Just reading my daughter's copy of Greil Marcus' "Like a Rolling Stone" (my God that sounds like a putdown by MacColl).

I have the greatest respect for Mr. Marcus, and the book is excellent, but there's an absolutely hilarious paragraph where he claims that Brit folk clubs in 1965 were Communist cells, from whence commisars and workers were detailed to march to Dylan's concerts, waving red flags and placards and causing mayhem. Hence, apparently, the cry of "Judas" at Manchester Free Trade Hall.

Presumably Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd were the party apparatchiks detailed by the Kremlin to get rid of this dangerous revisionist, no doubt with Karl Dallas waving a revolver in the background.

If a respected essayist like Marcus can get something like this so wildly wrong what's the hope of us knowing what was going on in MacColl's mind forty years after the event?

Mind you I bet I wouldn't have got on with him.