...subjective..

Subjective you say? Subjective?! Maybe we should put this one to the vote - and don't bring your Myspace friends into it, because mass sycophancy doesn't count. Try putting up a film (with sound) on You Tube, they tend to give more honest appraisals there. To paraphrase Oor Wullie*, ye canna play for nuts, and I'm not alone in thinking that. Don offered you some sound advice back there, Wavy - I suggest you listen to it, and listen to yourself, as objectively and as humanly (and humanely) as is possible up there in your Narcissistic cuckooland of self-glorification. Whilst I allow that your rendering of Cob a Coaling somehow manages to mimic the same quaintly ironic charm you occasionally manage to bring off in a singaround (that is when you're not performing your execrable self-penned self-indulgent drivel), your rendering of When I Survey the Wondrous Cross is a cultural vandalism bordering on desecration. Listening to that I was plunged into the darkness of a culture well and truly lost; and believe you me, I took on the sufferings of our society as a result.

as are opinions of your exotic accompaniment of E trads

Having long studied & obsessed over monophonic musical practise of the Mother Cultures, extant or otherwise - which is to say the Arabic & Indo-European traditional music & the secular & sacred music of the Middle Ages - I have come to favour a peculiarly monophonic and essentially improvised accompaniment to folk song which is entirely in keeping with the melismatic modal nature of both the songs themselves and their traditional performance. To this end I have adopted certain folk instruments from the same general modal mother cultures as our own, all of which have proved themselves ideally suited to the accompaniment of Traditional English Folk Song and Balladry, such as the Turkish Kemence and Hungarian Citera, the dynamics of which are more suited to my voice than the violin or reconstructed E. Cittern. It's also a matter of pragmatics - I find an instrument that works and no matter what it is, I'll use it.

Whilst I allow that in this respect what I do is perhaps a little idiosyncratic, let me assure you that idiosyncrasy is the heart and soul of traditional music, English or otherwise. Traditional Folk Song from the English (speaking) Tradition is but one part of what I do. Other aspects involve Mediaeval Music and Song as well as Free-Improvisation and Experimental music. In my own compositional work (as featured on BBC Radio 3 I might add) I bring these three aspects together, not out of exoticism or cross-cultural fusion, rather because this is my personal and cultural vocabulary which sees a lap-top as valid a tool for accompanying a traditional ballad as a concertina, or a Tibetan Singing Bowl, or dropping stones into a river, or whatever. Currently playing on my myspace page is a wholly improvised rendering of The Wife of Usher's Well in the which the voice is accompanied in real time by playing a vintage fretless guitar with a Tibetan singing bowl, thus creating some very filthy resonances indeed. I don't see this is as being in any way weird or different, it's just what I do - what I've been doing now since 1976 - thirty-two years. No one's asking you to like it, Wavy, but I know how good it is in terms of music and the craft thereof. God knows it's been long enough in the making.      

- I, for one (aesthetically as well as politically), much prefer it when you sing UA.

No one cares what you prefer, Wavy. Your aesthetics are determined by your politics, which are inhuman, right-wing, quasi-religious, vile & reactionary, founded as they are on a nauseating racism which is the consequence of a pig-headed and quite wilful ignorance. We live in a world of glorious possibility which you would have us debase to the catalogue of risible clichés that constitute your vision of Our Own Good English Culture. English Culture is anything that happens in England by way of cultural experience - anything less than that is UA (unacceptable).   

* If this reference is lost on you - which I suspect it might be - then check out this site: http://www.thatsbraw.co.uk/. If this upsets your Nationalist Puritanism, then bear in mind the artist, the late great Dudley Dexter Watkins, was an Englishman, and also responsible for such iconic comic creations as Lord Snooty, Desperate Dan, Biffo the Bear and innumerable others. Growing up in working-class Northumbria such works, though voiced in the Scots vernacular, were part of our everyday culture, along with so much else from North of the Border.