"It was a festival made of paper"

As Dorian Lynskey outlined in an article for the Guardian last year, putting on a summer music festival - even one of a relatively modest size, such as Sea Power's Krankenhaus - involves vision, belief and optimism but also a phenomenal amount of hard work, preparation and sheer bloodymindedness.

In light of this BBC report about the ill-fated Monmouth Rising, it would be very charitable to suggest that its organiser, convicted fraudster James Kenny, was merely naive about what would be required. It appears far more likely that he's a shady, deceitful fantasist who cut corners and whose delusions of grandeur have left countless people out of pocket. Much as I like the idea of a cannon that "would fire bacon butties into the campsite in the mornings", it does rather hint that Kenny's plans were at some remove from reality.

I guess it's some consolation that the plug was pulled so far in advance of the scheduled weekend - if Monmouth Rising had gone ahead, it seems certain that it would have been the UK's answer to Fyre. But clueless chancers like Kenny are precisely the sort of trust-damaging blight that the already beleaguered and brittle live music industry really doesn't need at the moment.