The old anecdote about the 1971 Loughborough Festival, where I announced that "We're only in it for the money" has re-emerged. Over 35 years after the event, this one certainly has legs. It hasn't bothered me much in the past. But Jim Carroll is using it - along with the pronouncement that I wasn't "really interested in folk music" any longer - to suggest that "anything he wrote or said after that date should be regarded with [those statements] in mind". Difficult to figure out what Jim is implying, but as this is in the context of a brief discussion of two of my books - Folk (1976) and Rites and Riots (1981) - and could be taken as questioning my motives for writing them, it seems appropriate to put down what exactly was going on all those years ago.

At the Festival that year a debate had been arranged between members of Steeleye Span and Mr Fox, the band formed by me and Carole Pegg in 1970. The theme was something like "the future of folk music" or "the future of folk rock". I had become increasingly frustrated by the fact that Mr Fox were expected by our management and record company to keep going on a shoe-string budget; we were pulled off our first tour, supporting Ralph MacTell, because we had no PA system, and when we finally acquired a road manager, his dodgy back meant that we still had to carry our own gear into venues (while Steeleye had an army of roadies to do this for them). So when I said "we're only in it for the money" (a direct reference, by the way, to the Mothers of Invention's 1968 album, which took the phrase as its title) the intention was wholly ironic. Maybe, also, I was hoping to wind up the more tight-arsed purists at Loughborough by uttering the words that would horrify them the most. I certainly wasn't above doing that.

My first mistake was to say it at all, my second to imagine that the irony would be appreciated by anyone in the audience. Silly me! I turned up at Loughborough the following year to find the pamphlet "We're only in it for the money" circulating (Jim gives more details of this in a posting at 2.26pm on 13th January). The pamphlet specifically ascribes the quote to me, and earnestly discusses, if I recall aright, the question of the commercialisation of folk music.

As for my not being "really interested in folk music", I was undoubtedly pretty fed up with the "folk scene", but by no means with traditional music, the primary subject of the book Folk. Folk included some quite radical suggestions which, at the time it was published, inflamed some people, though I don't think they'd upset many folk today. I certainly didn't write it "for the money".

Over the years I've managed quite happily to get up a few people's noses. So be it. What's said is said and what's done is done, and I've no desire to re-write history. But sometimes what's said isn't necessarily what's meant.