"I love Jim Mory but I don't want to see/hear him providing Mowtown, Tribute music, silent disco etc at Sidmouth 2011 he's too good a creative musician for that."

On a serious note, I've been booked as a concert artist for the last few years and I'm sure people would be bored of me if I was booked again this year. But the Silent Disco is a highly successful event that was originated at Sidmouth in 2009. I don't think I'm imagining it to say it was the busiest LNE of the week last year. It was a very creative piece of programming by Joan as a way to get round noise restrictions that paid off enough to become a regular event and I'm really proud of it. Through the Sidmouth silent discos I've been offered DJing slots at Cambridge Folk Festival, Bristol FF, The Bellowhead New Years Eve event etc - its something that all the other festivals wish they'd thought of and want to copy...

The Motown Ceilidh is a repeat of something that has happened successfully at Whitby for the last few years - and its actually the Eliza Carthy ceilidh band, I'm just the guitar player for that one. If you look in Derek Schofields 'Sidmouth at 50' book there are some wonderful photos of Nic Jones and Martin Carthy in fancy dress playing at "50s rock and roll" night at Carinas in the late 70's. Sidmouth has always had an element of that kind of silliness. And actually, at the core its only a Motown ceilidh in the same way that Steamchicken do "ragtime ceilidh" or Tickled Pink do "80s rock ceilidh" - we still take the danceability of the music seriously and have Martyn Harvey calling. It's not a throwaway event.

And that's not mentioning the hundreds of other serious events programmed over the week, a lot of which is totally unique to Sidmouth (the major new production of the Transports for example). The accusation that it "is born from someone of little creativity driven by money and not by artistic direction" is totally untrue and amounts to a personal slur against someone who is doing a great deal for the festival, and the folk world at large.