for us a ten minute spot in a folk club is like driving a racing car - audience intelligent, not completely pissed - and we eat those places. Piss rings round their crummy efforts.

Do you? I've known folk clubs where apologising in advance ("I only finished it this afternoon"), reading the words off a bit of paper, mumbling into your chest because you're concentrating on getting the chords right, forgetting the chords halfway through anyway (and so on) isn't just tolerated - it's actually welcomed: that's the kind of thing the regulars expect. Hitting the back wall, doing ten or twelve verses straight through, engaging the audience with witty banter and so on is all very well, but it's a bit like showing off. (And heaven forfend that you should try and get a chorus out of them.)

But this doesn't have anything to do with traddie vs singer-songwriter, or with Harding-Folk vs alt-folk, or with class for that matter.