With this year’s Idler Festival just weeks away, Tom Hodgkinson looks back on some of the wonderful (and scary) moments from festivals past…

I was pleased yesterday to unveil Idler Art Director Alice Smith’s poster design for the Idler Festival 2023, with full line-up.

This year I’ll be chatting on stage with Irvine Welsh and Sindhu Vee. Friday’s headliner is the always brilliant Adam Buxton.

To me, our festivals replace the old feast days which were destroyed by the Protestant reformers. Most cultures have a tradition of regular days or weekends off when people took a break from the everyday and entered a non-utilitarian world.

Today’s festivals have grown out of things like Saturnalia in the old world and more recently, Glastonbury and the Stonehenge Free Festival. They appealed to our deep-seated love of paganism, ritual, ecstatic dancing, intoxicants and not working.

The Idler Festival has evolved slowly from the festival Victoria founded in the nineties, the Clerkenwell Literary Festival. That wild affair ran from 1997 to 2003 and featured a host of creative types you might not normally associate with a conventional literary festival, including train robbers, comedians, Bollywood stars, porn stars, pop stars, rappers, DJs and former drug dealers.

In the noughties we went a bit quiet on the events front, thanks to having children and living on a remote corner of Exmoor. We did have a lot fun helping with our local free festival in Lynton and Lynmouth, putting on Alabama 3, Keith Allen, Gruff Rhys and Bert Jansch. This festival collapsed following an invasion by two thugs: the following year it was impossible to get insurance without paying the police an unaffordable sum to stand guard.

We ventured back into the festival world with the Idler’s Grove which we set up at the Secret Garden Party in 2007. Speakers included Crass’s Penny Rimbaud, author Jay Griffiths and, memorably, Mumford and Sons played on our tiny stage.

Then, from 2008 to 2018 we set up a marquee each year at the Port Eliot Festival and ran the Idler Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment, our psychedelic school. This is where you would have heard the first glimmerings of the magic mushroom renaissance and may have been lucky enough to witness Bill Drummond building a bed or Wilko Johnson giving an astronomy lecture. Port Eliot Festival has now very sadly closed down.

So thanks to Fenton House for hosting the Idler Festival. This year it’s our 4th time in this beautiful merchant’s house at Hampstead. Last year the event, headlined by Jarvis Cocker, sold out completely so get your skates on.

Please cast your eye over our brilliant programme. As ever we have attempted to mix the best authors and artists with fine merry-making and radical politics to create a genuinely life-improving three days. Fenton House is indeed “a fine place to talk treason”.

Weekend and day tickets are both available. And subscribers please note that we’ll be releasing audio and video clips of the festival which will be available to you to listen to or watch on our website.

Come and see why Cosmo Landesman, writing in the Spectator, called us “Britain’s best arts and literary festival.”

See you there.

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