Suibhne old-fashioned, Jim? Your own perspective seems positively antediluvian. Your description of a performance setting in which every element of a song needs to be ruthlessly subordinated to the telling of a story harks back to something that barely exists anymore. Like it or no, we live in a world of CDs, tapes, Youtube and Soundcloud, where we have the luxury of hearing a performance as often as we want. This opens up the pleasant possibility of a much richer aesthetic experience, in which the texture of words interknits with the contours of the melody, which is further enriched by the sound of voices and instruments engaging creatively with melody and text. And we can take as long as we like to explore those elements in re-listening. Now why shouldn't performers take advantage of that? All the above sucked me into The Birth Of Robin Hood and have held me there ever since the Soundcloud recording came up. As Michael said earlier: beautiful. Or as you might say: decadent. But I'm not putting words into your mouth, of course.

So if Suibhne and Rachel are thirty years off the pace, would you care to tell us who you regard as cutting-edge these days?

And why is responding robustly to someone's criticism somehow self-obsessed? Just wondered.