Just want to echo those sentiments. He should have been a megastar. Alex was a minstrel, whose grasp of the folk medium was instinctive - before the days when heavy artistic claims were being made for the music.

I remember Tony Savage (who for years kept the folk club at Ampersand near Leicester) telling me a story about Alex. One night I asked Tony how he got into folk music. And the story goes Tony was an opera singer, and one night he was giggging (or whatever the term is for opera singers) the Paris Opera house. There is a disturbance in the performance - two English drunks have hired a box and are trying to sing along. Tony goes up there to confront the ne'erdowells. Of course one of them is Alex complete with cowboy boots and the other is Woody Guthrie.

You can understand how meeting those two might just kindle a slight interest in folk music.....