I liked the unique sound of Blondel.

Yay! I love the Amazing Blondel - but without Gladwin it just wasn't the same, was it? Mind you, Gladwin was never the same with Wincott & Baird so it cuts both ways. Strange then that their finest album was their 1997 re-union album Restoration which really is the most perfect 70s folk album ever made & all new material too. Go figure... Some nice live sets out there too (Corner of a Foreign Field, Live in Transylvania and 20-minutes of a BBC In Concert set on The Harvest of Gold : The English Fok Almanac double set on Dejavu which they share with Fairport, Steeleye Span and Magna Carta).

Seeing we're on this road - do the Strawbs count? As with the Amazing Blondel there's no trad material as such (though I do have a near perfect Cousins-rendering of Banks of the Nile from the early sixties) as such but along with Gladwin, Dave Cousins has one of the iconic voices of Englishe Country(side) Musick... If he did get round to doing an album of traditional material you just know it would be amazing, just as long as he didn't rock it up too much. He even wrote a song for The Young Tradition once (a weird pastiche of the Beatles Paperback Writer called Where Is This Dream of Your Youth?) but I think they politely, and wisely, declined.

The classics:

Grave New World
Two Weeks Last Summer
Hero and Heroine

(Dragonfly would be in there two if it wasn't for ghastly The Vision of the Lady of the Lake which is one ill-advised overlong re-write of Tam Lin too far. Otherwise - a great acoustic album with some of the best folk cello ever from Claire Deniz.)

*

Can I use this opportunity to crave a minute's respectful silence for the passing of the archetype / institution that is Strawhead? Friday nights in The Euston Ballroom will never be the same again. Gregg Butler - another iconic English voice as well as top geezer and national treasure.