Brian - now that is a breath of fresh air.

Howard: They took the version they heard, with the changes and improvements made by previous singers, added their own, and passed it on to other singers, who in turn added their own variations, until we ended up with several widely differing versions of the same song.

Yes. In contemporary terms it's as if, instead of having a James Ford remix and a Venetian Snares remix and an Aphex remix and a Two Lone Swordsmen remix, you had Weatherill reworking something he'd got from Aphex who'd got it from James Ford, and Ford reworking something he'd got from Venetian Snares who'd got it from Ergo Phizmiz, and so on and on. The other difference is that, instead of a couple of dozen big-name producers and DJs doing it as a job, there were hundreds of unknown (and unpaid) singers, doing it for fun.

It's a very different musical world from anything we experience now. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a reality.