Diggle Blues Festival celebrates its decade anniversary.

The Diggle Blues Festival is back this June celebrating its tenth year in the village.

Creator, David Wood, is hard at work with his team to make this year a special one as they look back over a decade of success and a festival that brings the community together.

“I’d been going to the Marsden Jazz Festival for a few years and I always really enjoyed that,” said David, “I was speaking to a friend of mine who was also a councillor, John McCann, and said wouldn’t it be nice to have something like that in Diggle. He explained to me how I could get funding and that is when a vague idea became a distinct possibility.”

David was the only organiser for the first six years of the festival. He has lived in Diggle for forty years and part of the reason he created the festival was as a thank you to his community.

He said: “The community in Diggle is just wonderful and they have looked out for me and my family and welcomed us from the very beginning and part of this was giving something back to them. I also hoped it may give a financial boost to some of the wonderful businesses we have here.”

Another part of David’s decision to create the festival was overcoming a cancer diagnosis that initially told him he didn’t have long to live.

He said: “When something like that happens to you, it makes you see the world a bit differently. Previously I might have mulled over an idea like that, but after what happened I had the mindset of life is short and I should just go for it which I did. I remember when the first advert went in a magazine and I thought well that’s it, it is in black and white now, no chickening out, I have to do it.”

Having had no previous experience in event management, David reached out to businesses, friends and the Marsden Jazz Festival which was his initial inspiration for the festival.

He said: “A lot of people and businesses helped with funding and I had a couple of meetings with the Marsden Jazz Festival which was great and they helped to point me in the right direction, but it was just me organising. I found that blind panic from January to June really helped me to cope.

“I remember one artist calling and asking me to get him a PA and I said yes of course because I wanted him to think I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t and after I put the phone down it took a good five minutes for me to realise that he meant a Public Address system, but it shows how far we have come. Ten years ago, we were making silly mistakes, but I would rather try and fail than not try at all. So the fact that we have tried and it is still going ten years later, we are really pleased with that.”

David has been a blues fan since the sixties.

He said: “I used to go to a place called Ma Dobbs, a little record shop in Oldham Market, the son was a blues fan and I got into stuff like Elmore James and the electric slide guitar, I have absolutely loved it ever since.”

In 2016, David was joined by a group of five volunteers, who helped to keep the festival going.

David said: “It’s funny because I was just so glad we got through the first one I didn’t look too far past it, but because people told me it was a success I was encouraged to carry on, but after six or seven years it was getting a bit too much for just me. I had to make the decision to give it up and I put it out there that it was my last year, but straight away people jumped in offering to help and businesses were contacting me asking me not to give it up and it meant such a lot and now here we are at ten years.”

The event, which is family friendly, has been free since its first year running through funding as well as selling t-shirts and programmes at the event and having voluntary donation buckets at the venues.

The festival is staged as a musical tour of Diggle with a band playing at each of the six venues with half an hour in-between each act to allow people to walk to and from each place and grab a drink before the music begins. Any profit made each year is rolled on to help with next year’s festival as well as some small donations to charity.

There are 11 spots for bands and artists to fill with the festival receiving around 100 applicants each year, a testament to its quality.

David said: “As we only have those 11 spots, we do have to disappoint more people than we please. It surprised us really, we didn’t see it coming, because we thought we would always be regarded as a smaller festival, but our reputation has gotten around over the ten years. It is a good festival, we are reliable and people come to actually listen. The artists are appreciative of the fact that it is a listening audience rather than just a noisy one and I suppose it has a bit of a prestige to be chosen for one of the spots because we get so many applicants.”

Choosing which bands will play at the festival has also evolved over the decade.

David explained: “The first year I would be driving around to venues to listen to people that applied whereas nowadays you can find people on the internet and listen to them on Youtube. Me and my friend, Jim Gradwell, who is one of the volunteers do still go around the country visiting different festivals and clubs and pick bands that way too. It usually involves some drinking and what can we say, it is hard work but me and Jim are up for it!”

David has also had some very memorable trips to America following his love of the blues, visiting New Orleans, Memphis, Austin and Clarksdale. This year he is heading back with a group of blues fans to visit Arkansas and Texas. He has found some of the bands for the festival through these trips.

David remembers: “New Orleans was brilliant, it has such a laid-back atmosphere. You can walk in and out of the clubs and bars and there are musicians in every one playing blues, jazz and rock. You just need to make sure you have some dollar bills to put into the tip jars. One place was so packed we had to go up to this little balcony and the staff were going around with buckets for the tips but only on the ground floor. So we folded our bills into little paper aeroplanes and threw them off the balcony, everyone was cheering and the people were trying to catch them in the buckets as they came down.”

David also has fond memories of visiting the traditional juke joints to see blues artists play.

He said: “They are these small shacks where workers from the cotton fields used to come and make their own entertainment. There are buckets on the floor to catch the rain and they are very basic. People were passing around moonshine and that is where the best blues musicians played, it was fantastic.”

A trip to America actually inspired the tagline of the festival. After a visit to one of the House of Blues venues, David saw one of their taglines ‘Where the heart meets the soul.' He deemed that one a bit too 'dramatic' for Diggle, but it did inspire him to come up with the Diggle Blues Festival tagline, ‘Where the blues meets the greenery.”

Before his next trip, however, is the festival which takes place from May 30 to June 2. There will be anniversary t-shirts on sale as well as a special edition programme to mark the decade anniversary.

Artists this year include Trilo3y, Dogfinger Steve, Hokum Hotshots and the Two Hats Blues Band.

Speaking on the future of the festival, David said: “There was a surge of blues music in the sixties, a real movement, but the people that were part of that are now in their late sixties. What I worry about is that after we are gone, will there be a bit of a decline in blues music? So we are out here now sharing our love of the genre and hoping to bring other people into it.

“We are constantly aware of how many people help and support us and we are so thankful for it. We are happy to still be here ten years on and hopefully even longer.”

For more information visit www.digglebluesfestival.co.uk or follow the Diggle Blues Festival on Facebook.