"so nonone can define a ballad"

I don't think that's the verdict of this thread, Dick. Any definition in this kind of area is going to be complicated and difficult to make stick but, as with the innumerable "What is folk?" threads on here, the point is that you have to have some idea of what a word means if you're going to have any meaningful discussion about it. "Ballad" obviously means different things in different contexts but that doesn't prove that it has no meaning at all. If I am booked to give a Ballad Workshop such as the one I'll be doing at the Lewes Arms next year (and, BTW, Marian Button is an excellent singer and her workshop there should be well worth attending as well) there will be no point in me turning up and saying, "Well, no-one can define what a ballad is, so anything goes."

For what it's worth, of all the examples of modern ballads suggested above, I'd go for Richard Thompson's 'Vincent Black Lightning'. It's not traditional and its verse structure isn't a nice neat four-line stanza, but the way it tells its story in a series of dialogue snippets certainly has something of the trad ballad about it. That one Hugh Lupton wrote and Chris Wood sings about the chip shop is pretty good, too.