Could Ewan Spawned a Monster and glueman be one and the same?

What? On the basis of one barely original metaphor? I think not, Sycophant! But that's quite a slime-trail you're leaving there; quite pretty too in certain lights, but you'll find me generally sympathetic to gastropods, with or without shells.

"one of Them"?

That set me thinking - am I one of them? To which the answer has to be a resounding yes, I'm rather afraid I am, though not without certain reservations of course, hem hem. Fact is any discipline designated Folk - be it lore, song, music, custom or tale - owes its very existence to the antiquarians and academics who perceived a subject worthy of collection, study and preservation in the first place thus giving rise to the whole merry shambles we know and (hopefully) love today. Thus you might find me poring over, say, the VOTP booklets if only because context is essential to any understanding or wider appreciation of these recordings; they are artefacts in a museum, so provenance is essential - otherwise you're up shit creek without a paddle. Likewise I regard Malcolm's Mudcat posts as one of the most important on-line resources on traditional song you might find.

Enquiry is part of human nature; and ignorance is most certainly not bliss - rather, it niggles away as an irritant engendering our urge to seek enlightenment. When Hux lately served up two classic slabs from the Dr Strangely Strange archive they did so in both cases with hefty booklets contextualising the music in terms of its inner mythos, which is something we fans of the Good Doctor had never seen before; likewise when Luca Ferrari issued his CD booklet on the Third Ear Band (Necromancers of the Drifting West) we looked on agog at the wonders therein. My appreciation of Frank Zappa was enriched by Ben Watson's Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play and I await the (imminent!) arrival of Daevid Allen's Gong Dreaming 2 with baited breath. My bookshelves are heavy with books on the music I love - Henry Purcell, Harry Partch, Scott Walker, Joy Division, Vivian Stanshall, The Manband, The Fall, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Soft Machine. One day I hope there'll be a Peter Bellamy biography up there too, whose mythos might be explored on-line, in old magazines, or in the various sleeve-notes to the recent CD re-issues and compilations which serve to confirm the legend. I've also got any amount of books on The Marx Brothers too; I'd be quite stuffed without them to be honest.

Of course such wilful dilettantism is hardly academic - I'm sure my level of learning is no higher than your average Joe or Josephine who rushed out to buy Jade Goody's autobiography or any of the recent volumes of Michael Jackson - but understanding that on any level enquiry is engendered by our passions is essential, I feel, to our understanding of the broader appeal of Folk Music, Folk Song, Balladry etc. - which we wouldn't have without the academics and the collectors.

So, this is me, in all sweet deference, doffing the owld cloth cap, tugging the old greasy forelock, before exclaiming Gawd bless you, Mr Sharp! in a hoarse wheeze as I fling myself into the nearest ditch.

Thank you one and all; you done us proud.