The contentions I found hardest to swallow were really the ones that traddies took to like ducks to water.

For example this business of the tremulous voice that reflected how the population had suffered a mass nervous breakdown at the time of the enclosures of land. Some people could do this, with some songs - the late great great Peter Bellamy will spring to the forefront of most minds. But a hell of a lot of people couldn't, and it sounded awful. For a while however it was 'de rigeur' amongst traddies who spent the other half of the evening sneering at American influenced English folksingers like Jack Hudson, Brimstone and Gerry Lockran.

The other thing was the contention that English folkmusic was Celtic in origin - and he gives the example of the (almost) extinct Lincolnshire bagpipes. this led to modal scales and strange rhythms being injected into and grafted onto English folksongs - the Swarbrick/Carthy Byker Hill - being a case in point.

Whatever the merit of these contentions - the folk clubs became policed and then emptied by the adherents to these theories. It simply didn't reflect the sensibility of the average English listener - it was the badge of the traddy club.

But none of that should deflect from the fact that this was a glorious book. It wasn't Lloyd's fault - that people read it and went mad. It was ambitious, clever, and coherent.