Peter Buckley Hill has become something of a festival legend. His sets, both inside the Club Tent and out, are a must for a lot of people. Peter has become a Cambridge institution, but one where the lunatics have taken over.

Peter had an opening night slot on the Thursday, but I bumped into him early on the Friday morning just after he'd emerged from his tent.

#P=Peter Buckley Hill #N=Neil King

#N First of all, your set last night seemed to go down a storm.

#P About eight out of ten from where I stood. It's a lot better than seven and worse than nine. I enjoyed it.

#N You get a lot of genuine affection from the crowd.

#P Phenomenal, staggering, what have I done to deserve this? Not a great deal, but…

#N There are people that buy their tickets for your set and count the rest of the Festival as a bonus.

#P I have heard that. Then again people do all sort of irrational things, some vote conservative, some even vote New Labour.

#N There's a lot of crowd favourites in your set here. Do you find it difficult to introduce new material?

#P Yes. There were actually some, hopefully not too sincere, boos when I announced I was doing a song they didn't know. The number went down quite decently. There is a sense of traditional gags almost.

#N Rory McGrath was saying that an advantage of song is that you can present the same set to the same people two days later and they're still entertained by it.

#P It's sort of right and wrong. There are people that do the same stand up routine, sometimes for years on end. I work the comedy circuit, I've met them. They just look for new audiences. I have heard of audiences shouting to a comedian, tell us a joke we know. It's very much the same symptom.

It can make life easier if you get a cult following for your material. You can give people the older stuff easier than you can the newer stuff. If I didn't write anything else it would keep me going. Yes it is also frustrating

#N There seems to have been an increase in people taking up guitar and singing funny songs again. Is it something you've noticed?

#P What is happening there is an increase in the wit and cleverness of lyrics in songs generally. I remember the Sixties[smiles] when up until the mid-Sixties, the lyrics were terribly banal. Even in the later Sixties only progressive bands really thought lyrics through. Now it's easy to mix music and comedy.

In the comedy clubs there are a lot of audiences that react negatively to an act with a guitar. I think the comedy clubs are still more responsive to a guitar than a folk club is to a singer of funny songs. Folk Clubs that don't like it react by not booking it. Who am I to say who clubs should book. Who am I not to say who they should book, book me you bastards.

#N Whose inspired you other the years?

#P The first people to inspire me on the comic songs front were Flanders and Swann. There were three records in our house, "Drop Of A Hat", Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto" , which caused me a lot of confusion. It was the only classical music that I knew and by appalling coincidence it also happened to be his fifth concerto, so for years when people spoke of Beethoven's Fifth I thought that was what they meant. The third one was Fats Waller's Greatest Hits. There was a lot of innuendo in the Waller album that I didn't get 'til later.

#N That's one of the things about good comedy songs. It's possible to pump it full of smut without offending the kids.

#P There's one on the Flanders and Swann album, "have some Madeira Me Dear". Which is a Victorian villain piece about a dirty old man getting a girl drunk. As a kid it just sounds funny without understanding the meaning. There's a comment about a nephew that went to one of their shows and loved the song. It turned out he thought it was about cake.

Now this has happened to me. The prophecy has come true. Serve me right for offending a witch.

#N Cheers