MOST ACTS at Forest Live gigs in Westonbirt are encouraged to at least mention in passing the work of the Forestry Commission. Elbow’s Guy Garvey turned the reading of a press release into the running gag of the night.

After milking the joke for several songs, he even had us riffing “I pledge a significant amount of my income to the Forestry Commission” to the melody of his band’s most famous crowd pleaser One Day Like This.

Garvey is as engaging a character as you could wish to spend a couple of hours with in the woods.

He was in good voice and spirits. Newly married – his mother-in-law Diana Rigg now more famous for Game of Thrones than The Avengers – he’s also a new dad.

No one does the minutiae of everyday life better than Garvey. Elbow can do stadium anthems – they have a couple of crackers – but their songs of melancholy romanticism and hope always benefit from strings rather than bombast.

And their front man has the canny knack of making even a sell-out gig at the Arboretum as intimate as if he were chewing the fat with you in the corner of a pub.

They opened with Any Day Now and there was an early treat for Elbow completists with the first live airing of Head For Supplies from the latest, and excellent back-to-form LP Little Fictions.

As the summer night got ever chillier, the audience warmed up on the chorus of the appropriately-titled Magnificent, before tackling ‘a song about arguing’, the rocking Little Fictions itself, which manages to rhyme ‘kitchen table’ with ‘Tower of Babel’.

My Sad Captains is a gentler epic, musing nostalgically about getting in your cups with true friends as being the ‘perfect waste of time’. And then they close with One Day Like This in all its glory.

We were blessed with three rather than the normal two encores: Lippy Kids included a pitch perfect singalong from a punter behind us, Station Approach and the band’s perennial closer Grounds For Divorce.

Wherever the band ended up for a nightcap, I bet Garvey and co were good company.

FINE gig but no bouquets for the new parking arrangements at Westonbirt. Cars from the Cirencester side were diverted to the grounds of Westonbirt School, doubling our walk to the arena with chairs and picnics to more than 15 minutes. And no one asked for our ticket!

Post-concert it took more than an hour to exit the car park.