"He sings about Louisiana when he's from Belfast - unforgivable! I for one would never sing a sea shanty, what with me being a clerical worker, and I certainly wouldn't dance the traditional dances of Oxfordshire when I live in Nottinghamshire. Whatever next: folkies in the early 21st century singing songs about the Napoleonic war?"

Those aren't good analogies. The point is not that Gary Moore is singing songs from an entirely different place and culture, it's that he's doing so in an accent and timbre that is a caricature (the oaken "honky bellow" that so many white people adopt when singing the blues – you wonder quite who they think they sound like. As if all black men had James Earl Jones baritones and smoked 50 a day...) The equivalent would be an Englishman singing Oh Danny Boy in a thick Oirish accent, or calypso in a cod-West Indian one. Ugh. It's not what he's doing, it's how he's doing it.