Author: Darren Worrow

Never forget, there’s lots of other events on our calendar, for families and everyone of all ages. But this weekend is a bank holiday, and those local live music hunters will be out on the prowl, so here’s what we’ve found for them….

Thursday 21st August, Just Parsons plays the Foyer Sessions at Chippenham’s Neeld Hall, that’s a freebie. Wild Isles & Plummie Racket are at The Castle, Swindon, free, while The Illegal Eagles are at The Wyvern, ticketed. There’s a Fayre on Salisbury’s Market Square with The Kings of Lounge Trio, and that’s free.

It’s the Welcome to the free Wildwest Country fringe festival at the Three Horseshoes in Bradford-on-Avon, ongoing throughout this week and weekend with a whole lot of circus and music. The Headrush Brass Band plays a hospitality jamboree there on Thursday 21st.

Friday 22nd, and things are really rolling, there’s even a Music for Miniatures at St Andrew’s Church, Devizes, 10:30am, for the under fours!

Staying in Devizes for anyone over the age of four, try out Brogan Pearce singing covers at The Condado Lounge, or  a “Haze Session” with Marcus Boll at The Three Crowns. HoneyFest kicks off at The Barge on Honeystreet, camp up for that one all weekend, ticketed, for they’ve The Undercover Hippy, RSVP and The Scribes headlining; sweet as mate.

Zack Linton plays The Lamb on the Strand, with new Zia Pizza company and organised by Bird is the Word. The Free Spirits Band at The Royal Oak, Hawkeridge, a Red Hot Chilli Peppers Tribute at The Wheatsheaf, Calne, and The Blue Moon Band at The Rising Sun, Christian Malford, near Chippenham.

Not Quite Bob at Aldbourne Sports & Social Club. It’s the E-Fest Music Festival in Swindon, and Supersonic Queen at Town Gardens Bowl. A Summer Beer Gin & Rum Festival at The Hop Chapel, but we’re heading into Swindon for a Talk in Code single launch at The Vic, with Riviera Arcade and Flora Fiora in support; bang tidy that’ll be!

Trips out for Devizes-based acts this weekend: No Alarms and No Devizes are not in Devizes, they’re at the Boathouse in Bradford-on-Avon, Jon Amor Trio are at The Royal Oak in Bath. The Vintage Explosion plays Komedia, Bath, but they’re not from around here, I was just running off the Bath paragraph, not to avoid any confusion!

P!nk tribute Vicky Jackson at the Cheese & Grain, Frome. Little Joe at the Coach and Horses, in Salisbury. Fayre on the Square continues at the Market Place in Salisbury with 

Rock The Boat DJs. Lonely Road Band at the Wig and Quill, Summer Beer Festival at the Old Mill with Lucas Hardy, and Jetback and Wilton Voices at The Bear.

Don’t forget Flock Steady Beats festie at The Music Baa near Salisbury, ticketed, hurry up, Buster Shuffle and The Dub Pistols headline, with a host of offbeat goodies, including Captain Accident over the course of the weekend; mint sauce me up!

Tucker’s Cider & Music Festival at Tucker’s Grave in Faulkland, El Toro headline Saturday, with Russ Barnes, 41 Fords, The Usual Suspects, Call the Shots, more on Sunday too!

Saturday then, the 23rd August 2025; Bone Chapel at The Southgate, Devizes, and Jambon Chapeau at The Pelican. The Sylvertones at The Duke in Bratton.

Humdinger at The Cooper’s Arms, Pewsey. Sophie Henderson at the Crown, Aldbourne.

Room 101 play The Lamb, Trowbridge, whilst The Twelve Bells have a Punk Picnic. Tex & The Troubadours at Melksham Rock n Roll Club’s monthly dance.

Bradford-on-Avon, you groovy lot! With the Welcome to the free Wildwest Country fringe festival at the Three Horseshoes still going down, there’s CastleFest at the Castle, with a great lineup too.

