I've actually realised why this thread has slightly irritated me and why I probably shouldn't be contributing to it. I haven't actually heard an album of traditional folk music that has blown me away since the Hladowski/Joynes album last year. On top of that, I don't really dig much singersongwriter folk or mumfolk and we all know the psych folk stuff I like isn't proper folk music anyway! I'm actually starting to understand why family and friends beg me to take it off nearly every time I put a trad folk album on. I suspect the next step is to pare the collection down to a few essentials - Shirley Collins, Nic Jones, Ray Fisher, Martin Carthy, Peter Bellamy and not that much more...

Meanwhile I don't think tourist-friendly state sponsored folk music as a symbol of 'who we are' will win many friends. I doubt it would make for very interesting folk music either, for that matter. The possibility smacks of a weird sort of cultural engineering where the heritage industry (of which the EFDSS and so on are arguably already part of anyway) sell something on our behalf that we're supposed to think is ours anyway but that most of us don't actually want. There again, I imagine few of us eat clotted cream teas all that often or play cricket on the vilage green, so maybe it doesn't matter, and maybe Ray Davies was right.