Just seen the folk proms on telly.

Martin Simpson (doing trad ballads - never any good with money and Creeping Jane type songs where the stories move at a fair old lick and force him to rein in his overwhelming technique are great, but on most of the trad pieces - they are long slow songs to start with -Martin's guitar makes them interminable) and Bellowhead (Up to the rigs of London Town with a brass section lifted from Paul Bunyan or any one of those ghastly operas Stravinsky used to write with WH Auden).

Seriously - would anyone confuse this with a music that's supposed to have working class roots?

and as for re-tuning. surely it would have been worth taking extra guitars and getting someone to help you set the stage and exit it. And I don't want to hear any more lectures about training my ears - if EVER there was a place for a digital tuner!

sod the tradition! Forget the tradition - let's try for listenable.