Thomas Arnold Hall in Warminster has an Ultimate 80’s Revival Disco. Ex Stiff Little Finger XSLF at The Vic in Swindon. Total Rex, a Marc Bolan & T Rex Tribute at Chapel Arts, Bath, and the Big Disco at Komedia.

Forwards Festival over Clifton Downs, Bristol, and we’re heading south, the Tin Shack Band are at The Ram in Tidworth. Jolyon Dixon & Rachel Sinnetta make a welcome return to The Kings Arms, Amesbury.

Sleepwalker at the Fayre on the Market Square in Salisbury. Slingshot at Qudos. Jon Bailey at The Royal George. Hop Back Blues Band at The Duke of York. Timespan at The Horse & Groom. Salisbury Live has a Summer Beer Festival, with Black Iris at The Old Mill and The Bear Inn has an August Bank Holiday Beer Festival with Break Cover, Bob Primmer and Ben Vuckovic.

Sunday 24th, then, the fun never stops! 30+ Daytime Clubbing at The Exchange, Devizes. 

Eddie Martin will be at The Southgate around 5pm, and the Roughcut Rebels have got The Three Crowns covered. Potterne Cricket Club’s ever popular Potterne Festival is likely sold out, but you never know your luck!

Talbot-Fest at the Talbot in Calne, then; Dorothy House fundraiser, all free, see the poster, wicked lineup, Talboterrians!!

The Sylvertones are at The Crown in Westbury. Unpredictables at the Boathouse, Bradford-on-Avon. Rorke’s Drift at The Vic Swindon.

Johnny G at The Bell, Bath, Kenyan musician Vonj at Komedia.

Coach & Horses Sunday Session in Salisbury has our homegrown marvel, JP Oldfield.  Fayre on the Square continues in the Market Place Salisbury with Park Island, as does the Old Mill’s Summer Beer Festival: with Route 3. Salisbury Live are at The Horse & Groom with The Norfolks, Lucas Hardy and The Late Starters. August Bank Holiday Beer Festival continues at The Bear Inn with Slingshot, Above Board, The Reel Deal. Pudenski Bros at The Goat, and a Picnic in the Park at Redlynch Sports & Social Club with the Woodfalls Band.

The Hammervilles’ Bank Holiday Beach Party at the Cheese & Grain, Frome. 

Bank Holiday Monday; yay!! Drew Bryant is at The Three Crowns, Devizes from 3pm, and of course, it’s Black Rat Monday at The British Lion, an annual outdoor Bank Holiday Monday extravaganza, all free, local live bands, they won’t tell us who, a charity BBQ raising funds for Dorothy House. 

Box Rocks is of course the other stalwart of August bank holiday, at The Queen’s Head, Box, they’ve got a fantastic lineup including our good friend Chandra; nice one!

The Americania Boatfest is another damn fine option, at the Boat House in Bradford-on-Avon; too many bands to mention, but I’m told our Burn The Midnight Oil will be there, and that’s worth the trip over alone! Staying in Bradford, The Lamb Yard are celebrating 25 years, with Talk in Code headlining, Fly Yeti Fly and The Trapdoor Spiders. It’s all free in Bradford!

Bath, and there’s another free community fest at Komedia, Rusty Shackle, True Strays, and Concrete Prairie, with added Courting Ghosts and Barney Kenny. Barrel House Vipers are at The Bell.

Salisbury, and Pete Donnelly is at The Duke of York, and there’s the last day of the Old Mill’s Summer Beer Festival with SO Uncool.

That’s all we’ve found…….so far….folks, summer is OVER!! I’m sure many will jump on the bandwagon and make me add more to our event calendar really soon!! There’s only one link you need to keep up to date, and its HERE! Have a great weekend!

