Lost heart? Where's the evidence for that? The Transports was a vehicle for all sorts of triumphs but it's not his crowning glory even amongst his surviving works. What it is does is underline just how much he'd taken on board of The Traditional Idiom as his creative MO; as a work of Folk-songwriting it is an astonishing piece of work, but its broader appeal is in The Stellar Cast and Company it invariably engenders, rather than The Man himself who seemed content to take a back-seat to other singers in its various productions.

Look at the albums that followed it; no evidence there of losing heart at all. Indeed, one finds in his ongoing collaboration with the ghost of Rudyard Kipling his mastery of melody really taking shape. I find it intersting (& ironic) that the Kipling:Bellamy songs that don't quite work are the onrs for which he found a traditional tune. However, his own melodic genius has furnished many a Tune in the Traditional Idiom that never fail to not only beggar belief but serve to underline the essential inner-beauty of Traditional Melody and the Not-Transferable nature thereof. The Idiom however is something else, and from this point of view alone Keep on Kipling will always be my favourite Bellamy album, with Merlin's Isle running it a very close second.

Anyone who heard Bellamy kick off his set with On Board a '98 will have been in no doubt of the seriousness which PB took his craft, nor yet that he was a creative master of that craft; a true Folk Singer immersed in the glories of a genre who could easily take his place alongside The Coppers, Cox, Larner, Tanner, Stewart - all of whom were idiosyncratic stylists in whose hands The Tradition is at its most vivid. To my ears Bellamy quite simply smoked The Revival on those terms, and his recorded legacy will always stand as a testimony to something a whole lot bigger than Folk because of that. Maybe that's why he couldn't get work; in a scene for whom MOR easy listening was the preferred norm he always came across as a fish out of water somehow. I'd have said the manifest arrogance and flamboyance was not only entirely justified, but inevitable - the man not only had swagger in spades, he'd earned it a thousand fold.

Many true artists are only appreciated long after they're gone. Maybe Bellamy's true audience have yet to be born? Whatever the case, for My Generation, Bellamy shone forth as a beacon in a music where beacons aren't really what you expect to find. Even before I ever heard him sing I remember the time he was doing a booking in Newcastle and wasn't even offered accomodation. Someone suggested to him that I was the sort of person who might put him up, but left it to Bellamy to find me! So imagine that - prior to his performance he was reduced to seeking out a complete strangers and begging them for a doss. That was 1984 I think. It struck me as odd that anyone should be granted humiated bum-status who was a booked guest at The Bridge Folk Club (or whatever it was called back then), but it was at that gig that my friend bought me his self-bootlegged cassette of Merlin's Isle which was the beginning of a far deeper astonishment that I'm still dealing with to this day.

Having worked & lived very close to death & disability all my life, I generally have little time for suicides; in Bellamy's case, however, I might count it a minor miracle that he made it as far as he did. Then, as I say, I think if only he'd hung on another ten years he'd be a National Treasure now - cherished by all but the usual suspects who wouldn't know genius if you sat them in a room full of Van Goghs whilst playing them the collected works of Joy Division.