So, what's changed in 25 years?

The policemen have definitely got younger.

I've only witnessed the last seven or eight years of this, but I think there's been a cumulative process of "amateurisation", helped along both by the decline in folk clubs and (paradoxically) by the more recent revival. Smaller audiences meant that professionals couldn't make a living out of folk, and the drop in the number of pro and semi-pro acts meant that audiences got even smaller. In the clubs that hung on, folkies who were playing to the same six people they played to last week stopped bothering to polish their act and start turning up with half-written songs on crib sheets, because they knew nobody would mind (like doing the shopping in your pyjamas). Then when there was an upturn MCs were only too pleased to welcome new acts, however unpolished, and audiences had lived with shambolic performances for so long that they'd stopped expecting anything else.

I'm a bit Jekyll-and-Hyde about songbooks myself. The nasty side of me says that if you haven't learnt the song you shouldn't be singing it - and if you can't learn songs, maybe singing in public isn't for you. But at this point Nice Pip chips in and points out that I've seen some superb performances given by people who had a sheet of paper or a notebook in front of them, and who presumably didn't actually have the song off by heart - so simply saying No Cribsheets would deprive us all of a lot of good singing.