Harold Wilson said, “a week in politics is a long time.” Lesser within local politics, but we’ve a month to lambast, so no messing about…. okay, maybe a little. With the promise to reduce satire to this monthly causerie, I’ve been biting my lip till sore… Calne Councillors for Rape campaign, Potterne Hates Solar, to a five- or six-million-pound “sinkhole,” in other words a Wiltshire councillor’s offshore account; it’s all been happening……

Pride month too, where we embraced freedom of expression and equality, or got triggered. “Wens strait pride munth?” thick slices of gammon inquired on social media, and they’ve a point. When we’ve progressed from centuries of heterosexuals beheaded, to imprisonment, onto ridicule, and now more agreeably just obtaining angered emojis on every Pride Facebook share simply for loving someone, maybe. Until then just stay home, it’s not law to attend a Pride, you know? I suspect the sunny but rainy start to the month triggered them too; “even the sky’s gone woke!”

Last month Wiltshire Police and Crime Commissioner Philip Wilkinson was on weed, this month it’s speed; he’s right, dammit, it is a gateway drug! What is a gateway drug anyhow, one you can buy in a supermarket? And if so, can you mix them with Somerfield drugs?!

Ah, Wiltshire Police were cracking down on speeding, raving, weed, and anything else causing misinformed Wilko sweaty underarm patches; brutally ripping foxes apart for fun, he’s fine with. When twenty-seven fruit-bats were clocked speeding in Wilton and a further thirty-three in Harnham at the beginning of the month, Wilko told The Wiltshire Times, “Speeding is dangerous, it can kill and leave others seriously injured.”

This is shocking, a shocking piece of clickbait. No shit, Sherlock Wilko. Like a football commentator, overpaid to state the bleeding obvious. Peep from your office window and realise selfish pricks have cars; they’re hoodies-up driving gung-ho like they’re escaping the wrath of Steppenwolf, else parking them wherever its most inconvenient for emergency services.

This is something we cannot blame those in positions of power for, it is every driver’s responsibility; Google the word “responsibility” in this era where no one is held accountable, not even councillors “losing” six million smackers, of which we will move onto when convenient. Just thought I’d mention it under the premise of “setting a good example.”

There’s no social grouping either; young, old, male, female, black, white; so many drivers have got headless chickens going “you’re erratic, pal;” French headless chickens.

Yet Wiltshire done away with stationary cameras, too expensive, but Wilko’s salary isn’t, apparently. A salary the average copper wiping up bits of brain left on the highway could only dream of. “We haven’t got the resources,” Wilko whinges, then deploys intelligence to break up kids having fun. Yep, on the 19^th of June Melksham Police were “aware of a planned large gathering due to take place in Lacock.”

“The event,” they bragged on Facebook, “which was being organised via WhatsApp, was set to occur without the landowner’s permission and was expected to attract a significant number of young people. We have engaged directly with the individual believed to be organising the gathering, and they have now cancelled the event.”

God forbid, young people, gathering, throwing away their cares and stresses of a business-like education system where they’re the products, for just a few hours, enjoying themselves without profiteering festival organisers hosting middle-class festivals they cannot afford; if it ends in anarchy, it’ll be of the government’s own making. I’m not going to pretend I’m hip with the kids, I’m a 52-year-old grandad, but have we not been here before…with glowsticks?!

One tip, young urn’s; we had raves of 40,000, and we did it by word of mouth; try it, cos WhatsApp can be infiltrated. “We didn’t ‘ave all thart inter-web thingy bark wen I be argh right raver, yer nose!”

Ah yes, lessons of the nineties forgotten, now unarchived. If you don’t provide entertainment for youth, they’ll make their own. Does this fake Labour government want this? Keep supporting genocide, silence objectors, set that example, and watch this backfire into massive civil disobedience, why don’t you?!

“The safeguarding of young people remains a top priority for us,” the police said, didn’t matter about Calne, something else to move onto.

