Afterwards he came up and said, "I liked the Robin Hood song but the American one was shite." Praise indeed!

LOL! Good old Alex, eh? I remember him at Lancaster University Folk Club, slightly drunk, shouting out, "There I was, down the mines, hewin' ma coll! Hewin' ma coll!"

You can draw your own conclusions from that one... He was larger than life to a young shaver like meself in those days. Somebody sang "Calton Weavers" at a singaround recently, and I was immediately transported back in memory to Alex singing it at some club somewhere in the Lancaster area around 1965.