Metrical irregularity, that is - although I'm sure the great man was irregular in other ways!

I've learnt several songs from Bellamy's recordings, and - such is the power of his interpretations - I've very often ended up learning them the way he sang them. The trouble is, this sometimes means that you aren't actually learning the tune of the song. Bellamy's delivery has something of the metrical irregularity that you often hear in source singers - sometimes speeding up or slowing down, sometimes hesitating or interrupting themselves, and hardly ever putting in the right length of rest at the end of a stanza - plus an extra layer of declamatory rock and roll theatrics.

The end result is that the original melody, if there was one, gets completely lost; if you were to treat an unaccompanied Bellamy recording as a source text and notate it, instead of a folk song that other people could pick up and sing you'd end up with a contemporary classical piece in several different time signatures or none at all. Compare Bellamy's Death of Bill Brown with Will Noble's - the latter is vivid and conversational in its delivery, but you can still hear where the beat falls.

For another example, where are the accents in Two Pretty Boys? Everywhere and nowhere:

TWO pretty BOYS WERE GOING TO SCHOOL
IN the EVE-NI-i-ing COMING HO-o-ome

Practically every syllable's accented - it's not so much a tune as a proclamation.

I once tried to work out what the tune must originally have sounded like - a fairly quick 6:8, I thought:

TWO pre-tty BOYS were GOING to SCHOOL
in-the EVEning COMing HO-ome

But that sounds rather jolly, which is an odd fit for the lyrics.

The really odd thing about Bellamy's de-metrication strategy is that he even applied it to his own tunes. Look at that great piece of Bellamising, On Board a '98:

Now when I-was-a-boy... and SCARCE... eighTEEN... I DROVE a ROARing trade...

Unsingable by anyone else, or not without immediately sounding as if they're imitating Peter Bellamy.

If that was based on an existing tune, I'd have said the tune 'naturally' wanted to sound more like

NOW when I was-a BOY and SCARCE eighTEEN I DROVE a ROARing TRADE
and so on.

But, again, you end up with a jolly, bouncy number, which clearly wasn't what PB had in mind.

There are exceptions - there are always exceptions - but over quite a lot of his work it just seems as if Bellamy just didn't like metrical accents. You even hear it in Gethsemane - again, a tune of his own. Having sung it a few times I find it benefits from a discreet but definite accent on the 'one':

The GARDen called GethSEMane in PICardy it WAS...

But Bellamy sings it effectively without any accents at all.

I could go on (but won't). Has anyone else noticed this odd characteristic of Bellamy's work? Was he trying to make himself inimitable, or to make the imitations obvious?