It really is time to exctracted your collective heads out of your arses and take a look at the damage you've done to traditional music with your crass claims and your crap standards

With all due respect, Jim - I think it's you who have the head-up-arse problem here. Just because a highly specialised audience have the patience to listen to a celebrity artist with a Goddess-like reputation singing a long ballad is of little relevance to people in the UK clubs who might well regard such things with suspicion. Horses for courses after all. The state-funded folk-show in Ireland is a different beast to what we have over here in the UK where if someone sings a 10-minute ballad it'll probably mean someone else might not get a chance to sing. Traditionally the long ballads weren't meant for this sort of consumption anyway, much less performance; same with storytelling. At the end of the day, it's all a matter of context, and respect, and stepping down from this absurd high-horse of yours whereby you insist that ballads are somehow of a higher standing than your average episode of EastEnders or Corry. People regularly sit through 30-minute episodes of Corry - I don't think even your most hardened Ballad Enthusiast could make such a claim, no matter who the singer was. As for storytelling - used to be that 'feature length' meant 90-minutes; these days you feel short changed if it's anything less than 120. So, attention spans are alive and well; just maybe not when it comes to artificial renderings of old story songs we all know the endings of anyway. I love ballads, but if it came to a choice of 13-minutes of unaccompanied Peggy Seeger or 90-minutes of Planet of the Apes, chances are I'd choose the latter. I routinely listen to Miles Davis tracks pushing the 30-minute mark; and one of my favourite things is a recording of My Favourite Things by John Coltrane, live in Japan in 1966, which comes in at the 50-minute mark. One of my favourite albums of all time is DDD by my friend Daisuke Suzuki which consists of a 50-minute unedited field-recording of ducks in a Tokyo park. I can sit for hours listening to Purcell sonatas or the sound of lapwings and curlews out on the estuary. But, if someone got up in a UK Folk Club and insisted on giving us their plagiarised rendering of Martin Carthy's masterful version of Ray Fisher's heavenly setting of Willie's Lady, I'd probably take it as a cue to head to the bar. Nothing to do with club organisers or a conspiracy ahainst The Muckle Sangs, rather just a sense of fair play really.

My favourite traditional ballad performance of all is THIS, in which Mrs Pearl Brewer brings an essential reduction of The Cruel Mother in at around the two minute mark.