Hello Winchcombe

It’s everyone’s childhood dream to step out on stage, Steve Tyler style with legs apart, confident posture, arms raised in a V (small homage to Eddi Vedder there), and welcome an entire town to your show. Your show.

For some it’s Kylie, for others it’s Jethro Tull, most people (and at this point I’m leaving out the unfathomable few who claim to never listen to music) spend their informative years idolising some rock star or another. For me it was and still is The Who. I’m sat here now, for example, still wanting to be Pete Townshend as I watch him work his thing on-stage at Glastonbury. I’m not actually there, it’s not happening live, but even on a small TV screen I still get that tingle down my spine and the current passes from the guitar, through the amp and straight into your nervous system. It’s something every musician understands. Unless, perhaps, they’re Baroque players, but I guess even they get a bit of electrical current through those tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows from time to time.

It’s like a drug. You start out with a few friends as an audience, then a few dozen. Eventually you’re seeking the higher doses, the stronger fix. Soon you’re up to the prescription level stuff, up to a hundred, a few hundred. You get hungry for more and more until you reach the ultimate high – the festival crowd. Every member of the audience feeds the habit, sending the blood coursing through your veins. It’s not a happy feeling, but it makes you feel alive. It’s that same adrenalin rush that Friday-night fighters get at chucking out time. It’s that confidence thing that the Grim Reaper himself could walk up alongside you and tap you on the shoulder and there’d be no chance. You’re indestructible.

My ultimate goal is to walk out on stage at a major festival. I remember winding my way to the very front of the stage at the Reading Festival as a teenager to get an unfettered view of the cellist in Irish moshers Therapy and wanting to be up there.

And tomorrow that sort out happens. A Prom complete with Spitfire fly past and a pyrotechnic depiction of apocalyptic proportions.

Actually, I take it back, Roger Daltrey has just walked back on with a mug of steaming tea and is singing some whimpish thing about tea and the theatre. What was that smashing sound? Oh, just my illusions…

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