Powerful performer is an understatement. The first time I saw him live I'd just seen The Art Ensemble of Chicago the night before : fun on, five piece free-jazz ritual Great Black Music Ancient to the Future theatrics with all the trimmings. Peter Bellamy, I thought, could have blown them off the stage, just one man & Michel's concertina!

Thing is with my heroes, I might mutter a few words but shrink from actual conversation, so times I was in his company I was too starstuck to say anything, like when I did the sound for his gig at the Durham Folk Party only weeks before he died. It was the same set as Songs and Rummy CT but to the power of ten, at least. His last ever gig? Somewhere, I have a tape of it but I've moved house so much I've lost track of its exact location. Maybe it's just as well; listening to it having heard of his passing I just sat there, utterly numb, thinking back to that gig because soon as he took the stage half the audience immediately walked out - they'd been waiting to do this, making a real show of it, leaving me to just set the sound (one mic either side of the anglo and one for the voice - hardly rocket science) and run off around the singarounds to raise an audience. 'Come on you bastards! Support this man! You wouldn't be fucking well here without him!'

Why did they walk out? Artistic reasons? Political? Or had he pissed them all off in the past? We'll never know, just as we'll never know what impact that had on the choice he made a few weeks later. Whatever the case, listening back to that tape, what I heard was Peter Bellamy at his most numinous & exultant. And I think he was wearing his Brian Jones t-shirt that night as well, but I couldn't swear on it.