FESTIVAL season has started. Having been a part of it for 45 years it seems to me that it begins earlier every year: not a bad thing in principle, but worrying if there’s a connection with global warming!

Anyway, the first one of 2025 for me was a two day stint at Folk On The Pier in Cromer a couple of weeks ago. After a lovely solo gig on the first day, my follow-on stint with my band Barnstormer 1649 was a tad irritating, to be honest.

Instead of supporting the brilliant Oysterband, whom I’ve known since the 1970s, a perfect fit for my early music punk outfit Barnstormer 1649, we ended up playing somewhere else in the town at exactly the same time while nearly all our potential audience were watching… the Oysterband. All because of GPS. No, not a malfunctioning satnav, but what I call Genre Preconception Syndrome.

GPS exists in many minds, but especially those of people who programme folk and early music festivals. It basically works like this: if you gleaned a certain amount of recognition as a punk poet 40 years ago you are perceived as doing exactly the same thing now and nothing else. Even if you are now doing something different which they might like, GPS means they simply don’t even bother to listen.

So because I was a shouty ranting punk poet in 1980, and still am to this day when I want to be, the fact that I love early music, have taught myself to play a whole host of ancient instruments and am the leader of a band which combines early music, folk music and punk and is the literal embodiment of “ancient and modern” — exactly what folk music should be about — is irrelevant. That’s a shame. But we had fun anyway. Thanks to Phil and Co for doing their best to break down the barriers!

And last weekend was the utterly brilliant Bearded Theory Festival, which is inoculated against GPS and all the better for it. I don’t do stadium gigs, so the only time I get to see people like Iggy Pop and the Manic Street Preachers is at festivals where I’m playing myself, and they were both absolutely magnificent, I must say. 

At the age of 78 Iggy is an absolute inspiration, his energy levels astonishing, his band (whose full-on brass section made me dub them Iggy’s Midnight Runners) rock solid. And the Manics were ace too; when singer James dedicated a song to “anyone who came to see us in 1990” it made me smile, because they supported me at Swansea University in 1990, and they are as good now as they were then. Not a stadium band — a band who are so popular they play stadia. There’s a difference.

But the heart of Bearded Theory was most certainly not found on the main stage but at Gail’s wonderful Something Else Tea Tent, where our DIY community of musicians and poets has its spiritual home. Wonderful sets from Joe Solo, Jess Silk, Janine Booth, Calum Baird, the fantastic late-blooming songwriter Mary Moden and her Male Members, Steve White & the Protest Family, Wob, Mark Thomas, Pog, and of course Gail herself as Muddy Summers with her Dirty Field Whores. To name but a few.

And elsewhere, plenty more lovely stuff, including Merry Hell, who did a storming set on the Woodland stage and whose new album Rising Of The Bold is their best one so far, which is saying something, because they are all brilliant.

To literally have a family of excellent songwriters in one band is a rare phenomenon, and they’re at the top of their game here. Inspirational songs about staying strong as we grow older in a dark and uncertain age: my favourite in a fine bunch is Changing Times, a brilliant celebration of the fragility of human existence and the “echoes of carbon” which are our destiny.

This is what “folk music” should be: monster melodies to march up mountains to, inspirational words about our loves and struggles in the here and now. No fingers in ears, above all no sodding ploughboys. A masterpiece. And there’s a song called Louder Than War — I hope that esteemed publication can escape its own GPS and give it the review it deserves! 

This weekend is our 30th and last Glastonwick. It’s been epic. Review to follow.