of people were getting sick. It quickly became apparent in about a month that we would not be able to do the festival that we had hoped for.”

There was so much uncertainty in the air at the time, Monahan said, that at one point she thought the festival might not survive.

“Our first inclination was: Ok, are we done? As a festival, as an organization? Could we survive? Monahan said.

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“The first problem we had was, what was the legal situation with the contracts we had signed… we had already paid millions of dollars. And under normal circumstances, you can’t just say, ‘The deal is off.’

“And we hadn’t finalized our insurance policy yet, so we essentially had no festival cancellation insurance,” Monahan said. “But it became clear that the entire industry was in the same boat, and it became very apparent that no one wanted to put anyone out of business.

“This (pandemic) was force majeure, it was something out of anyone’s control. And that allowed us to postpone, rebook or cancel any of the acts without any commitment.”

However, many of those acts re-signed once the 2022 edition began to take shape.

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Organizers and artists attempted to recreate as much of a “carbon copy of that 2020 festival” as the schedule would allow.

Rage Against the Machine and Alanis Morissette are among the biggest names on the main stage this year, along with Marshmello, Alexisonfire, Ja Rule, TLC and The National.

“It’s going to feel a bit like redemption in a lot of ways,” Monahan said, when the Bluesfest organization made the decision earlier that spring of 2020 to keep all of its staff employed full-time during the pandemic, festival or not.

“We said: ‘If this costs us, so be it.’ But we cannot afford to lose our greatest asset, which is our people, and if we had any hope of getting out of this pandemic, we would have to keep those people. It feels like a redemption that we were able to keep everyone, and it looks like we’re going to have a successful event here in 2022.”

Monahan said sales are going strong for this year’s festival.

“I think the market is back, but one of the challenges now is that there are so many concerts and tours this year, because it’s the first full year that people can actually tour, that there’s a lot more competition for entertainment money. of all Monahan said. “Artists want to tour and people want to go see concerts, but there’s not a lot of money available for you to spend.”

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