These threads are usually started to show what an unpleasant bastard MacColl was - perhaps we can look at a selection from this thread - all by the OP.
I could be wrong (been known to happen), but this lot, without even bothering to visit any of the related threads, reads to me as being small minded, mean spirited, vitriolic, axe grinding and, particularly as it is aimed at somebody who has now been dead for over twenty years, disturbingly obsessional, .
If MacColl had made anything resembling one of these statements about another singer, perhaps there might be some grounds for the mythology that emerges whenever his name is mentioned; but as he didn't go in for that type of vitriol against his fellow performers..... who does it suggest is the unpleasant bastard I wonder?

"One of the best would have him going in bearded disguise, wearing calipers, so as to avoid both conscription and facing the indignities suffered by more genuine COs."

"Is it true that having heard Ewan's Freeborn Man of the Travelling People a bunch of travellers camped up on Ewan's land only to have him phone the police and order a summary eviction?"

" Like the folk club organiser weary with MacColl's prima-donna attitude who scrawled ARSEHOLE on the back of the chair set aside for the star turn, knowing our hero's affectation of turning the chair around to sit with the back facing the audience."

"where Bert and Jimmy were giving the miners a concert of their own folk music. "

"One of my favourite ever ballad singers, I last saw him at The Bridge in Newcastle and was bored to death by his execrable self-penned polemics about South Africa."

"Methinks at times the myth Jimmy Miller created in Ewan MacColl grazes as an all-too Holy Cow on the grave of Traditional Folk Song, much less its so-called revival. The legend endures along with his effected mannerisms - it was, after all, Ewan who copped the hand-over-the-ear pose from Arabic muezzin along with that faux-melismatic style which has become de-riguer ever since, despite his dictatorial insistence that we somehow sing our own. If this was truly the case few in the revival, Ewan included, would have dared sing a note!"

"I was bitching about Ewan MacColl's so-called politics on the letters page of Folk Roots when he was still alive."

", the gist of which was for the well-healed middle-class folk fraternity to resist the urge to romantise the real-life struggles of the working classes for the furtherance of their soppy art and stick to what they actually know about. Reducing the complexities of working-class culture to convenient socialist polemic by way of protest song is paternalist political nannying of the worst order."

"Talentless arsehole just about sums up Ewan MacColl; a pedlar of spurious, the bogus and the faux - so, as a figurehead of the so-called revival, he'll do just nicely. The real mountain? The man was barely a molehill. Still, nice to know that you're keeping the faith so devoutly, old man!"

"the Cult of the Divine MacColl"

Jim Carroll