Thanks for that, Greg - I think the PCO comparison is an interesting one.

Seth Lakeman and his ilk remind me of the Goth Morris sides that we were talking about a bit back - their rationale is to be traditional but new. The implication is that being just plain old traditional is boring, and that bits of the tradition can be discarded at will if they don't fit (I think it was Richard B. who said that the trouble with Seth Lakeman's arrangements of traditional tunes is that you can't hear the tune any more).

To those of us who don't buy into "traditional-but-new", it looks like adulterating the tradition in the name of keeping it alive. To people who do buy into it, it's more or less synonymous with "traditional-but-alive", and opposition to it must come from people who want to keep music dead.

And that's why attacks on Seth Lakeman get such a strong reaction - in another forum praise for him would probably have the same effect. He's working in a field ('contemporary folk') which is defined as like-that-other-stuff-only-better; both its opponents and its partisans feel strongly about it by default. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra escaped all this precisely because they were never defined as folk in the first place. (Lucky them, some might say!)

Phil
sticking with this sobriquet for the time being