Peter was Marmite as far as audiences went. Like the club organisers mentioned above by G-Force, the people in charge of my local club were very resistant to booking him, not because of Kipling or politics or his sharp tongue, but because they "couldn't stand his voice". Eventually my persistent advocacy prevailed, and in our case the organisers did go along to the gig - and were won over by a brilliant performance (this was in his last year when, as Suibhne says, he was consistently on outstanding form).

But I don't buy the idea that Peter was shunned by the Folk Establishment - if such a thing existed. He was booked regularly at Whitby Folk Week, where he edited the daily newsletter in characteristically entertaining and forthright style; I remember seeing him present the Maritime Suite to a full house at Sidmouth; the traditional festival at Redditch loved him to bits, and Folk Roots at one point gave him a regular opinion column (as well as the notorious Karl Dallas interview which did some partly self-inflicted damage).

As for the record companies, he had bad luck with labels that went bankrupt, sure, but he had a good relationship with Fellside (who produced 'Songs & Rummy Conjuring Tricks' as well as some of the Kipling stuff. Peter's habit of turning up at gigs selling bootlegged cassettes of his own albums must have been at least partly his own choice.

Shimrod is dead right: the 1980s and 1990s were a pretty bleak time for traddies on the folk scene. I know, because I was trying to get gigs myself - "We don't like that finger-in-the-ear stuff at our club" was a not uncommon response to enquiries from an artist presenting traditional song in any guise. Peter was utterly uncompromising in everything he did, and the sad fact is that trad songs performed in his wildly idiosyncratic style must have been a hard sell, whoever was doing the selling.