Aye but the issue as ever Dave is that we tend to know what we think we know and are comfortable with. We see it in more than just music.

If you or I type BBC into a search engine we expect The British Broadcasting Corporation. A teenager in The USA smuggling his iPad under the covers at night expects a rather different acronym....

When I used to give talks with traditional ballads thrown in I used to say why go to a museum and see 200 year old ploughs when listening to the songs puts you in the mind, hopes, dreams, fears and aspirations of the people living then?

Contemporary songs can carry this on. Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water describes an event in time, ditto Boomtown Rats I don’t like Mondays. You could argue that a 350 year old love ballad tells us nothing other than blokes were nursing semis when thinking of their lovers back then.

I go back to my point. It’s a style or set of styles. A genre even. Roots is a term that more of us are becoming comfortable with as it separates the value to future generations from enjoying the noise it makes.

Dave. We must argue this out again at Whitby? It’s a couple of years since we had a pint.