And I can't think of anything more hideous than cockney songs the way they get sung today. There are scores of really great London cockney songs and you can hear them sung properly on easily available reisssues of elderly records, but what many modern singers think is a cockney voice is really a God-awful distortion of the London dialect, as stupid and offensive as mummerset yokelese - and the coarse manner of their performance is an insult to the sensitive artistry of singers like Marie Lloyd, Kate Carney, Gus Elen and Nat Travers.