BY MICHAEL CHOWNE
Photo credit Michelle Fredericks
A great day out for the free ‘Cocks Fest IV’ at Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans, Hertfordshire on Saturday 1st August 2026.
A very large crowd was attracted to the outdoor area of one of several pubs that claims to be the oldest public house in Britain, apparently in business in various forms since AD793!
Organised and well compered by Kaspar ‘Berry’ Rapkin, we were only sad not to have caught him singing with his band The Swamp Dogs as we had other evening plans.
The final act on the outside stage, before they moved everything inside to accomodate the neighbours, was a fabulous 6pm show put on by Savannah Gardner & The Recovering Good Girls. In truth, this was not the band’s usual line-up but Savannah only plays with talented people and both Holly Carter (electric guitar, a beautiful sounding Gretsch) and Tomas Siroky (double bass) have played with the band several times before.
Together they put on a superb performance of all originals. Savannah is one of the best songwriters in the business and has so many great songs – for me yesterday it was 3 unreleased songs in ‘I Left You Behind’, ‘Cowboys of Carrizo’ and ‘Wayward Wind’ that really caught the mood of this crowd. Finishing in fine upbeat tempo with a couple of honkytonk numbers from her ‘Recovering Good Girl’ album, the crowd were left literally demanding more as there wasn’t time for the anthemic ‘Born in the Wrong Generation’ (there was a tight schedule and I think they’d already gone over their 45 minute allocation).
Opening the whole day (8 artists in total, of which I saw 6) at 1pm was Savannah’s close friend, the wonderful Brooke Law. Brooke is another really talented singer-songwriter from London and played mostly songs from her ‘Naked Heart’ album, along with a couple of older favourites and a cover of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ that had the crowd singing along (as did several of Brooke’s originals). Brooke has more of an americana/soft rock feel to most of her music but I particularly loved hearing her sing the country song she wrote with Savannah – ‘Cowboy Hat’ – Savannah duets with her on the album on this one.