Hay is a strange sort of literary festival: on my first day here I listened to a film director, Stephen Frears, and music impresario, Tony Wilson. Both may have written books, but it's not what they're known for, or what their audiences wanted to hear about.
The former Factory record boss, who recorded Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays, was here to publicise his new hip-hop group, RAW-T. The four rappers, who appeared alongside him on stage, represent a particularly literary form of popular music, he claimed. "Their life is about writing, it is about a piece of paper and a pen, they are poets."
Wilson was his usual provocative self, articulate and pretentious: in one sentence he compared himself to the enthusiastic Pierre Bezukhov, who is thrust into the nobility in Tolstoy's War and Peace, and the Hollies singer and "Salford lad" Graham Nash.
His protégés were less forthcoming. Initially shy, the three teenagers and one 20 year old warmed up a little when talking about their music, though the scene still resembles an embarrassing dad asking his offspring about Eminem over Christmas dinner.