I recall a time when official “pay” raves were no better organised and safer than their illegal counterparts. I cannot say if the same goes now, but unrestricted from the rules of society the majority looked out for each other, even tidied up after themselves. Other than perhaps the noise, they really weren’t the massive problem the media and government would have had people believe, but police would turn up anyway, while their town centres were wrought with drunken troublemakers.

Why not praise their initiative and police it accordingly? Because it’s illegal? Don’t make me laugh, foxhunting is illegal too, but you turn a blind eye to that.

Promoting hate speech isn’t entirely legal either, but police didn’t intervene in Calne when rogue Reform councillor Violette Simpson mistook hypermasculinity and rape culture for “freedom of speech.” Because thanks to Calne Town Council, who unlike Trowbridge’s, swallowing Farage’s strawberry milkshake cum bucket at the Civic Hall, they sensibly refused her event to go ahead in council property. Some call it “woke,” others, with a braincell, call it common sense; I believe they’ve similar meanings.

Ah, Violette again, who, seemingly so frustrated in South Africa about the abolition of apartheid, took it out on the wildlife, proudly posted her gunning an innocent antelope as her Facebook profile picture, and still manged to obtain a seat on Calne Town Council. We’re so indoctrinated Reform candidates could shoot Hello Kitty and still win a by-election.

She invited Carl Benjamin to Calne for a nice chat about “British Identity and the Modern Male,” which roughly translates to how to progress your hatred for women into violence, it seems to me. Carl, though egotistically calls himself Sargon of Akkad after the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire, is rather a YouTubing Swindon answer to Andrew Tate, just with a smidgen more hatred for feminism.

Simpson whimpered about the cancelation like the hurt puppy she probably would’ve shot, calling it an “unprecedented move,” by Calne Town Council, and claimed they were “scared of genuine open and honest dialogue.” Benjamin got a wrap on the knuckle when he Tweeted to Labour MP Jess Phillips, “I wouldn’t even rape you,” meaning it as an insult, to say she was so unattractive to consider raping, ergo if he was to pay her a compliment the precise reverse would be, “I would rape you,” and Violette thinks this is “honest dialogue?!”

It’s not really, is it? It’s twisted mindfuckery intended to evoke and encourage the kind of hypermasculinity which leads to scenarios akin to Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s celebrated drama Adolescence. Being Calne suffered a real-life comparable situation just six years ago, when a seventeen-year-old boy stabbed the girlfriend who left him, was an event like this respectful to the family of Ellie Gould?

Then again, does Reform understand respect? “We need strong healthy men to maintain a strong healthy society,” Simpson waffled, has she not seen what this lovechild of Henry VIII and Minecraft Steve has been preaching from Satan’s scrotum?! I’m a red-blooded British modern male, and to me that means having self-control, accepting patriarchy has been rightfully replaced by equality, and life is not Grand Theft Auto.

Strangely, Benjamin himself is a family man, living masked in a fantasy world like he’s Sauron, inspiring boys to take up arms against girls in some imaginary gender war, and I think that’s worse than him being a masturbating loner in a bedsit, because he’s normalising this medieval rhetoric. Not to mention, if he did bash the bishop more, he might be less tetchy; you cannot replace a knob with a game controller, for whilst it may satisfy the male craving for fiddling, it does nought for sexual satisfaction.

Yet in a you’ve not heard the last of this yet notion, Violette vowed to host more controversial events. I wonder what they might be. Matthew Hopkins’ Witch-Burning Festival on International Women’s Day, or a homage to the work of Sir Jimmy Saville on Mothering Sunday?

She even encouraged another Reform town councillor, Augusta Urquhart-Nicholls to jump this bandwagon and bleat to Calne News about how their freedom of speech is unhinged by not allowing them to promote hate. “Reform are here now,” Urquhart-Nicholls told Calne News, “we have been elected, did you really think I would make this easy for you?” Sounds like a Trump-like threat to anyone with empathy, unsurprisingly.

