A UK premiere four years in the making was performed on The Esplanade, Watchet, by the West Somerset Brass Band as part of the town’s Summertime week of activities.

The music for Crash Bang Donkey was set to a children's book written and illustrated by Watchet author Jill Newton.

Jill joined the band on stage for the performance with her hand-painted storyboards in front of a packed and enthralled audience of young and old.

The original music was written by a young American musician, Joshua Guarisco, who set the book and narration to music for his 67-piece Sheboygan Symphony Orchestra, in Wisconsin, America.

In February, 2019, Jill and her husband Cosmo visited the city of Sheboygan for its debut performance as part of a children’s concert.

The band’s musical director Niall Watson said: “Jill handed me the original orchestral score in March, 2019, and asked us to try and play it.

“We had it transposed over to brass band music by our friend Nigel Moyles, which was a long and complicated process, reducing it from 67 orchestral players to 12 brass musicians.

“It has been a really enjoyable process rehearsing it, and very satisfying, too, that four years later, three rewrites of the music, a lot of hard work by the talented musicians in the band, including our narrator Colin Whitworth, the full support of Jill and Cosmo, and a global pandemic thrown in for good measure, that we have been able to finally perform it in public.

“We are already planning some more performances of the piece for 2024.”

Jill has illustrated more than 150 books and had more than 20 of her own stories published.

When not at work in her Watchet attic studio, she seeks inspiration in the countryside surrounding the town, running or rambling with her dog Garry.