I think Peter would have been greatly amused by what's been written on this thread, and infuriated by some of it. What he would have posted in reply, I can't imagine – but I'm sure that even if I disagreed with it, I would have enjoyed reading it.

The earlier question of what he would have thought about today's folk scene is (IMHO) unanswerable. Like the Elephant's Child in Kipling's "Just So Stories", Peter was possessed by a "satiable curtiosity". This made him a perpetual seeker, experimenter, and challenger of entrenched orthodoxies. He was always asking new questions, exploring new territory, and offending somebody's sensibilities.   So if he were still here today, he wouldn't have exactly the same tastes and opinions he had twenty years ago (though many people would still have found them infuriating). I wish he had given us the opportunity to discover what they would have been.

Not having been at Shrewsbury Festival, I have no basis for questioning Caroline Foster's assessment of the performers she encountered there. But the general tone of her comments suggests that she is making what Professor Gilbert Ryle used to call a "category mistake".   This is like regarding an apple as something that has tried to be a banana, and failed. People who love apples and don't much care for bananas have a perfect right to organise apple festivals. And people who love bananas and despise apples should look somewhere else for entertainment.

Wassail!