Don't know what "whacky over very trad rendering of songs" means, but the thread is not, nor was it intended as a "war" about which band is the best. Not even madlizziecornish was trying to do that because, in her view, there is no band but SoH.

Where they have similarities, it is in their updated treatments of some trad material, however SoH's repertoire has vastly more self-written compositions. It is not even about "which CD to buy", but concerns a spoof situation in which one (Bellowhead) is pulling out of a headline festival spot and the alternative replacement is SoH.

Personally, I would agree entirely with the assessment that SoH's arrangements are "samey and stagnant". A terrible shame because they are nice chaps and all that but are capable of considerably better, certainly as individual musicians. One of Gervase's earlier posts summed this up very concisely. They get away with what they do because they can and make, presumably, an adequate living from not trying all that hard. I wish they would, but then, perhaps they are more interested in branching into alternative employment routes . . .

Bellowhead, on the other hand, are a 12-piece of professional, multi-genre musicians all have whom have a multiplicity of other projects on the go. It is no way a like-for-like comparison.