Sunbury Music Festival

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The crowd watches a band at the 1972 festival.

The Sunbury Music Festival was a music festival held on a private farm in Sunbury, Victoria that ran on the Australia Day long weekend from 1972 to 1975. The festival attracted up to 45,000 music lovers each year. It signalled the end of the hippie peace movement of the '60s and the beginning of the reign of pub rock ^[1]. It holds legendary status in the history of Australian rock and has been compared to America's Woodstock Festival. The festival folded in 1975 after heavy losses resulting from bad weather and high fees charged by visiting overseas act Deep Purple.

Michael Gudinski was involved with the running of the festival, and record company Mushroom Records' first release was a triple-disc live recording from the '73 festival. Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs also released a live recording of their performance at the '72 festival. In 1974 the festival featured its first international act - Queen, who were "booed off the stage to screams of 'go back to Pommyland, ya pooftahs'."^[2] Skyhooks were also booed off stage, and after watching a recording of their performance, lead singer Steve Hill quit and was replaced by Graham "Shirley" Strachan. ^[3]

The Fauves in 1998 recorded a song called "Sunbury 97" on their LP Lazy Highways. The lyrics, in part, read: There's the tree where mum & dad conceived me / Do you believe that I'm a child of Sunbury '73?. Chris Wilson also recorded a track Sunbury '73 on his 1998 album The Long Weekend, that reminisces about a road trip south from Sydney to attend the concert.

From time to time calls are made to resurrect Sunbury, the latest being promoter Michael Chugg in 2005.^[4] However the widespread success of alternative rock festivals of the 1990s (for example, the Big Day Out) make a successful resurrection seem unlikely.

1 Band line-up by year
- 1.1 1972
- 1.2 1973
- 1.3 1974
- 1.4 1975
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Band line-up by year

[edit] 1972

1972 featured 41 bands, and was opened by Madder Lake ^[5]. MCed by Gerry Humphries, one-time lead singer of the The Loved Ones.

Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs
Max Merritt & The Meteors
Spectrum
Chain
The Wild Cherries
SCRA
Pirana
Tamam Shud
Company Caine
Friends
Carson
The La De Das
Glenn Cardier
Phil Manning
Greg Quill & Country Radio
Total Fire Band
The Bushwackers and Bullockys Bush Band

[edit] 1973

MCed by Paul Hogan.

Bakery
Band Of Light
Carson
Coloured Balls
Country Radio
Flying Circus
Friends
Healing Force
MacKenzie Theory
Madder Lake
Max Merritt & The Meteors
Johnny O'Keefe
Sid Rumpo
Matt Taylor
The 69'ers
Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs

[edit] 1974

Skyhooks
The Dingoes
Kush
Buster Brown
Chain
Madder Lake
MacKenzie Theory
Ayers Rock
Ross Ryan
The 69'ers
Daddy Cool - reformed especially for this event
Queen (UK)

[edit] 1975

Only 16,000 people attended this year and the festival suffered terminal financial losses. Deep Purple went home with $60,000, while most local bands went home empty handed. AC/DC refused to play after Deep Purple roadies provoked fights with them. ^[6]