SUMMER’s here, festival season’s here, and this weekend sees the one I have co-run for 29 years, Glastonwick, in the beautiful surroundings of Coombes Farm, West Sussex.

Our annual Beer, Music, Poetry & More Beer Festival: established in 1996 by co-founders beer guru Alex Hall, music/poetry co-ordinator yours truly and the late Roy Chuter, and based around a very simple idea, albeit one pioneering at the time.   

It was the mid-1990s. I had performed at countless music festivals where the beer was the undrinkable urine of Satan and we had all attended vast quantities of beer festivals where it was a matter of iron principle that “the entertainment” had to start every song by informing the audience that they “woke up this morning” in a fake US accent.