24-hour party person

By Daniel Pilkington, March 8, 2007 @ 1 am

Idealog March/April 2007, page 24. Photograph by Mark Hamilton

How to turn sex, drugs and rock’n’roll into peace, love and a tidy campsite

Brian Ruawai is used to not being taken seriously. With his faded jeans, well-worn t-shirt, and thick, authentically unkempt dreadlocks, he looks more like the singer in a reggae band than a successful businessman.

In fact, he’s both. Ruawai is the frontman of Cornerstone Roots, the promoter of Raglan’s Soundsplash music festival and the driving force behind three limited liability companies. For Ruawai, business and roots music go together like surf wax and sand.

“I just enjoy it all, the whole thing,” Ruawai says. “Some people say music is the filthiest business in the world, but I kinda like it.”

The first Soundsplash festival kicked off at the Raglan Town Hall in January 2001 with six bands, including Cornerstone Roots. “I wanted to give New Zealand roots music a platform … for the bands, DJs, and artists, to come together and build a movement,” says Ruawai. The entire venture cost just $7,000 but it was still a financial success … well, sort of. “I think I managed to buy a record with the profit.”

Still, it was an ambitious undertaking, particularly in the wake of the Sweetwaters debacle two years earlier. But since then the festival has moved outdoors and grown rapidly, attracting 1,500 punters in 2002, 3,000 the next year, over 4,000 in 2005 and up to 5,000 last year. Ruawai expects about 6,000 roots fans to turn up for this year’s festival on February 23 and 24 for acts like Mad Professor (UK) and Dub Syndicate (UK/Jamaica), and locals Katchafire, Kora, The Black Seeds, Ladi 6, Deva Mahal, Shapeshifter, Batucada Sound Machine, House of Shem and, of course, Cornerstone Roots.

Raglan officials took some convincing, though. “Back in 2002, the council was very reluctant to have a 24-hour music festival, let alone let us stay and camp on council land,” Ruawai says. “They couldn’t get past the stereotype—y’know, that guy with the dreads, smokes a lot of pot and drinks a lot of piss, what would he know about business?

“Every year we’ve had to fight the council to put the event on, but this year is the easiest. People might have viewed the event as full of dreadlocked misfits, but changing the stereotype was a crucial part of our marketing plan.”

These changes have included banning the sale of legal party pills and soft drink at the event and replacing them with healthy food, and establishing an eco-friendly mandate to ensure environmental damage is kept to a minimum. “We want to make people think about it, to take some information away from the event.”

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I’ve  tried not to make the same mistakes again. You’ve got to have balls. There’s an element of risk. Going from playing 400-people gigs to 5,000 a few years later takes some planning.”