Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra are coming to Cornbury Festival

The weather may have taken a temporary turn for the worse, but it’s clearly going to take more than a few dark clouds to burst Jools Holland’s summery mood.

“I can’t wait to get out and play,” he tells me. “There’s an ancient pleasure in being outside with trees and things.”

The boogie woogie pianist, bandleader and broadcaster is, in fact, already on the road, having embarked on one of his traditional spring and summer tours, which will keep him busy until the end of August.

But while his dates are all inside, he insists he looks forward to getting out in the open air — playing in grand settings such as Hampton Court, Althorp House, Kew Gardens and Oxfordshire’s Great Tew Park, where he returns to headline Cornbury Festival.

The Friday night show sees him joined by his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra and special guests Soft Cell star Marc Almond and former Spice Girl Melanie C. The stately homes of England have become a second home to the South London-born father-of-four, who started off as a teenager hammering out tunes in East End pubs. His first recording session was for the punk band Wayne County the Electric Chairs in 1976 (Wayne later had a sex change and became Jayne). The title is too profane for a family newspaper.

Since then he has performed with musicians who achieved success in every decade of the 20th century — among them Dr John, Sting, Tom Jones, Eric Clapton, George Harrison and David Gilmour. He was a founder member of Squeeze and played on The Fine Young Cannibals’s hit Good Thing (for which he was paid the standard musician’s rate of £150).

He picked up an OBE for services to the British music industry, starred at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Concert at Buckingham Palace with long- standing singer Ruby Turner, and, more bizarrely, he is a Deputy Lieutenant for Kent and Honorary Colonel of the Royal Engineers 101 (City of London Engineer Regiment) - the British Army’s bomb disposal experts, is a greyhound racing enthusiast, he appeared in the Spice Girls flick Spiceworld, oh, and he and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra performed All You Need is Love for world leaders at the G8 Conference in Holland. Amusingly, Jacques Chirac mistook the trumpet intro for the start of the French national anthem and stood up.

Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Boris Yeltsin joined him, to avoid embarassment - and proceeded to dance.

These days Jools is equally familiar as a TV personality, hosting of the ever-popular Later... with Jools Holland shows, in which he showcases new music from new and established artists. The show has run for at something like 42 series. His New Year’s Eve Hootenanny has run for 20 years. Prior to that he had hosted The Tube with one Paula Yates — a burst of creative swearing on a live trailer once earning him a six-week suspension from the show.

“The years are a little bit of a blur,” he says cheerfully.

One thing he is careful to do is mix things up. If you’ve seen Jools before, you can expect to be rewarded with a whole new show from a band of virtuoso musicians who ought to be famous in their own right.

“The orchestra is a like a big creature,” he chirps. “It has grown organically and that’s what makes it what it is. It’s a group of people thinking together and it needs to be fed new music.

“We go out in spring and summer, and again in winter, learn new stuff and it moves on. We play things a lot, retire them and find something else. New people and guests also bring along something else. It’s an ongoing process.

“Nobody would decide to start a big band from scratch. To be a big band that works you need to have the same people. So they are not just reading music together, but thinking it together. In a year we’ll do 70 shows and spend 20 days of recording. There’s a lot of time spent travelling the world together.

“We have different configurations too. Sometimes we are a sports car, at other times a limousine or an estate. It becomes all these things and everything in between.”

The thread of continuity is Jools’s helmsmanship and its adherence to good rock and roll and boogie woogie - including a few staples.

“Certain pieces have an effect on people, and get the boogie woogie muscles twitching, ” he says. “Other pieces get the ska knees moving.

“You can plainly see the effect music has on people. You can see the necks twitching and the heads moving.”

That, he says, is the beauty of playing live. “You are looking into the whites of their eyes,” he goes on. “But by doing it for a while it becomes something you love - and it gets better.

“Like everything, whether you are writing, gardening, or painting a picture, the more you are doing, the more you steadily improve - and I’m doing that with a big band.”

With up to 18 members, I suggest it must, at times, feel like herding cats.

“Well, I’m a kindly despot,” he laughs gently. “I rule with a rod of Liquorice. You want part of everyone’s character, but have to have one person deciding what to play. It’s a vehicle for music I’ve written and I’m the leader.”

How does he feel about returning to Cornbury - where he headlined in 2004 and 2012? “It’s got a lovely atmosphere, a very mixed line-up and the location is beautiful,” he says. “We played one of our best performances ever there.”

And is he prepared to for Poshstock’s famously rarefied clientele - which often includes the Prime Minister?

“The great thing about ska music is that it’s for all people,” he says. “It knows no divisions between politics and social classes.”

And the same goes for his brand of boogie woogie? “It’s all about the effect it has on people,” he says. “It’s up-tempo and at the root of a lot of popular music.

“It’s easy to play badly, hard to play well and never the same twice.”

He smiles. “It’s easier to play than explain.”

Jools Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra Cornbury Festival, Great Tew July 4 
cornburyfestival.com