entertaining is a funny job. everybody has some opinion as to how it should be done.

there are no rule books. the BBC believe you've got to have been to Cambridge and done footlights and the edinburgh fringe.

People who would have paroxyms of nerves doing the best mans speech at a wedding tell blokes playing the palladium and the O2 that they're crap.

You find people on mudcat who genuinely believe the folk clubs would be full - if we stuck to the Childe Ballads. There's some idiot slagging off Dylan at the moment saying he doesn't understand traditional music.

Dylan! whose first album introduced many of us to the traditional forms of his own country; who along with Pete Seeger employed traditional song forms to to articulate our feelings of helplessness in the Cold War period, when our middle class artists artists and poets like Francis Bacon and Philip Larkin were immersed in their own private angst.

I thank God i always got paid for music which I got paid a fee for - but there are some free spirits who need the open air - they're the expert on how its going to work - not the bloke watching.