Stonehenge to the Murder Hotel: A Weekend on the Festival Circuit

Tuesday, 26th May 2026

The week's run of clear weather continued into Tuesday for a booking at Bourton Hall. To think that I have lived just down the road from this venue for my whole life and have never visited, let alone heard of it before, could be thought of as absurd, but such is the way of the wedding venue industry. The scheduling here ran like clockwork, and to my relief, the venue had a blanket order that prohibited outdoor amplified performances.

The compromise for the afternoon drinks reception was to set up one speaker facing directly into the internal reception room, with a second speaker angled out into the garden. I was positioned just inside the doors of the sun-facing wall. While the setup kept the equipment out of the direct glare, the heat still dictated the movement of the crowd; though I had a handful of guests to entertain inside throughout the afternoon, the vast majority understandably set themselves on the shaded side of the building by the bar to escape the baking 34-degree heat.

Wednesday, 27th May 2026

Wednesday marked a shift in focus with the first full-day rehearsal for the Julie July Band, working intensely toward the upcoming album launch gig. After a week of solo wedding sets and bluegrass covers, switching gears to track-heavy original material required a completely different sort of mental stamina, but getting the full line-up in one room to lock down the arrangements was exactly what the material needed.

Thursday, 28th to Friday, 29th May 2026

The middle of the week brought a forced slowdown with a quiet couple of days on Thursday and Friday. I spent the time nursing the beginning and eventually seeing the end of what might have been summer flu, hay fever, or heat exhaustion, depending on how you choose to look at it. The intense, unyielding heat of the previous days certainly hadn't helped. Thankfully, by Friday evening the weather finally cooled down to a point where I was able to breathe properly again.

Saturday, 30th to Sunday, 31st May 2026

With a bit of a spring back in my step and the aid of a strong dose of electrolytes, I was back on my feet and able to face the weekend’s bookings. Both days were dedicated to a pair of afternoon performances at local care homes. These are always rewarding sessions, requiring a very particular type of repertoire delivery, and it felt good to have the stamina back after a rough couple of days.

Tuesday, 2nd June 2026

Tuesday required a trip out of the local circuit, travelling up to Newark in Lincolnshire to meet Maddie and a new band that were due to fill in on a late-notice booking for the upcoming weekend at the Dorset Tractor Festival. The booker had somehow managed to not tell us about the date until two weeks prior to the gig, by which time the whole regular band were unavailable. The only alternative was to (to tip a nod to Roger Waters) bring in a surrogate band, and it was these players I was set to meet with in Lincolnshire.

Whilst not the same as the regular group, they were on the fringe of our circle, easy to get along with, and seemed organised enough to coordinate backing tracks and get to the festival on time.

Wednesday, 3rd June 2026

Wednesday was another all-day rehearsal with the Julie July Band, continuing the push toward the album launch. This session provided an excellent opportunity to put the Stagepas through its paces after sorting out the preset memory settings.

Having total control over my own monitor mix was an absolute revelation. I spent some time tweaking the EQs on the guitar and vocal channels to achieve maximum clarity and smoothness. For once, I didn't have to worry about other band members turning my volume down on a shared monitor link for being too loud, while I simultaneously struggled to hear my own instrument. Having that independence meant I could dial in exactly what I needed to play comfortably, which made a significant difference to the productivity of the day.

Thursday, 4th June 2026

Thursday was another quiet, low-music day on paper, but the hours were entirely consumed by the heavy logistics of preparing for a massively busy weekend ahead. With three distinct festivals lined up in three different counties over three consecutive days, every piece of gear, backup cable, and wardrobe item had to be meticulously prepped and packed.

Friday, 5th June 2026

The weekend marathon began on Friday with the trip down to the Dorset Tractor Fest. Owing to the stand-in band’s involvement on this first date, I had elected to drive myself down to Dorset rather than carpooling. This independence proved to be a stroke of good fortune upon reaching Salisbury Plain, where I found myself caught in the gridlock. If one must be stuck in traffic, there are worse places to do it than right next to Stonehenge, which was sitting clear by the side of the A303. One day I will visit the site for real, as I tell myself every single time I drive past it.

Despite having only a single rehearsal earlier in the week, some brand-new arrangements, and two completely new songs in the setlist, the gig itself went incredibly well. The surrogate band locked into the material capably and delivered exactly what was required for the festival crowd.

However, my first indication of an imminent tech collapse arrived before we even hit the stage. The drummer, who was also taking onstage control of routing the instrument signals to the front of house, informed me that the signal coming from my acoustic guitar was incredibly weak. This came as a surprise, as that guitar has always delivered a pretty hot signal. The plot thickened when we actually reached the stage and two out of three of my wireless channels were hit with severe RF interference, to the point where I had to abandon the wireless packs entirely and borrow a couple of standard jack leads just to get a connection.

The compounding issues implanted a nagging worry that there might be something fundamentally wrong with the acoustic guitar's internal electronics, though my main suspicion was a simpler culprit: a flat battery. With no time to diagnose it on the spot, I resolved to swap out the battery before the next show, put the technical distractions out of mind, and got on with the performance.

