THERE'S a perception put about, usually in the form of light bulb jokes, that the guitar scene is a bit, as our Australian cousins might say, ''up itself'', that guitar events are run exclusively by and for guitar bores. Not in Kirkmichael, they're not. The ''Guitar Village'' signs welcoming visitors to this splendid spot in Ayrshire are the first and last suggestion of any arcane assemblage of plectrum comparers because festivals don't get much more inclusive than Kirkmichael's annual guitar jamboree.

Locals who, I'll wager, don't know a bridge pin from a sidewinder - and why should they? - cram into the marquee along with more particular devotees from Essex to Eyemouth, and even the festival ''commission'' welcomes guitar outsiders - Maybole Pipe Band honouring Aussie Tommy Emmanuel with Waltzing Matilda.

The tremendously charismatic Emmanuel, along with local resident and festival founder Martin Taylor, is Kirkmichael's talisman. A superb showman, for sure, and a player of almost vulgar facility, whose flashing-fingered flourishes produce a response bordering on the religious, he is as capable, as his duet with Taylor on In A

Mellow Tone showed, of great

sensitivity as he is of magnificently rocking, country-blues picking and the grand, electronically enhanced gesture of his

Aboriginal tour de force, Initiation. Emmanuel's effervescence ended a programme (and, almost, an up-till-then faultless sound system) boasting a variety, including Adrian Byron Burns's gorgeously pitched Hendrix-to-Sting blues, Swing Guitars' impressive hot club of Strathbungo Djangoisms, Charles Chapman's more languid jazz fluency, and another outrageous demonstration of pan-

global rhythm'n'mirth from Bob Brozman and Woody Mann, of which Kirkmichael can be proud. Next year they might just need

a bigger tent.