Starting a music festival from scratch was one of my wilder projects. Up there with starting The Do-Not Press though knowing next to nothing about book publishing, promoting two tours for Jerry Lee Lewis and writing a textbook on how to write novels – without first having written a novel myself.

My advice to anyone thinking of getting a music festival off the ground is “Don’t.” With a capital D and a few exclamation marks behind it.

I began Rhythm Festival in 2006. At least, that’s when the first one took place, though the serious planning started three years before that. My motivation was that I simply couldn’t find a music festival I wanted to go to.

Glastonbury was way too big and I wasn’t keen on the hypocracy that portrays it as a benevolent, almost charitable event, rather than the money-generating machine it really is. Cambridge Folk Festival was OK, if a little too, er, “folky”. There just wasn’t enough happening for me at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention: one stage in a relatively small field and if you didn’t think the sun shone out of “The Greatest Folk-Rock Band in the World’s” arias, you were stuffed. Reading, Leeds, V and suchlike were too regimented and aimed at a far younger audience. And back then, that was about it .

I was at the scrag-end of my forties and I knew that a lot of people like me wanted to spend a pleasant weekend away, listening to good music in relative comfort, munching on decent grub and supping pints of better than average real ale at prices that wouldn’t make Donald Trump wince. As the Dragons have it, I perceived a gap in the market. Maybe I could fill it. (That was my first big mistake).

The main thing a great festival needs is a great festival site. I was lucky. One of my first Google searches came up with Twinwood Arena in Bedfordshire, purpose-built around the wartime airfield out of which Glenn Miller took his final flight in 1944. The owners, the Wooding family, had been putting on a relatively small festival commemorating the wartime bandleader estival since 2002 and so knew about outdoor events and what it needed.

After a few meetings, David Wooding and I realised that if we weren’t exactly singing out of the same hymn-sheet we were at least in roughly the same congregation. We agreed terms around Christmas 2005. I’m not sure if the name came before the dates or the other way round, but eventually Rhythm Festival was booked at Twinwood Arena for the weekend of August 4th, 5th, 6th, 2006.

The second main thing is music festival needs is acts: bands, comedians, solo performers and DJs. Getting the right acts can make or break a festival. So can getting the wrong acts – though usually it’s just break. The music industry and agents in particular have a schizophrenic attitude towards festival organisers. On the one hand they treat you as one step up from a con-man, fully expecting you to go bust at any moment and so demand that you pay them in advance for all their acts. On the other hand, they act as if you’re making a fortune out of exploiting musicians and so ask for hugely inflated sums, often many times their normal fee. As an example, a band perfectly happy getting £2,000 for playing the 100 Club wants £5,000 to play Rhythm Festival.

After a series of email and telephone negotiations, I arrived at a bill headlined by Jerry Lee Lewis, Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm, Donovan, Arlo Guthrie, Seth Lakeman and, most importantly, Roy Harper who had secured agreement from Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page to appear with him. We had the site, we had the bill, we had the Festival. All we had to do was sell 2,500 tickets to break even.

What could possibly go wrong?

Find out in the next thrilling instalment of “Rhythm Festival: “the best small outdoor music festival in Britain”…

(For details of Rhythm Festival 2009, click here)