The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band's festival summer rolls on - starting with a fraught wait among the sludge, rain and randy teenagers at Boomtown 

OXFORD jump-blues and vintage-jazz group The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band have a ferocious reputation as a hard playing - and even harder partying - bunch of musical hedonists.

This summer the dapper seven-piece are on the road, playing music festivals the length and breadth of the country. This is their festival diary....

His fourth instalment finds frontman Stuart Macbeth and band losing their minds in a field in Hampshire...

We’ve come off stage at Boomtown - a 38,000 capacity festival near Winchester - and tensions are fraught. We’ve waited three and a half hours for artist transport to collect us.

Our excellent stage manager Hannah Barducci is on our side. She’s frantically making calls while balancing her own workload. She puts in a sterling effort, radio set permanently pressed to her ear. By this point however my band are getting ready to crack. Leashed in at our heels are a drum kit, a bass amp, a trumpet, two saxophones and my piano keyboard - around £10,000 worth of gear, languishing in the Hampshire mud amid a sea of empty beer cans.

It’s nobody’s fault - such chaos is inevitable. Over a thousand acts will play this weekend. Only five vehicles are available to ferry the lot of us between 108 stages and back to the car park. The drivers work like demons.

Finally a van pulls up. I cue Skippy our drummer to walk up and commandeer the driver while we get hold of the equipment. Our looks lay down the law - we’ve had enough. We’re going home NOW.

With colossal effort we wade our way towards the vehicle. This looks like our only chance of escape. Skippy is articulating while the driver shrugs helplessly - and suddenly I see the problem. If we ever want to play our instruments again then this van is taking us nowhere. This is the van they empty the chemical toilets into.

How did we get into this situation - where sludge, rain and randy teenagers conspired to make our lives a misery?

I blame it on an email. I eyed it suspiciously in my inbox for a couple of weeks before gathering the nerve to forward it to the band. “It will be great publicity“ I tell them. “And if we camp overnight we get to see Chas and Dave, for free“.

Oxford Mail:

Brassed off: Freeform and freerange

The glamour started to fade when Martin, our trumpet player, and I arrived at our stage to find our slot had been moved forward half an hour. A couple of warm cans of San Miguel were produced from a shopping bag to pacify us.

It took another mammoth struggle from Hannah to get all of us and our gear on site - with minutes to spare. And then you walk up the steps, through the tarpaulin, out the front - and you start to see things from the punter’s perspective.

Hundreds of unwashed partygoers wait to see us. Among them there’s a man dressed as a pirate, who knows all the words to my songs. There’s a woman wielding a five gallon vat of scrumpy over her head. These people are having a seriously good time.

Boomtown is the UK’s trendiest festival. It’s a virtual city which springs up every August. Reggae soundsystems blare through the streets. There’s a town hall at its centre - and even a mayor, who, I imagine is a bit like John Tanner, but trying to leap out of a wheelie bin - while on ketamin.

This year’s line up carries huge names like Jimmy Cliff, Skatalites and NOFX. Alongside them are some of the most exciting, lesser known bands in the UK. They include Rob Heron and the Tea Pad Orchestra from Newcastle, the Vagaband from Norwich, Junior Bill from Cardiff and the Slap Ya’ Mama Big Band from Bristol. This is a line-up put together by someone who is seriously in the know about music.

When our transport finally arrives five guys pile in the front while me and Skippy crouch in the boot along with our instruments and a tonne of mud. He is wearing a £500 suit. We’re hurled around like cattle as our driver bravely negotiates us off site. “This” he says “is how I’d imagine an afternoon in Gaza”. Once the band are gone I pitch my tent and join the party. As the rain falls down and the scrumpy kicks in I forget all about Chas and Dave.

I enjoyed a moderate share of scrumpy on previous weekends too. We’ve recently headlined a trio of lovely, local festivals.

Cogges Beer and Cider Festival even had our own Rabbit Foot Spasm Original cider on tap.

Faringdon’s Follyfest was another well organised event, with committee members in flourescent yellow jackets swarming around the town’s market place, doing their utmost to ensure everything went to plan.

Oxford Mail:

Folly dollies: Living it up in Faringdon 

My favourite however was Brill’s Big Camp, a two day event organised by Michael Swan to raise funds for the village primary school. Having secured a lift in the back of The Dreaming Spires’ tour bus I momentarily felt like I was in a real band.

And at the end of our set we enjoyed one of those rare, random moments that make life worth living. The Rabbits, The Dreaming Spires and Ags Connolly joined forces on stage for a one-off set of authentic country and western.

I picked up a guitar and did my best Johnny Cash impersonation. Skippy stepped up to the mic and delivered King of the Road. Ags tore into a rendition of Johnny Pay check’s Slide off your Silk Satin Sheets which brought a tear to my eye. It went on, and on, and on.

Then in the middle of a heartbreaking take on Hank Williams’ Your Cheating Heart, our saxophone player Mike 'Red' Wilkins decided to launch into a be-bop jazz solo, at a wholly inappropriate moment.

Mike shot up and down the scales with the furious, fanatical pace of a virtuoso. It was like watching Halley’s Comet shooting across the Nashville skyline. We all looked at each other astonished.

Free jazz, country and western fusion music - invented tonight, in Brill. Who would have thought it? And it sounded pretty damn good too.

Read episode one of Rabbit Foot Dispatches here...

Read episode two of Rabbit Foot Dispatches here...

Read episode three of Rabbit Foot Dispatches here...