John McCabe, 70 this year and composer-in-residence at the Three Choirs Festival, owes his well-being to cider.

“At the age of three, while my mother was out of the room I fell into the fire and lay there roasting until she rescued me.

“It was wartime and suitable analgesics weren’t available, so the doctor kept me sedated on cider. It could even have been Bulmer’s,” he says.

The burns affected his immune system so severely that he was 11 before he could go to school.

“Fortunately, I lived in a household where there was music and there were books. I used my pocket money to buy miniature scores and gramophone records.

“I got to know a huge amount of music and would sit at at home writing it like mad.”

By the time he went to school he had composed 13 symphonies. When asked if they still exist he replies: “Heavens no, they were rubbish and have been gleefully destroyed.”

Among his fellow pupils at his Liverpool school were Paul McCartney and George Harrison, both junior to him. “I remember McCartney coming to our house to pick up some music for a school play.

“The headmaster had decreed that music was not an official subject, but fortunately Fritz Spiegl’s wife Bridget Fry was a family friend and she got me through A-level and into university.”The sidelining of music in schools worries McCabe. “When I was in charge of the London College of Music I always said that music was the best education for life because it teaches self-discipline and how to work with other people and interact with audiences.”

As a composer, McCabe doesn’t claim to inherit the English tradition, but he’s always loved it. “I suppose it must have affected me subliminally, and I feel very much at home in the Three Choirs Festival,” he says.

“It’s a festival I actually adore because it has a tremendous sense of community and the performances in general are very good.”

McCabe has three works in this year’s festival. “Woefully Arrayed is a powerful setting of a 16th century text about Christ on the Cross. It’s written for the vocal group Stile Antico, and although it has some tricky harmonies, I’ve tried to make it as singable as possible,” he says.

“Songs of the Garden is a reworking for soloists, choir and full orchestra of a composition for smaller forces. It develops an approach I’ve used in carols, and is a relaxed and tuneful setting of poems about gardens and wildlife.

“My second violin concerto Les martinets noirs was inspired by the swifts wheeling around my garden when I was writing some music in fine weather a few years ago – they visit every year and I always look forward to it.”

Alongside music, John McCabe has a passion for cricket and likes to listen to Test Match Special while copying out scores. “Someone once said that test matches are like Bruckner Symphonies … lots of slow movements!”

He grins. “Certainly the demands on the players’ concentration are very similar.”