Ruth Archer: you seem to make an incredible range of assumptions.Go ahead if you wish, but if they are about me, expect to be challenged. Now, the clear implications of your remarks directed at me are that I am opposed to funding, that I do not engage in funded work, that I am happy in doing things the old way, that others choose to be funded and innovative, and that funding is only granted for innovative work. Now, everyone of those statements is demonstrably rubbish.For example, I worked for the celebratory/site specific(whatever you care to call it) theatre company Welfare State International, regularly, from its first show in 1968 to its last in 2006(it closed itself down with the retirement of director John Fox). Now, many accusations could be levelled at WSI(hippy, load of rubbish, child of three could do that), but I don't think anybody has ever accused us of not being innovative. Try reading "Engineers of the Imagination", or any other stuff about the company. And all of the work(virtually) was funded in some way.So, (1) I like innovating and (2) I love being funded. And I have worked for at least ten other (funded) wierdo theatre companies.
   I am always after funded work, I'd likely starve if I didn't find it. I work a lot by gigging, and have often lived on busking when times were hard, but by and large I work in areas where things are financed by funding...theatre, education etc etc. Nothing against it at all. So please don't suggest I don't do funded work, or disapprove of it. I say there are dangers in funding, certainly. Do you think it is possible to work profesionally as an artist for 45 years without noticing a few things that go wrong from time to time?
    As to my not being innovative, and just happy to do things the old way. Well, I do have an indecent love for "the old way", which is why I love folk music. But as a person who is notorious for never going to folk clubs, but persisting in working with African percussionists, asylum seekers, radical theatre companies, gypsies and now(horror of horrors) young urban rappers etc etc, I don't think I am quite such a stick-in-the-mud as you paint me. I know everybody works with African and Asian music and mutli-this and multi-that now, but believe me there weren't all that many of us around in the 70's. I think I preserve quite a nice balance of old and new, and unfunded and funded.
    And your crucial point, that funding is only for innovative work. Ha ha ha ha!You've got to be joking.But wouldn't it be great if it was true?