When I've got a new song, or one I haven't sung in a long time, I like to have the words there to check with - which can be tricky if you're paying a big guitar.

If you're straining to remember the words, it kills a song. But if you're reading a song it can kill it too.

So what I reckon you should do is try to learn the song so you know it, then sing it, with the words there as a back up, to give you the confidence, but not reading it -but not hesitating to us it in you find you need it.

What you want is to reach the stage with a song where you are past trying to remember it, where you sing each line without any concious knowledge of what the exact next line is. And that can only happen after you've sung it in public a few times. And even then every now and then you find lines just vanish in front of you, like stepping off the side of a cliff. And I've seen that happen to Eric Bogle too - in fact to everyone. It happens to Roy Bailey so often that he almost seems to use it as part of the show.

Most times singers fake it, and get away with it without most people noticing. But I once saw Eric Bogle get half way into a song, then tell the crowd he couldn't remember it, and he owed it a proper redering, so he'd sing another song while he got his head round it. Which he then proceeded to do, and the second time round was perfect.

One last suggestion - it's better to write out the words for your own songbook rather than use pre-printed ones - for one thing, it helps you learn the songs. And of course, it's more traditional - lots of the old singers used to build up their own songbooks which they used, and handed down.