It is quite difficult to see why so much anger over this issue should be directed at Ian Anderson who as editor has, in my experience, a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards the opinions of his reviewers and understandably, a very supportive one when the opinions of his reviewers are called into question.

I write a lot of reviews for fRoots and quite a number of other publications - and I must say that I hate writing negative reviews - but sometimes my opinion is that something is awful and I would be wrong if I did not say so.

A few years ago I was sent a book on the history of the folk revival to review for fRoots. In my opinion - just one person's opinion - it was badly written, poorly constructed, full of factual mistakes and hyper-critical of some of the major contributors eg. Lloyd and MaColl. I wrote a stinging review, then worried about it and sent it with a message to Ian asking if the review was in order. He replied the provided that I could confirm that the mistakes that I had mentioned were in fact errors, then that review should stand, if that was my honest opinion.

Then I read a review of the same book in the Folk Music Journal by Martin Carthy which if anything was more damning than mine was. When Martin and I next met we confirmed that we both felt better about not be the only people to give the book a negative review.

As to why Ian should have closed the geantrai thread on the Froots Forum, I don't know, but I imagine that he felt that it was already breaching his contributors' guidelines which say:-

Carefully crafted arguments, theories, reactions, diatribes, stuff you'd like to know etc. Unseemly personal squabbling and trolling will be zapped.

I