Two seconds earlier, it had been sheet rain and squally winds at the street festival in north London, but as Robert Peston took the stage with his band, Centrist Dad, the weather suddenly swerved back to sunshine, which gave the whole thing a surreal edge. What did these men (including Peston on vocals, John Wilson from Front Row on bass and Ed Balls from New Labour on drums) do, to get blessed by Zeus? What dense thicket of influences informs Peston’s performance, which is a little bit Bowie, a little bit Carly Rae Jepsen, a little bit Ross-from-Friends-in-a-school-musical? The broadcaster, author, journalist and fabulously idiosyncratic emphasiser of words is, of course, well connected (Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper are also here), but he doesn’t strut like a well-connected person. He struts like a guy who really likes being in a band.
I met Peston two days before, in a cafe in Kentish Town. He is 64 but reads as peculiarly ageless, natty in a sharp blue suit, carrying a Brompton bike, a bit like a guy from the BBC sitcom W1A. He has lived his entire life in what you might call the progressive aristocracy. “I never thought of it quite like that,” he says, “but that must be true.” His father, Maurice Peston, was an economist and adviser to various Labour governments from the 60s to the 90s, becoming a life peer in 1987. Robert Peston talks about a “cringe-making section” in his teenage diary – “13- or 14-year-old me saying, ‘Had a good chat with Roy [Hattersley], I don’t think he likes me.’”
