"well I might have a bit more respect for the proponents of this point of view if they weren't the very people who had spent the last few years dismantling the format of English songs to give them a more ethnic (to the majority of English people) completely inaccessible sound."

Far be it from me to agree wth WLD but I think that there's more than a grain of truth in what he says here. The peculiar nasal, 'pseudo-ethnic' style of many English folk club singers is, I have to admit, deeply off-putting - but I think that it goes deeper than that. I also think that there have been/still are powerful forces within the English Folk World who have been desperate to abandon 'The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs' as soon as possible and produce some sort of folk flavoured 'rock fusion' thingamajig (mainly because rock music is as far as their limited imaginations extend) OR to produce endless 'relevant' folk-type pastiches about how awful it is to be a miner/unemployed miner or fisherman/unemployed fisherman OR to abandon sense and dignity all together and to sing infantile kiddie songs with actions.

I think that it might be quite nice to get back to our roots (oh my God - did I really use that phrase!!) and sing some real folk songs for a change (puhlease - pretty puhlease!!!).