When I was 18, TS Eliot reading the Waste land was my favourite recording of anything. I listened to it many times. That is the voice that creared the Waste Land. The rhythms and resonances of of old Toilets voice still echo in my mind every time I read the lines now.

But that's neither here nor there Mike. what is crucial is McTell's right to create with exactly the brushes from the pallete that HE chooses. Not some prefigured stereotypical way a Croydon lad should sing.

Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence is asked to consider what if he turns out to be a bad painter - should he have abandoned his wife and family.

Strickland says something like, when a man finds himself drowning in the river - he has to swim. It doesn't matter whether he swims well or badly. All he knows is, he has to swim, and that is my predicament. It doesn't matter whether I paint well or badly, I have to paint.

And I think that is Ralph McTell. A completely committed artist, who has put his best foot forward (as it feels to him) and people have to make what they will of it. Thankfully there are quite a few of us who find what he does acceptable - remarkable even. We know we couldn't do it as well.

What is stunning is that this chap from a very poor background has realised his ambition to be an artist. Ralph, when he started out had this persona as a sort of ragtime cavalier. His reference points were US folksingers and the glamour of the European continent that few of us had seen, but he had.

It was an ambitious pose. Perhaps a bit uppity for a working class kid. But I reckon he pulled it off, pretty damn well.