At the closing of 2007, a big southern rock fan with slightly missionary attitude, Dalibor Mierva, has organized his first festival based in Central Bohemian city of Kolín. The aim was to present and promote the southern rock music to Kolín citizens. The original festival name was Kolínská jižanská noc (Southern Night of Kolín), and until 2011 this festival took place for 5 years. Many domestic southern rock bands (The Cell, MBA Band, Blue Rocket, Pumpa, Blackies, Full House, 1202 Station, Last Rebel and The Again) have performed here, and in 2009 the first international band (Highway from Poland) was present at the festival. Attendees response was less than expected, therefore after 3 years the festival was moved from the city concert hall (MSD Kolín) to smaller rock club U Vodvárků. Yet, we can consider this festival in Kolín as successful, refreshing and enriching experience for the city.
Since 2008 there was also a blues festival taking place in Kolín, named by organizers FestBlues. The organizers have managed to negotiate financial support from the city for this festival, and by 2011 there were 4 successful years of this festival. When the main organizer of FestBlues, Aleš Králík, has decided that bringing these rock stars to Kolín for a few people that would attend is like beating a dead horse, and therefore he discontinued the festival, another Kolín based patriot Vojta Klouček, who was helping with FestBlues, took it from here. But as he felt that producing a festival is too difficult for one person, he joined Dalibor Mierva. A new music project was born, following up the tradition of both predecessors. One local journalist has named it later as „marriage of convenience“.
The new baby was named Southern Rock & Blues Kolín, and since 2012 it literally started, as the name suggests, offering the public blues and southern rock genres in the large scale of flavours of these similar music styles. The festival has made it to important event of the domestic blues–rock scene, and foreign bands started to get interested as well. Since then, musicians and bands from all Europe, USA, Canada and Australia have performed at this festival. For some of them it was even their first time in the Czech Republic, and since then they are returning frequently (like Natchez of France).
You can get familiar with the rich history of this festival and its individual years in “Previous Years” section of this website.