Erm, I'm not Alex Petradis, Dave. Merely quoting him.

His words struck a recognisable chord with me that yours, for example, don't particularly. Instead I see the same old knee jerk defensiveness that Petradis points out. Which is a shame, because I suspect we agree on far more than we disagree on.

In any case, I don't think folk has a narrow viewpoint in terms of styles that can be taken on board by the folk club scene: in fact there's an argument that any old bollocks can be accepted as long as it has come up through the folk clubs (and some stuff that hasn't will sometimes get grudgingly accepted when people have no choice but to acknowledge that it is after all very good - like some of those young Newcastle graduates who some UK Mudcatters seem to think haven't paid their dues because they haven't spent four decades touting their wares round the backrooms of grimy pubs). I think - and this was the point Petradis was making - that the rot sets in when the wider world starts to take notice - hence the virulant attacks on forums like Mudcat that people like Kate Rusby, Rachel Unthank and Seth Lakeman have been subject to, that you yourself have rightly condemned: often these attacks are not about the pros and cons of the music but a simple case of shooting anyone with the audacity to stick their head over the parapet. But with the folk club world being as it is, these people need to stick their necks out because it seems there's not enough in folk world to sustain them. I suspect that's equally true for a lot of musicians who have yet to scale the dizzy (and in some quarters apparently unforgivable) heights of having names some members of the general public might recognise.

My generation largely turned its back on folk music and particularly folk clubs. Some of us have come back to folk music but much fewer to folk clubs. Why is that? Do you think its inevitably because there's something wrong with us? Or do you think it's largely because that's not where we find what we want? That we might actually prefer festivals, concerts and sometimes (as long as its a spade calling itself a spade) informal singarounds? And how come so many of the performers in the generation down from mine are happy to play festivals and concerts, but at best and with a few clubs as notable exceptions, largely ambivalent about folk clubs? That was the point I was making with my list... if there was a healthy club scene surely a fair few of the people on my list would be gigging at these clubs several nights a week? Its all very well to tell me that that you can have a better time than me over in Sheffield (I'm happy for you, I really am) but that still doesn't alter the reality of what its like where I live. Fancy a house swap for a month? Didn't think so...

Finally, I'm a bit disappointed that you take such a "whatever" attitude to the fact that some of us who love and support this music feel like outsiders to the folk club world. If the folk club world is analogeous to golf clubs, we have gone a very long way down a wrong turning, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not happy with the idea of it being ok that this music remains the preserve of cosy, inward looking elites. At best it's far, far too good for that.

I'd like to be able to persuade my friends to listen to folk music without them dismissing it out of hand before they've even heard it because of what they believe about its image. My contention is that though the media may have given that image a helping hand, the folk scene created it and perpetuates it for themselves.

At least you, Dave, are disc jockeying folk to an audience that might sometimes contain non-folkies. That's a good thing.