"!an argument where Chris was really over-egging and exagerating the difference between "popular" and "folk" just a bit too much."

I didn't really take that from the interview. I thought it was Chris Wood explaining why, in his youth, pop music left him a bit cold.



"he was positively celebrating the alleged fact that English folk music had died out and bewailing that in Ireland and Scotland people still remembered folk music for what it was"

See, I didn't get that from him, either. I think he was saying that the fact that English music is less prescriptive than Irish or Scottish (he clearly doesn't visit this place!) gives him, as an artist, more freedom. The theory proposed to him was that English music had "died out", whereas Irish and Scottish music hadn't. Of course, this is a misconception in both respects - Irish and Scottish music have both had the life breathed back into them at various times, and it's probably the very nature of these revivals which has led to the prescriptive interpretations Chris Wood was referring to.