I had originally considered staying over in Dorset after the festival, but ultimately decided against it. Looking at the geographical spread of the weekend, staying down south would have meant driving onwards to Brands Hatch on Saturday, then to Reading on Sunday, before finally heading back to Coventry. I’d had an offer of a ride in the van for the rest of the weekend's dates, which I considered a much more sensible and sociable mode of travel.

To make that logistically work, I needed my own car back at base. I therefore made the drive back from Dorset on Friday night after the gig. The journey took me through a more direct, yet completely deserted and pitch-black route straight through the Cotswolds, getting me home late but set up properly for the group travel ahead.

Saturday, 6th June 2026

I finally walked through the front door at around 2:30am and managed a somewhat generous amount of sleep before getting up to tinker with the kit. The morning was spent reorganising the gear, which included swapping out the wireless cables I no longer needed after Friday's RF issues, and mentally noting that I had somehow managed to leave an XLR cable behind in Dorset. Once the bags were repacked, I ran through a practice warm-up with some violin exercises to keep the fingers loose, and transiently, replaced the battery in the acoustic guitar to hopefully put the weak signal issue to bed.

The weather had been damp, verging on rain, during the drive the previous day, but overnight it had devolved into something just thoroughly miserable and grey.

With the gear prepped, I drove over to meet up with the band van in Atherstone. It was fantastic to see Dave and Bren again. This trip marked our first proper gig together since November, apart from a very brief catch-up back in the spring when I ran into them during a local show with the Folly Brothers. I hadn't seen either of them since last year, so it was good to chew the fat on the road, which kept our minds off the increasingly lousy weather. By the time we were midway down, the rain had reached those "why are we doing this?" proportions that every British touring musician knows only too well.

As we drove, Mark (our dep guitarist) and Sarah (our new bassist) checked into the group chat to let us know they had already arrived at Brands Hatch. They had successfully located the hospitality tent where food was on offer, but confirmed that the weather on-site was still absolute crap.

When we pulled up 45 minutes later, the outlook hadn't changed a bit. Remarkably, the open-air stage was still occupied by a live performance, despite the elements and the serious sight of one of the road crew sweeping sheets of rain off the back of the deck.

After an hour or so, during which time we decompressed from the journey, integrated and reintegrated ourselves with the new and temporary band members, and got changed into stage gear, it was finally time to make the move. We had to hustle our instruments across the short, open-air gap to the stage, getting thoroughly rained on in the process.

Once everything was plugged in and tuned, I noticed there was still RF interference on stage for the wireless signals, but thankfully it was only affecting one instrument this time, which felt like a minor bonus. I immediately changed over to a wired jack lead for the acoustic guitar and prepared to line check.

The ground seemed to open up, however, when the sound tech spoke through the monitors: "Your acoustic is distorting." And it was—a hideous, broken fart of a signal was coming straight through my in-ear monitors. My heart sank. I had literally just changed the battery that morning! Panic set in that this must be a fundamental problem with the pickup itself. I had changed the guitar strings the previous week... could I have somehow damaged the under-saddle element during the swap?

I'd had the foresight earlier in the day to pick up a multi-pack of Duracells along with some Deep Heat for some tired tendons in my arms. Desperate to rule out a faulty new cell, I made a lightning-fast battery change right there on stage. No difference whatsoever.

With the clock ticking, quick thinking led me to a sudden executive decision: I would have to use the electric guitar for all the acoustic songs. The plan was simply to turn off any overdrive, keep the tone light and clean, and just get through the set. I knew I would have to figure out a proper solution for Sunday’s gig in Reading, but for the moment, the golden rule of live performance took over: just work with what you've got.

As the set progressed, the initial panic about my pickup began to ease into suspicion. I noticed that the click track coming through my in-ears was also heavily distorted, and when I listened closely, the electric guitar on the other side of the stage sounded equally crunched. It became increasingly likely that the issue was a front of house error or a clip in the monitor desk, rather than a catastrophic failure of my own kit. I didn’t have a speaker with me to properly audio-test the acoustic at the hotel that night, but I at least had my pedalboard, which could visually measure the input signal level. I resolved to investigate it properly later.

Once we finished the gig, we packed down and headed over to the hospitality room. The space featured a spectacular, long viewing window overlooking the race track—the absolute stuff of legends, even wrapped in grey mist. Unfortunately, by the time we arrived, the rider and the food options had already been thoroughly raided by the other acts. The catering spread had been stripped clean, leaving behind a bizarrely specific assortment: a large ginger root, a massive box of pineapple cubes, several bottles of water, and a lone bag of Crunchie chocolate pieces. I bypassed the raw ginger and the fruit, took the Crunchies and some water, and chalked it up as another classic festival survival meal.

With the gig done and the gear stowed, we headed off to the hotel—a place in Dartford that we’d found on Booking.com. It had looked acceptable enough on the website; the rooms appeared a little cramped and one of the listing images was actually a pencil sketch rather than a photograph, but we had overlooked this and didn’t think too much of it. It was a bed for the night, and at under £30 a head, it felt like a win.

