It was the night before Midsummer's Eve and the queue of people waiting to buy tickets was so long that it seemed as if the entire village had turned up to join in the fun. Indeed, Finstock Village Hall was packed to the gunnels - not a spare seat was to be had when the Mellstock Band took to the stage with their new show A Midsummer Cushion: Music and Songs of John Clare.

The title refers to a village custom of celebrating midsummer by making a decoration from a piece of turf into which wild flowers were inserted. While the four members of the band (David Townsend, Pete Cooper, Gill Redmond and Charles Spicer) were dressed in colourful 19th-century outfits that John Clare would have certainly recognised, no one in the audience actually carried a midsummer cushion. Maybe that was because the midsummer cushion is a Northamptonshire tradition (John Clare is a Northamptonshire poet).

The audience did, however, come prepared to enjoy themselves and were certainly not disappointed. Within moments of the show's opening, with a reading from The Village Minstrel, followed by Sadler's Balloon and Archer's Dance, feet were tapping as expectation turned to delight.

The people of Finstock know this band well, becausae all its new shows are tried out in this attractive little village, in the belief that if a show works for Finstock it will work for Oxford - and, in this case, for members of the Clare Society, who commissioned this show.

Leader David Townsend admitted that a celebration of John Clare took the band far from their usual territory of Hardy's Wessex; but he added that Clare, like Hardy, wrote down local versions of songs and dance tunes. He also wrote racy descriptions of village life and customs and frequently played the fiddle in pubs and around gYpsy camp-fires.

The evening brought together all sides of Clare's life, including his tragic end. It brought together members of the audience too, who left declaring that it had been yet another never-to-be-forgotten evening, thanks to The Mellstock Band.