The Evening Post claims to be leading the inititive, and they report that Reading West MP Martin Salter has persuaded 80s star Feargal Sharkey to come for a brainstorming session with the council, the Evening Post and music promoters to try to get something off the ground.
However, they might hit difficulties. This year showed that the market for all but 'mega-festivals' - which are able to attract the currently popular and biggest profile acts, often to the exclusion of performances by these acts at smaller events - is all but saturated, with a number of new festivals planned for the summer just gone failing to get off the ground either due to poor ticket sales or failures in organisation, and some of the new events that did go ahead suffering from fewer ticket sales than had been hoped for.
Plus, any new festival would also most likely have to come to some arrangement with Reading Festival organisers Mean Fiddler - who bought the Little John's Farm riverside site about a year ago - unless they went for a very scaled down event on just the Rivermead part of the site that WOMAD used. Site rental for festivals can be surprisingly expensive, and with the Reading Festival site one of the best known in the country it might well be at the top end of the price scale.
We hope that things come together from these discussions, and Reading is able to put together and make a success of the sort of event they want to see in their town.