It has to be said that the sound WAS awful - and the arrangements a bit ropey in PARTS (but as M Simpson said, how do you follow someone whose time has its own logic?). Still, I can't believe I was listening to the same person as some of the other correspondents here.

The voice has always been a love or hate thing (I'm definitely in the "love" camp - the sheer passion of his delivery is magical) - deal with it. And the shifting rhythms underpin the lyrics with great intensity. Something tells me it's all down to whether you can stomach the man's voice and the man's politics. Sad if you can't - maybe Justin needs a touch of Gaughan's sense of history and then he might not see the 20 years since the miner's strike as such a gaping chasm. Where I come from, we're certainly still living with the consequences of that dispute. Meantime, there are new problems and new issues that "New Labour" are causing rather than solving. Give me an "unsubtle" socialist over a cunning career politician any day.