Now in its eighth year, the Cornbury Festival, held this year at a new Oxfordshire location, has grown in stature and is as magnificent from above – I went up in a helicopter with a daredevil photographer – as on the ground. It's also fast becoming part of "the season", alongside the Derby, Wimbledon and the Henley Regatta, with Caffè Nero and Pimm's not quite on tap but plentiful in the plush VIP area and beyond.

Dubbed one of the UK's 'cleanest, cosiest' boutique festivals, The Cornbury Festival will kick off its eighth year next month in its new Oxfordshire location in Tew. The eclectic, family-oriented, line-up features James Blunt, Cyndi Lauper, Status Quo, Eliza Doolittle and the recently reformed Faces, with original members Ronnie Wood, Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan, and guest vocalist Mick Hucknall.

Hollywood director's move to reinvigorate Napa Valley estate a 'dream come true'

One of modern life's stranger phenomena is the weird paradox of knowing that the majority of people do something, but finding that you don't know anybody who does it. For instance, I don't know anybody who won't move down the carriage when there is plenty of room and people are trying to get on the train, and yet when I am on a train (or, more likely, trying to get on it), most people don't move down the carriage. Who are they? What is their thinking? I'd love to know. Likewise, I have never met a man who admits to honking his car horn at women in the street, so I can't ask what it is that motivates them, and why they can never think of anything to say once they've got the woman's attention.

Simply Red star Mick Hucknall has issued "a public apology" to the hundreds of women he slept with at the height of his fame.

In a mocked-up Main Street in the middle of a field in Sussex, several strikingly well-dressed women are queueing impatiently for admission to the catwalk show in the Fashion Pavilion. Some are clad in the khaki uniform of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (the famous Fanys), some are in land-girl slacks with their hair knotted inside red bandannas. Others are squeezed into tight rayon skirts that accentuate their Monroe hips, or floral cotton blouses with embroidered trim that their grandmothers might have considered a little fussy back in 1948.

Among the guests at the Big Chill Festival last weekend was ex-Joy Division bassist Peter "Hooky" Hook. During a Q&A, Hook was invited to name the "biggest pillock" he'd ever met during his days as a regular at the legendary Hacienda Club in Manchester. "The crown would have to go to Mick Hucknall," he replied. "At the end of each night [at the club], everyone used to congregate by the front door, and there was one wonderful night when we heard this voice saying 'Mick Hucknall coming through, Mick Hucknall coming through!' It was Mick Hucknall coming through. So one of the Salford gangsters who was in the club turned round and lamped him. And everyone just ignored it." Considering the relish with which he recounted this tale, I can't imagine Hook will be hob-nobbing with the former Simply Red singer (who now fronts The Faces) when the two appear on the same bill at the Goodwood Vintage Festival this weekend. Hook is due to close the event with a full rendition of Joy Division's 1979 album Unknown Pleasures.

Seventies chart stars The Faces are to reunite, with Mick Hucknall taking Rod Stewart's role, it was announced today.

It might, as they say, be best to sit down. Michael Flatley – Irish jigster, sometime holder of the world record for taps per second, all too easily confused with Mick Hucknall – is making a comeback. More than that: he plans to rejoin Lord Of The Dance, the multimillion-pound tap-dancing monolith he founded in 1996.

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