Lodestar 2013

At the weekend I returned to the delightful Lodestar Festival for the fourth consecutive year to be their Director Of Theatre. I've always enjoyed Lodestar - it's a music festival that is free of any corporate endorsement, it's possibly the most friendliest place in the world where, despite thousands of people attending, you always feel like you have enough personal space to enjoy the beautiful site. It is, of course, a musical festival first and foremost, but like previous years my job has been to sprinkle a little theatre/comedy into the proceedings. My selections this year were all crackers; established fringe legend Peter Buckley-Hill, London sketch troupe Restrain The Kracken, The Cambridge Improv Factory, The Gamlingay Players and of course, two of my own shows. In a small marquee within earshot of the music, it worked a treat - good and happy audiences enjoying themselves, a general sense of cheeriness. We performed two of our three Edinburgh shows; Some Plays By Paul Richards (myself and Hind) which was performed how it should be - like a show we've had a for a while now, we bashed through it, made people laugh and generally felt more comfortable than ever before. A day later, and shortly after The Gamlingay Players performed my old play, 'Year Of The Rat', I was back on stage - this time with Izzy, performing, 'Redundancy Club.' I'd lost a majority of my voice from the excess of the weekend (it was a busy weekend on top of the two nights camping, 4am/3am finishes thanks to the 'socialising') but we compensated for that with a really energetic performance - getting attacked on stage by a wasp kind of added to the fun of it. Aside from the theatre, I popped out of the festival for a couple hours on the Saturday night to play a wedding gig with Trevor Jones, and on Sunday afternoon I played at the festival with Fred's House on the BBC stage in front of a cracking lunchtime audience (our set was: Looking Glass, I'm Not Saying, Wrong Time, Face In The Water, Too Late To Go Home, Fine Life, Take A Ride, Marathon Man, Beautiful You). On top of all this activity, Lodestar is and always will be a great chance to catch up with good friends who I don't see enough of...okay, so the late night dancing (yep, you heard), drinking and banter with Heather, Jack, Adam, Clare, Marcus, Vaughan, Sevya and Andy may now have left me feeling a bit broken, but thoroughly worth it all the same. Top weekend.