When we arrived, however, we found a completely different story. We actually drove right past the place initially, only locating it properly when we turned around and started counting the house numbers. Gone was any form of hotel signage; in its place stood a building completely clad in scaffolding from top to bottom on all sides. There was a massive skip parked at the front, and the entire property looked like an active construction site.

To say that we were a little incredulous would have been putting things mildly. There were five of us booked in. We had already paid for the accommodation, but whether we were actually going to get usable rooms was the big question. Our first thought was to find somewhere else immediately and claim a refund through the app. While that would theoretically have been possible, the sheer headache of finding a last-minute vacancy for five people on a Saturday night stopped us. We decided to at least have a look inside first, using the digital access code we’d been sent.

Stepping inside, there was no sign of life or any staff in the building. We followed a hand-written sign directly ahead of us that simply said “Rooms”, and the unbelievable nature of the booking continued as we headed up the carpetless stairs and past gaping holes knocked into the wall plaster and around the skirting boards.

We reached the first floor and were greeted by rooms in the—I can’t even say "middle"—midst of a major renovation. In one room, an unfitted toilet sat directly on bare floorboards alongside a fireplace that had been violently pulled from the wall. Another room was piled high to the ceiling with bare mattresses, leaving absolutely no space to walk. In a third, there was nothing but raw timber and a discarded electric drill. What on earth had we walked into?

Bren walked up to the second floor to investigate and was met by a diminutive fellow who pointed back down the stairwell and simply told us, "1st floor." Given that we had already inspected the first floor and concluded it was in no fit state to provide human lodging, we were on the verge of turning around and launching a major complaint.

Just as we were about to throw in the towel, one of the group spotted a door on the ground floor that we had completely missed on our way in. It was behind this door that we finally discovered some liveable rooms. "Liveable" was a relative term, though—the setup was still incredibly weird. How this establishment had managed to maintain a 7.5-star rating on Booking.com seemed entirely unrealistic. There was plaster splattered across the outside of the frosted glass windows, plug sockets that were warped and couldn't actually receive a plug, and toilets and showers that threatened to catastrophically overflow the moment they were used.

We urgently needed to get out of the building to clear our heads, so we headed out to find a curry. This, at least, proved to be the right move. It gave the five of us a chance to finally relax, have a laugh, and distance ourselves from what we had already dubbed the "Murder Hotel."

As it turned out, beyond the bizarre operational choice of having individual room keys placed in lockboxes outside each bedroom door, the beds themselves were actually fairly comfortable. I managed to sleep well, though in fairness, that could have been entirely down to sheer exhaustion.

Sunday, 7th June 2026

The next morning, we checked out and headed off to a local café for breakfast—yet another internet find routed for us. It turned out to be situated right in the middle of a residential housing estate. Driving in, it looked so thoroughly domestic that I completely missed the café sign at first, genuinely believing we were pulling up to have breakfast inside someone’s private house. Once inside, however, the gamble paid off; after a decent breakfast burrito, we loaded back into the van and drove on to Reading.

The journey took us along vast stretches of the M25. It is a strange motorway; looking out from the van windows, you see hardly any evidence of human habitation—no shops, no houses, just an endless grey ribbon of roads and cars cutting through the landscape.

Arriving at Palmer Park for the first of the Summer in Nashville festivals, the atmosphere immediately shifted. It felt almost like visiting family. Over the course of the previous year's tour, we had made genuine friends with several of the other bands on the circuit, and it was brilliant to bump into everyone again and catch up.

Thanks to the weather, which had vastly improved compared to the misery of Brands Hatch, the sun made an appearance. The audience members were actually able to gather in front of the stage and watch the performances without taking a complete soaking.

Our turn for the stage came, and we found ourselves line-checking alongside a line-dancing act that was performing simultaneously. It was great fun and added a brilliant, authentic energy to the afternoon. However, just as we were getting settled into the mix, the sound engineer spoke up.

Though I had forewarned him that my acoustic guitar was potentially acting up, I’m still not entirely sure if I’d inadvertently primed him, because the first thing he said after I plugged in was that the signal was distorting. At least I had already been through this exact fire drill at Brands Hatch the day before, so I didn't waste time panicking; I immediately opted to use the electric guitar for all the guitar parts. It was a massive pain, but that is simply the reality of live performance sometimes.

The rest of the festival went off without a hitch, but the nagging technical worry followed me off the stage. I spent a good portion of the journey home in the van planning my next moves, researching second-hand acoustic guitars on my phone, trying to see where I could physically try them out locally, and calculating how I could fund a sudden replacement.

Monday, 8th June 2026

It wasn't until Monday afternoon that I finally had a chance to set up my own PA system at home, plug the acoustic in, and properly test the signal. To my absolute amazement, I couldn't hear a single bit of distortion—the guitar sounded completely fine, clean, and healthy through my own setup.

While that should be a relief, it leaves me in a frustrating limbo. Now I'm left half-worried that the fault is intermittent, that the distortion will magically reappear the next time I step onto a high-stakes festival stage, and that by leaving it alone, I will have missed my chance to have actually done something about it before the next run of bookings.