Jim, you are absolutely 100% correct.

BUT - and it's a big 'but', unfortunately - I'm convinced that it's an inescapable fact that there are insufficient people out there, whose appetites for that kind of music are sufficiently voracious, to maintain any sort of club structure except in a very few areas. You and the countess and a few others may enjoy a full evening of trad songs, but I'd dare to suggest that the vast majority wouldn't.

To keep a club running you need arses on seats, and the evidence is there that a continuous diet of solely trad music will not get a sufficient number of those arses on those seats - there simply aren't enough people around who have that deep, all-embracing love of traditional songs and music that you and the countess clearly have. They're just not out there. Trad music is a Minority sport, with an emboldened capital 'M'. Sad but true.

So what are we left with? Well, pretty much what we've got in a lot of the clubs I visit - a mix of the traditional with the contemporary which, although you and the countess might say it's a dumbing-down process that wrecks the true purity of the art, it encourages arses to put themselves on seats and gives a vehicle for performance of the old songs, albeit alongside what some sneeringly describe as 'snigger-snogwriter' material. Surely to God it's better to hear them this way than for them not to be heard at all?

And it's also a fact that many people are awakened to the greatness of our traditional songs by hearing them in such a context - I know of young people who have come to a club as performers of self-written, teenage-angst, I'm-going-to-shoot-my-girlfriend's-dad kind of stuff, only to be 'converted' by hearing fine traditional songs well-sung, and to themselves become accomplished performers of trad material.

Give and take - an old-fashioned concept maybe, but it's all it takes to keep people happy. Polarised attitudes, and single-issue musical politics such as we've seen in this unhappy (and sometimes appalling) thread, aren't any sort of panacea to breathe life into a corpse (although I don't subscribe to the belief that the patient is even slightly poorly, let alone dead).

How can there be peace and joy in music when malcontents and opposing factions are so intent on ripping each others' heads off and pissing down each others' necks?