Although I love a great deal of traditional British music, I just cannot get beyond this charade that it is still a living breathing naive entity - naive as in untouched by outside forces and sung unaware of outside forces. To me, a great deal of the folk purists seem to be intent on keeping the music exactly as it is - which is fine - but the falsehood comes when they pretend that in that setting it's a living, evolving tradition. It's not, no more than am-dram Shakespear is living and evolving.

Maybe these people should persue Antique Folk, where they get to preserve things exactly as they please - as close to source as possible. That's great - I thoroughly enjoy Antique Folk - especially Dick Miles' jumpers (seriously) - in fact, to me, the way it's sung often has a lot more meaning and feeling than the more exploratory, Ikea Folk.

And the Ikea Folk should get on with their exploration, happily acknowledging that times have changed completely in both a musical and social sense. Those days are gone, man. Me personally - there's a lot of this Ikea Folk I consider guff of the highest order, but I applaud their right to try. Some of it I love. i'd put M Carthy, Nic Jones, Ali Roberts all in the Ikea Folk category, but they're amongst the classic designs. There's also a whole raft of forgettable plastic cups.

I'm not suggesting two different genres really, just different types of furniture with different reasons for their design but the same heritage - somewhere to park yer arse and smoke pipe at the end of an evening.