Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My castaway this week is Lord David Cobbled. He was just 32 when he took over

the ancestral pile Nebworth house and from that moment on he dedicated himself to keeping it in the

family. He succeeded in turning a crumbling corner of the establishment famous for its

high Victorian architecture into one of the best rock concert venues in the world.

Over the past 40 years everyone from Led Zeppelin to Paul McCartney to Oasis have played there.

In the early years it was all a bit slap dash. His wife

Chrissy used to round up any stray fans in her old Renault to get them to the gig on

time. These days the benefits are clear and practical. When Robbie Williams performed three sell-out nights,

it paid for the estate's new sewage pipes and repairs to the deer fence.

The other benefit, of course, is having a front row seat to some of the most celebrated performances in rock history.

We are very lucky. The whole period that our generation lived through, he says,

was very creative and entertaining and very positive. It a fun time a lot of good things happened as well as some difficulties

So Lord cobbled let's go back then to one of the earliest concerts at Nebworth and maybe some of the difficulties.

It was 1976, the Rolling Stones were due to play, and you also, I understand, had a group of

girl guides camping at Networth in the same week.

A recipe for, well maybe not disaster but certainly hygings. Tell me what happened.

It was very funny because the Rolling Stones came down on the

Thursday evening for a practice playing to test the systems and things and they were

playing in the park but we had a girl guide group camping in the power and the girl guide leader came up and

...