Where are the great singers to compare with Mary Wells, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, Steve Marriott, Grace Slick, the musical visionaries like the Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead, the electric presences like the young Mick Jagger, the Ramones, the New York Dolls, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard?

Singers? I've seen Beverley Knight live, and she could go head-to-head with Aretha Franklin any day of the week. Her recording of "Piece of my heart" is great, as was her single "Come as you are" a couple of years back.

Electric performers? Robbie Williams ain't a great singer, but by all accounts he's a top-notch live performer. Pete Doherty is apparently also very good when he's not off his head on drugs, but then you could say the same about any or all members of the Doors, the Dead or the Stones. And Lordi are out-Meatloafing Meatloaf.

Visionaries? I'll match your Pink Floyd with Porcupine Tree.

New equivalents of the New York Dolls and the Ramones? Trivium, possibly. Actually the New York Dolls and the Ramones were triumphs of style over any kind of musical substance, so it's more likely to be modern pop-punk bands like Green Day or Blink-182. And it's hilarious, Richard, that you slate modern acts for relying on looks and obscenity, and then quote two punk acts as examples of how to do it "right"! Obviously they weren't relying on that at all, were they? and nor were the Sex Pistols... :-)

Other categories. Inspirational guitar players, perhaps, like Renbourn or Hendrix? Eddie Van Halen started the ultra-technical stuff, and Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen pushed technical guitar work way past EVH. As far as Renbourn goes, Eric Roche redefined what you can do with an acoustic guitar, and I've been lucky enough to see Thomas Leeb, a friend of ER's, who takes it even further.

As far as Dylan's bullshit statement goes, perhaps he should check out pop records in the charts from his "Golden Age". I don't think "Sugar baby love", "Runaway" or other saccharine pop of the era are exactly recommendations for the old way of doing things. And if he doesn't like how the recordings come out, he should hire better sound engineers instead of recording something badly and then bitching about it once it's too late.

Michael, the technology definitely *is* better. What you think of as the "character" of a Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis recording comes down to having crappy microphones and bad recording equipment that combined to cut off the high and low ends and impose significant distortion across the board. It's the same way that the "character" of a honky-tonk piano came from having a cheap crappy piano that had never been tuned.

Anahata and Richard are dead right that to get a good result, you need to find a recording engineer and a producer who can record you properly and mix the results to how you want your music to sound. But this is a failing of who you hire to do the job - pay peanuts and you get monkeys. So it was, and so it shall ever be, until the end of the world, amen... ;-)

Graham.