The first of Oxfordshire’s music festivals is just a week away. Wood Festival takes place between Friday, May 21. and Sunday, May 23, at Braziers Park, Steventon, and the preparations are almost complete. The festival, run by Robin and Joe Bennett, the team which is also behind OX4 and Truck Festival, is perhaps the UK’s only festival run entirely on renewable energy, with composting toilets, showers heated by wood-burning stoves and a solar-powered stage; there’s also a bicycle-powered disco.

This year’s line-up features artists like Tunng, Fionn Regan and Sam Isaac, as well as a plethora of workshops and activities. The festival’s headliner is Frank Turner, a singer songwriter who has enjoyed a meteoric rise over the last year, which began with him playing tiny venues and ended with him headlining a sold out Shepherds Bush Empire.

“I’m really looking forward to it.” Turner says, speaking from Paris on the night of the final show of his tour. “I’ve never headlined a festival before, so this should be a really good experience, I’m performing solo too which I haven’t done in a while, so that’ll be nice.”

Turner began his career in 2001, as the front man of Million Dead, a screamy hardcore quartet that enjoyed a short, tempestuous career ending in 2005. Whereas most of Million Dead’s contemporaries were singing about broken hearts and booze-soaked livers, Turner was different – he was both a soft-hearted crooner and righteous political activist.

Lyrically he was clever and innovative and it was no surprise when he went solo after the band dissolved. Now, given that Wood’s line-up consists almost entirely of acoustic acts and is heavily geared towards families, it’s pretty much the polar opposite of Million Dead, who spent their entire career gigging in sweaty clubs with notoriously brutal mosh pits.

This writer, in fact, left one of their early gigs with blood still dripping from a cut lip and a swollen left eye after being caught by a stray elbow. The fury’s not gone completely from Turner, but he admits that his punk days are over.

“I think punk, as a genre, is a young person’s genre and that’s no bad thing. It’s terrific while you’re involved, but you have to know when to move on. And I think it was right for me to do that.”

And, although his time with the band is something Turner is clearly proud of, it is not something he pines to return to.

“I don’t miss Million Dead, I have to say. We weren’t the best communicators and there was a lot of tension the whole time we were together.

“I miss the aggressiveness I got from the music.”

But does he miss being in a band? “No, not really. I still get the camaraderie of being in a band from the guys I play with now, so no, I don’t miss it at all. I‘ve always thought there’s something timeless about a guy with his guitar and I‘ve found a sound I‘m really happy with.”

There’ll be plenty of guys with their guitars at Wood, which serves as the folkier end of the Bennett brothers’ array of festivals, which Turner isn’t sure he quite qualifies for yet.

‘Can I call myself folk? I don’t think so, certainly not yet anyway.” Regardless of what genre he quite fits, one thing Turner does have is a long and proud association with the Truck brand and is clearly relishing his headline show.

“I think it’s really vital that there are people like the Bennetts out there as they are hugely important to keeping new music alive in this country.

“I’ve always admired what they do and have been very proud to play at Truck and now Wood. It’ll be a great weekend.” It certainly will be.

Tickets for Wood Festival are priced at £70 for adults. Teens (13-17) can get tickets for £50 and those who are under 12 can get in free.

(www.thisistruck.com).