First-class festival

In addition to pulling together the fourth Cornbury Music Festival, which this year sees Blondie headlining on the Sunday night, he is busily organising his own wedding.

For a fleeting moment he had considered combining the two events, effectively bringing together the two great loves of his life - the celebrated Gloucestershire-based artist Nicola Grellier, whom he is to marry, and the music festival, on which he lavishes a fortune to turn his musical dreams into a reality.

"My brother suggested getting married on stage at Cornbury," Hugh chortled. "We could have had Debbie Harry as the maid of honour. There would have been a great gospel choir on hand."

But even for Nicola, who knows all too well about his obsession with the musical extravaganza on the Cornbury estate, this was just a little too much.

Instead, the pair will tie the knot with a small group of family and friends near Hugh's home in the tiny village of Shorthampton, near Charlbury, rather than in front of thousands of rock fans, impatient to see the likes of The Proclaimers and Echo and the Bunnymen.

Not that the festival crowd would have displayed anything but good manners.

For Cornbury, staged in the grounds of Lord Rotherwick's home, has not been dubbed Poshstock for nothing.

Set in the rolling countryside of west Oxfordshire, it has laid new standards in comfort and facilities for festival-goers fed up with squalor, muddy fields, filthy toilets and three-figure ticket prices.

Hugh Phillimore spends much of his life delivering the biggest names in entertainment for both private and corporate events.

In recent weeks he arranged a Lionel Richie performance at a Gucci party and put Jennifer Lopez in front of 60 people for a Russian client.

He somehow managed to top that by helping to persuade Tina Turner to return to the stage for the first time in seven years to perform at London's Natural History Museum at a Caudwell Trust charity bash, with tickets priced at £15,000. (The sight of the rock legend carefully counting stairs of one of the museum's grand staircases, down which she would later have to descend in stilettos, is one that will stay with him.) d=3,3,1But Cornbury is different. First staged in 2004, it remains very much 'his baby', an event organised by a music nut, in his own backyard.

Joe Cocker, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant, Texas and The Pretenders have all headlined in past years.

But the smaller stages have also, for those in the know, offered early glimpses of superstars in the making, such as Amy Winehouse.

The 2007 Cornbury Festival, held on July 7 and 8, with The Oxford Times among the sponsors, is no different. David Gray and The Waterboys will headline on the Saturday, with Blondie, The Feeling and Suzanne Vega to follow the next day. There will also be a The Word Stage, offering many of Hugh's old and new favourites like Kate Walsh and Dan Reeder, while on Sunday Tim Healey will be staging the Oxford Folk Festival on the second stage.

"We have just passed last year's sales figures," Hugh told me when we met in his favourite Woodstock pub for a quick cooked breakfast on his way between Cornbury and Arundel, where Girls Aloud and Lemar will be performing in August.

"I suspect that we will be attracting over 12,000 people to Cornbury. We have just completed an analysis and found we have only sold about 200 tickets in London.

"It seems more or less everyone who comes, lives within a 50-mile radius. We are now looking to break even, which would be a real achievement."

People still marvel at his readiness to sustain huge losses, with Cornbury costing more than £600,000 to stage. But he cheerfully tells me: "Glastonbury took seven years to break even and the Guildford Festival took 12 years."

Earlier this year he had found himself really up against it, with the former American Vice-President Al Gore largely to blame.

For in February, Hugh, having signed up the hugely-popular band Keane and the newly-reformed New Zealand superstars Crowded House, had been relaxing at home contemplating a wonderful weekend in July, when news arrived of the American politician's plans for a series of global Live Earth concerts, featuring Madonna at Wembley on July 7.

"Both Keane and Crowded House wanted to be involved. So it meant virtually having to start from scratch," he said, with no apparent bitterness.

Happily, the Old Etonian, is nothing if not well connected. And Blondie, who starred in the first Cornbury festival, mercifully did not keep him hanging on the telephone.

It was a relief, not least because on that previous occasion, the ambitious running order had meant Hugh was forced to ask the New Yorkers to cut their set short.

Hugh recalls: "I was firmly told that they never play less than 90 minutes. I was a little surprised because Debbie Harry had had a really bad cold. Before she arrived I was told to have a doctor and masseur ready. But once on stage it is difficult to get her off."

These, however, were minor difficulties for a man who has worked with artists from Frank Sinatra to Stevie Wonder.

He can even afford to laugh that Lord Rotherwick recently told him that he was happy to invest in more infrastructure for the shows "now I know that you are not going out of business".

But then Lord Rotherwick is well aware that the first Cornbury Festival had been held in 1796, although originally more of a picnic, organised by three Wesleyan Methodists, apparently to provide local workers with an alternative to the rowdiness of the annual Witney Festival.

This year festival-goers will also be encouraged to contribute to ROSY (Respite Nursing for Oxfordshire's Sick Youngsers), a charity supported by Lady Rotherwick.

The couple are no doubt impressed by the number of families who turn up each year, with parents willing to let youngsters roam freely.

As Mark Ellen, the editor of the rock magazine The Word, puts it: "There is nothing to compare with Cornbury. It's the only rock festival for all ages, where your day won't be dented by demented jugglers and your night by rave-pixies playing dance music in the campsite."

Last year, it was widely rumoured that Prince William had shown up. In fact, it was his uncle, Edward, the Duke of Wessex, who was the rocking royal.

Hugh's wife-to-be will be going to the festival with her three children. The marriage will not be taking place until September.

"Believe it or not I'm putting on The Temptations that night. And I'm also organising something for somebody in Marrakesh." He went quiet. "Marrakesh, wouldn't be bad for a honeymoon, would it?"