"Let's show the rest of the world we are not ashamed of out culture."

Outed as a Morris dancer Dave?

Perhaps a little history will explain why many of us DIDN'T go for English music back in the late 60s/ 70s when we were starting out. I must have been about 16 (oy it rhymes) when I took my first serious camera to Manchester centre to look around. In St. Peter's Square there was a Morris side dancing. I couldn't believe it- colour, movement, blood- stirring, exciting and MENACING. I quickly got into folk music of all sorts.

So I went to folk clubs, dances etc. First off, all quiet and respectable for Traditional Ballads, no weaselly music hall or yankee stuff here thank you, though Ewan McColl stuff acceptable. That was OK, the ballads were full of dark history, tragedy and comedy. Dances I soon went off, apart from the three left feet, dancing with someone's granny to a fiddle, accordion, piano and drumkit (it was ALWAYS that) soon palled. And I never (well, hardly ever) found a Morris side like that again.

And then I found Irish music- pubs in Manchester, late smoky nights of battered Guinness-soaked old Micks bashing out EXCITING music that I couldn't get my brain around- I set out to understand it and never looked back.

Looking back in Anglo, it was only in the later 70s, when I was well set into my adopted culture, that the requirement to wear knee- britches and ribbons and carry a pewter tankard while humptying on the melodeon was dropped.

That's a personal history, but I know dozens of musicians who have travelled similar paths. Yes, we listened to Carthy, Fairport, Steeleye Span, Albion etc., but in the same way that we listened to Leadbelly, John Lee Hooker, and Ravi Shankar.