Okay, if she’s an advocate of free speech despite backed by a fascist company posing as a political party, she might not go as far as sucking off Bob Vylan, but she cannot object to me stating the bleeding obvious, that though I’ve not met the bloke, or have any desire to do so, he sounds like an utterly vile doggie doing, typical of Reform, and the only event he should be speaking at is a how to drop your soap in the shower for kudos at HMP Belmarsh.

Can we move on now, because if there’s any positive to be obtained from these women promoting hatred towards women, it’s surely proof that Reform councillors are as thick as a Boxing Day turd.

Things are nicer in Potterne, they’re just in dying need of a Green Party parish councillor. I supported Potterne Against Solar as I agreed One Tree Hill was an unsuitable location for a solar farm, but now they’re raging against another, proposed on Whistley Road, because it’s a blot on the landscape between the cesspit and breakers yard. It might just be me, but I’m kind of thinking they just don’t like renewable energy.

One legend suggested on Facebook they put them on the roofs of carparks, because yeah, dammit, all those multistorey carpark roofs in Potterne are just going to waste! Roughly translated, “not in my backyard.” I’m mistaken to assume we all had to do our bit, before One Tree Hill is One Tree Island. But it’s nice to know I can still walk my dog there when all life on Earth is extinct.

Carpark? Don’t make me laugh; on the same day, the trusty Gazelle & Herod reported on the uncertainty of St Stephen’s multi-storey carpark in Trowvegas. Under review from structural engineers, “three months after a swathe of parking bays were closed off.” Carparks here cannot hold their own weight, let alone a solar farm on top; almost symbolic of the shambolic Wiltshire Council, huh?

Oh, bet you thought I wouldn’t mention it, didn’t you? Hope and pray this will be pushed under the carpet as quickly as it crept up on us; the £5 million, or maybe £6 million, (who’s counting the odd million?) “sinkhole” opened in Wiltshire Council’s finances the new Lib Dem administration revealed, and corporate director of resources Lizzie Watkin informatively said it was “a very big number.” Good point on a Wilko grading system, that’s like a day’s cash-in-hand work for Jeremy Clarkson.

Stranger Things; no-one has been able to explain what caused it, no-one saw it coming, and some doubted whether the hole exists at all. Using a monkey climbing a tree idiom, I favour the latter; a “sinkhole,” is that another name for a councillor’s offshore account?

The Lib Dems claimed the dosh was missing when they took over, the Conservatives claimed it was there when they left, (blame Pickfords?) The council’s chief executive said both things were true, and the shoemaker looked suspiciously at the elves.

£5.5 million was laughed off like it was a box of pencils. All we know is ex-Conservative leader Richard Clewer’s favourite song is Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me. Typical Tory who doesn’t understand the buck stops at the top, and it isn’t the Demogorgon from the upside down.

The scapegoat for the deficit, which must be replenished, but how that might be achieved is the final unsolvable Scooby-Doo mystery, but you can bet your bottom dollar the taxpayer will involuntary be involved, is pointed at an overspend in adult social care. The budget of which is conveniently something as much spiralling out of control as my waffling, yet unarguably a necessity in a world gone bonkers. The Care Act 2014 moved the goalposts, they reckoned, and everyone got confused at the complicated process, very professional till the end.

Imagine the state of social care if there was no overspend, as it’s currently more like Mad Max’s Thunderdome rather than Huxley’s Brave New World. Here’s an unrelated report about severely autistic Darren Jones, about to be evicted from a Warminster care home; there’s many comparable stories, and we know from the Furlong Close scandal, when councillors look at care homes they see real estate.

Though, I’d rather fetch £6 million out of my own pocket than imagine what adult social care would be like if Reform won the majority and deported the immigrants; and the next in line for adult social care is most of the Reform voters! Chew on that fat until next month when we return for more shit hitting the fan. You can negatively comment, but frankly, Frank, I don’t give a Frank.