MALMESBURY’S first home-grown music festival will take place for a second year running after the organisers hit their target of raising more than £30,000 from advance ticket sales in just ten days.

The Boondocks Festival, which saw nearly 2,000 people gather on a 15-acre edge-of-town site for two days of music this summer, was made possible after £30,000 was pledged in 30 days last November.

This year the same target was set to see whether music fans from the Malmesbury area wanted the event to take place again next summer - and it has now been achieved in a third of the allotted time.

Having gone live on the morning of Saturday, November 7 the festival’s Kickstarter fund raising campaign passed the £30,000, mark this Monday (Nov 16) with 305 people pledging cash, with 20 days to go – underlining the event’s huge popularity.

Neil Muttock, one of the organisers of the two day event which will take place at the same venue on Friday and Saturday, July 8 and 9, said: “The response has been incredible. It’s amazing. We’d like to thank all those who made it possible.

Mr Muttock said that when they organised last year’s festival there was no real expectation of hosting more than one.

“It was an experiment. A risk. A one off. Since the festival closed on that sunny Sunday in July, festival-goers, neighbours and townsfolk have all asked the same question ‘When’s the next one?’”

So he said they launched a similar Kickstarter campaign to fund Boondocks 2016, which enabled people to buy their tickets in advance in the expectation that the event would go ahead if the target had been reached.

He said they raised pledges for a staggering £20,000 in the first 48 hours of the Kickstarter campaign. “I’m absolutely flabbergasted. We asked people in the Malmesbury area whether they wanted this festival again. Clearly, they do.”

He went on: “Boondocks 2016 will be run by the same team, on the same site as this summer. We want to recreate the same magic as 2015, the same relaxed vibe and the quality experience.”

Mr Muttock said they were now working again with the authorities to get an event license and were hopeful that it would all go smoothly.

Meanwhile, Boondocks 2015 has been nominated for four gongs at this year’s UK Festival Awards: best new festival, best small festival, best family festival and best toilets.