So there we were, my wife and I, upstairs on the left at the Kosy (as we still call The Albion) – having obtained our wristbands in the little bar downstairs where the bar-billiard table and the cigarette vending machine used to be – waiting to be entertained at the 50th anniversary Vale Earth Fair.
A tall man in a hat was tuning up his electric guitar and checking the leads going into his Fender amp, silhouetted against the grey, rain-giving skies to the east, which nevertheless glared into the unlit room.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I had envisaged, when we bought our tickets weeks earlier, that we would be sitting in glorious sunshine in our usual spot, just to the right of the front-of-house marquee, surrounded by the usual suspects – the tribe we see there every year and, in some cases, barely at all in-between. There would be catch-up conversations, excursions to all the other stages tucked away in the far corners of the Iron Age earthworks, pints of real ale from Errol’s Bar on the lofty gun platform and then, as the sun fell, the numbers rose and the beats quickened, the familiar question of where I’d left my jumper.
We were already veterans of the VEF – attending since the late 1980s – when, at the 1996 iteration, we became a couple. And we have been determinedly regular attendees ever since, regarding the volunteer-run charity music binge as a kind of unofficial anniversary. Indeed, faced with the prospect of moving to Australia for four years in 2016, we timed it so that we spent the daytime at the festival before getting a taxi to the airport in the evening.
And as if celebrating our 30th and the VEF’s 50th wasn’t enough to get excited about, they had secured one of our favourite acts from our heady post-student days – The Orb, creators of that alternative Fantasia soundtrack Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld.
So you might imagine that we would be exuding an air of disappointment, as we took the last spaces available in the room that Sunday mid-afternoon, what with the strong winds of the previous day having prevented the marquees being put up at the castle – forcing VEF 2026 to go indoors – and what with The Orb’s appearance having been cancelled ‘due to logistical issues and unforeseen circumstances’ that very morning, to be replaced by someone we’d never heard of.
But actually, it just seemed perfect.
Of all the places to be ushered into, there we were in the tiny room that for a few years from about 1988 had become an extension of our living rooms. Think of the Gryffindor common room but replace the butterbeer with snakebite-and-black and flip-top Grolsch, and swap out Nearly-Headless Nick and his ghostly friends for a fug of nullifying cigarette smoke.
What we had in store was a VEF which would, entirely by accident, inevitably be the most memorable in 30 years, simply by dint of being uniquely rehomed.
That guy in the hat introduced himself as John Swale and launched into a series of humorous political songs, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Then he made way for a comedic poet called Claire Ferguson-Walker. She seemed a bit nervous (or maybe just rusty) and the jokes weren’t quite landing. I thought about leaving. A few did leave. But then three drunk young women came in and noisily took up the empty seats. They found everything hilarious and soon the performer was hitting her stride – in between her own laughter – ad libbing and delivering punchlines pugilistically. It was good material. Really good. In no time, we were all in hysterics.
As she finished, we polished off our drinks and decided to explore. The revised 50th VEF plan also included The Yacht, Fermain Tavern, The Drunken Duck and Beau Sejour.
A quick walk to The Yacht in the pouring rain got us there in time to see Clameur de Haro, who had the place rocking in no time with what I took to be a pro-GST protest song – or an anti-anti-GST one, anyway. As with all their other songs, it was enthusiastically received, so either everyone agreed that singing Sweet Caroline in Market Square had been a vapid act of gesture-politics offering no constructive solution, or else they weren’t really listening and just liked the groove. I really enjoyed the set but I was left feeling that having five great singing voices in one band singing the same melody in perfect unison while offering nary a harmonised vocal was an opportunity lost. Thoroughly energising though, as was the beer being served by a veritable army of bar staff who, until the previous day, would have been expecting either a day off, or to be serving a handful of people watching Man Utd take on Ipswich on one of the pub’s several wazzock’s lanterns.
We stuck around for the next act. That was compulsory. It was the Sacred Hearts.
Ever since I saw their first appearance at the Peppermint Twist (downstairs at the Dorset Arms in 1989) I’ve been a fan, and were it not for insertional achilles tendonitis, I would have been pogoing to Love Bomb rather than merely nodding along. For those of a certain age, I was thinking, this song is anthemic, resonant and timeless. But then I realised that this band has been performing for 37 years to plenty of people, including the crowd around me who were young and old and all getting into it, so they’re not just for people of my vintage.
Next up was a considerably more youthful but no less confident bunch called Rosemary, whose musicianship was impressive for the three songs we stayed for, but we were in danger of constricting our VEF Goes to Town experience by hanging around in just one place and decided to walk up to Beau Sejour. We were also very hungry and stopped off at the Wellness Community Hub, where co-owner Hari was just closing up but served two portions of chilli, which we ate in Market Square beside a marquee housing a covers band. Nothing to do with the festival. I wondered how they felt about town being overrun by live musicians playing original material.
On climbing the hill to Beausie we found many of those friends we would expect to see beside that front-of-house marquee, instead hanging out in the lower foyer. It was noted that had we been down in the castle, as originally planned, we’d all be thoroughly soaked. In the consistently dry Dave Ferguson Hall, as we watched French dub-reggae band The Dynamics, I realised I was standing in the same spot where I’d been theatrically beaten up by my fellow actor Dave Hyett during our play just a few months earlier.
On that occasion, the Beau Sejour staff had rightly been praised for their flexibility and enthusiasm in putting together a One Act Play Festival in an alternative venue when it was suddenly announced that the theatre had to be closed down for health and safety reasons. Since then, the venue – also planning to celebrate its 50th birthday this year – has been subjected to open speculation about its future.
Yet here we were, enjoying the latter stages of an all-day gig which was accommodated at less than 24 hours’ notice, replete with a great sound system, effective lighting, two fully staffed bars and a great big screen at the back, which began displaying trippy visuals that took us back to our Brighton days as final act DJ Paul Loraine took to the stage. What bank holiday family plans had been scuppered to enable all these staff to be here?
This was the DJ we’d never heard of that had stepped in to replace The Orb. It was a great set, though I spent half of it trying to work out where I knew him from. Had I chatted to him in the upper foyer during the interval of Dial M For Murder two nights previously? Had he been on one of my tours? Was he the mild-mannered janitor?
No, I finally realised, he was the bloke I chatted to after the previous day’s Guernsey FC match, about the horrendous weather conditions. During that conversation, neither of us had any idea that we would be in a hall at Beau Sejour the next night, rather than a castle in the Vale.
As I pedalled home, I was grinning. How easy it could have been to cancel the event, once it was clear those marquees were too dangerous to put up. Everyone would have understood, and there would still have been the wind-down gigs on the Monday.
Instead – in a victory for human ingenuity that made me stop worrying about AI and fascism for five minutes – Guernsey’s hospitality sector mobilised, its leisure centre stepped up, its fun-loving battalion of volunteers were gleefully deployed, its musicians adapted and its music-loving festival-goers barely batted an eyelid.
And all were rewarded with the most unforgettable of festivals by which to celebrate the golden anniversary of a Guernsey institution.
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