Some might paint the town red but when it came to Armistice Day, Dan Skinner decided to cover his local church in colour.

The sound and lighting engineer set up a bank of floodlights around the parish church of Borden near Sittingbourne on Wednesday night and bathed it in 7,500 watts of poppy-red light.

He said: "I had the idea just before the second coronavirus lockdown. I knew it had been done elsewhere and thought it would be a fitting tribute on Remembrance Day as we would be having a socially distanced service with a lower number of people. I thought lighting the outside would be a nice thing to do because it could be seen from quite a distance."

Two years before, Dan, who runs DJS Audio and provides the light and sound for local Elvis tribute band Taking Care of Vegas, lit the inside of the church for Remembrance.

He said: "I up-lit all of the knitted poppies in red and projected an animation of falling poppies I had created on the wall."

This time he needed 16 lamps and 150m of electrical cable. He said: "It needed a fair amount. It takes a lot more to light up a building than you'd think."

The idea, he said, was also partly based on the national "light it in red" campaign which has been highlighting the plight of the events industry during the coronavirus pandemic.

He said: "Unfortunately, I missed all the dates for that campaign but I think this was more poignant."

He added: "It's been a very strange year not doing anything with the band. We had a lot of large gigs lined up but all have been cancelled. We started practising but even that's been cancelled again. We have all been missing it. Hopefully, we will be back gigging soon."

Father Robert Lane, the vicar of St Peter and St Paul, said: "Dan was amazing. The church looked stunning. We are very lucky to have him help us. It was a fantastic idea and an awesome tribute."

One little girl remarked: "The church is the same colour as the poppy I made at nursery."

Father Robert staged a service and two minutes's silence outside at 11am on social media to pay tribute to the Fallen during two world wars and other conflicts but Facebook muted the hymn Jerusalem and the National Anthem in a row over copyright.

The vicar said: "The really annoying thing was that we have a licence but there was nowhere to tell Facebook."

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