The Red Rooster Festival might well become my annual curtain raiser to the festival season. I am just back from attending my second year there having long been recommended it by friends who too have an appreciation of great music in quite a grand setting stately home grounds setting. The tone is mainly rootsy, there is a lot of Americana, always a good deal of rockabilly, country and blues whilst there are always some garage band fuzziness blowing through the branches of the old English oak trees. The other thing they get right is not having any obviously big attention-grabbing headline names appearing, so you can casually drift between the stages on site catching artists that I often have not heard of before but invariably offer up something unexpectedly fantastic and ripe for discovery. It also helps that the crowd is mostly made up of similarly engaged and interested punters, there are a distinct lack of assholes at Red Rooster.

One night the sound of bluesy piano acrobatics clearly played by someone with the fluency of a classicist caught my ear coming from a smaller stage with no more than two hundred people gathered around. This was Derek Paravicini, a blind autistic savant known as a musical prodigy who from an incredibly early age has been able to play any piece of music, note and pitch perfect, after hearing it only once. I would venture that his place on the autism spectrum is high because his between number hand motion routines were exactingly repeated every time and his left right head turning locked in like clockwork as he played every piece. But piano playing at this level is not something you see in the flesh, well ever really. I cannot comprehend how those hands moved so fast across complex classical, blues, stride and ragtime pieces so naturally, he was mesmerizing and a privilege to listen to. As far as headline performances on the main stage went, Kitty Liv was by far the star of the weekend. She grabbed that stage with venom and had a ball while doing so, taking the crowd with her every step. Backed by her brother (Lewis in her other band obviously) and boyfriend, they had fun with the platform, swapping instruments in unison for the thrill of it as they tore through ‘Keep Your Head Up High’ when the set hit a peak.

By contrast the big Friday night attraction, Paul Simonon, in his latest duo configuration alongside Kevin Ayers daughter Galen Ayers playing a French inflected take on twee retro pop, was notable for all the wrong reasons. If they had been put on in a midday slot with no headliner related expectations, their forced fey charm might have floated across the arena harmlessly enough, but here with a huge crowd (the largest I have seen at the main stage here) revved up for some Clash related mayhem perhaps, the contrast between anticipation and deliverance could not have felt more jarring. Within twenty minutes of the start 75% of that crowd had left and you could sense that the performers onstage were all too aware of it. Paul and Galen frequently turned their backs on the crowd, far more comfortable locking into each other’s gaze, while the other musicians retreated so far to the stage edges, they must have risked falling off. Not since hearing Ian Brown fronting the Stone Roses at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1995 have I seen an audience wince at a lead vocalist the way they did poor old Paul here and the most galling thing is, it is probably not his fault he ended up here, he is not a front man and he knows it; to be fair he was barely trying to be, reluctant does not begin to describe it. Still I stayed for the whole set, sometimes you have to witness the bad ones to really appreciate the great ones and I will also say, for the sake of balance, that talking to some Clash fans around a festival fire pit after the music had ended on the closing night, they all thought Simonon was immense. He was the only reason they were there. Writing about music, you never find a definite position everyone can agree on, maybe that is why it never gets boring.