Perhaps 'polite' is the wrong word, but I find that when Jon Boden lets rip he often does so in ways that sound fairly mannered and predictable; to my ear he sounds more raw and unprocessed when he's doing quieter stuff (e.g. today's AFSAD, "Deep Blue Sea"). Bellamy's delivery, at least on his later stuff, was *all* mannered - which meant that, once you'd tuned into that style, the voice could sound extraordinarily raw and powerful. It's an odd trick but a good one; I wonder if he'd listened to a lot of Beefheart in between the Sam Larner.

When I ask myself what advice Bellamy would have given newish singers like me, I suspect he would have told us to sod off. On the other hand, when I ask myself what example Bellamy set, the words "de l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace" come to mind.