TODAY I’m sat in Blake Gardens watching live rock music - writes Cllr Brian Smedley, leader of Bridgwater Town Council.

Last week they had the Burtle Silver Band. Variety is coming home. And fusion can be a difficult option.

Once, I took a Caribbean steel band to the Czech Republic and asked the local council to get a similar band to complement them. They got a uniformed Moravian brass band.

Well, a metal’s a metal. What’s the worst that can happen?

Well, who knows, I’m not a scientist but had the Bronze Age been followed by the Tupperware Age, we could have missed out 3,000 years of history - including most of the bad bits.

But someone who does know how to do metal fusion is Graham Hodgson, whose pub venue the Cobblestones is one of the top rock venues in town.

So, this week we got him in to ‘takeover’ the weekly Sunday Blake Gardens event and try something a bit different.

Bridgwater does ‘events’ well, and these Sunday events that the town council sponsors are nice family focused sessions where people can sit in the sun , listen to some erudite chamber music from the band stand and get a home made cake and an afternoon tea from the Blake Museum - as Robert Blake himself might have done, when he wasn’t blowing Royalists out of the water.

Today’s eclectic mix reminded me of another Czech rock tour.

One deep snowy winter full of ice snow and winter, I took a psychotropic hippy punk trance band on a tour of Bohemia.

A rock gig in the Borovany Village Hall was such a rare occurrence that literally everybody in the village turned up.

Obviously, the van broke down, so we needed a push across the ice.

To me the best ever symbol of bringing people together across continents was a Bridgwater minibus full of rockers being pushed across the icy streets of South Bohemia by punks, hippies, Moravian folk dancers, accountants, uniformed cops and a solitary Dutch rasta (who happened to be hitchhiking past at the time) and all waving goodbye together as we slid on our way down a hill, With very little in the way of brakes.

And that’s where we’re going today. Down a hill with no brakes.

No, I mean ‘pushing out the boat’. So long as there’s a helicopter form Yeovilton on standby.

No, I mean being a bit adventurous and taking a few risks. A bit like that bloke in the 1920’s who tried to climb Mount Everest in his pants.,.. and was found frozen solid in a ‘was this such a good idea?’ type pose 80 years later.

This week, I’m making the case for Bridgwater being a party town.

We do parties well. We do shows well, and we do variety well. Another tick in the box marked Bridgwater.