Blimey, we're getting every single hackneyed, done-to-death argument on this thread.

Yeah right, so we'll get Martin Carthy to write all reviews of English folk music from now on, shall we? I've read enough terrible reviews by extraordinarily talented musicians in my time to know that it's a long way from a guarantee of a well-written review.

Just as a lot of good writers are also good musicians, there are a lot of great musicians who can't string an intelligible sentence together. There are acknowledged experts in their fields who have appalling taste in music. Then there are writerly amateurish enthusiasts who give banal thumbs-up reviews to everything. In other words, you can't generalise AT ALL.

I enjoyed reading Eliza Carthy's review of Mary Hampton's album in fRoots. It was a fun, enthusiastic read. But it wasn't iconoclastic, thought-provoking stuff the way writing by, say, Ben Watson, or Ian Penman is. What I mean is, I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that criticism by renowned musicians is any more incisive than that by non-musicians. If anything they're probably a bit more reticent.

I can't make biscuits, but I will defend my write to praise the custard cream and damn the digestive whenever I see fit. Ultimately the only real qualification a music writer should have is that they want to write about music. The ones who only think they do, who just like the idea, generally fall by the wayside. The ones that stick to it, surprise surprise, tend to be the ones who LIVE for music. They certainly don't do it for the money.

I note that the author of this thread has suddenly gone very quiet about his incorrect - in every objective sense - assertion that technology has rendered the music critic redundant.