A top-class double bill. It is, of course, not always easy to programme a festival evening that is both practical as regards logistics and varied from the audience’s point of view. In the case of our Blues and Roots double bill of John Hiatt and Robert Cray the decision was easy. We snapped them up straight away since the brilliant songwriter and inspired bluesman had already spent the entire summer on the road together in the USA. Each of them had an exciting new album too: Hiatt with “Beneath This Gruff Exterior”, on which he continued his longstanding collaboration with guitarist extraordinaire Sonny Landreth, and Cray with “Time Will Tell”, perhaps the musically most daring and versatile album in his career, which spanned over 20 years.

Martin Schäfer