The assumption that Folk is different in KIND is a prescriptive paternalistic judgement on the nature of Proletarian Creativity. It disempowers essential individual genius in favour of the faceless collective and a much cherished purity that celebrates ill-educated working-class anonymity. On such a patronising notion was Folk contrived & is, I feel, entirely incompatible with anything but entrenched right-wing conservatism & cultural reaction that typifies the revival to this day.

At its most fundamental, Folk exists as a bourgeois fantasy of a working-class rural / industrial idyll, with Tradition fenced off in terms of the historically authentic, rather than a celebration of the culturally dynamic processes which gave rise to the Folk Song Idiom in the first place - processes which continue to account for proletarian musical experience to this day, irrespective of genre.

From the outside Folk remains hobbyist, quaint and elite; a very select and eccentric minority passionate enough to cherish such remnants which are always going to be relevant to someone, but rarely to the class from which the material came from, who will always be disparaged as being debased until retrospection invariably sanitises their rudery. As I said in a recent review of one of the new VOTP albums: [such an approach is] not only anathema to the working-class craft & cunning of the men and women who created the songs in the first place, but is entirely incompatible with the earthy vernacular realism of their subject matter.