At a momentary loss for something better to do, I was re-reading this thread (a practice to be commended to the myopic and blinkered), when my eyes fell upon some particularly nasty (not to mention ridiculous) comments from a bad-tempered professional Northerner - NB I know perfectly well who this person is and I come from further north than him), aimed at the Bard of Barking. Now Mr William Bloke would have made it easily on his own without any help from the so-called 'f*lk community'. But to suggest that he has 'never featured in the North' suggests a level of awareness below that of a reservoir in high summer. Did someone manage to sleep through the duration of the miners' strike and miss entirely the presence of Red Wedge? This was when B Bragg encountered the music of Leon Rosselson and Ewan MacColl and went on, subsequently, to perform with Carthys senior and junior. He even remarked recently that he was getting into Morris tunes. Talk to him and you'll discover in him a far greater awareness of the relevance of tradarts to people's lives than from any of the 'anything's good enough for f*lk just bash it out regardless of key or timing' brigade.