Ewan wrote a lot of songs from other people's characters. That's what he did wasn't it? Herring fishermen, travellers, power station builders, children of striking miners, victims of Aparthied... No oppressed minority on Earth was safe from his polemical doggeral; he was the real Voice of the People that man. Heavens, could it all have been (gulp!) dishonest I wonder??

At some point in the mid/late 1980s I was moved to write a letter to Folk Roots on this very issue after being bored to suicidal shitlessness by an evening of his tedious middle-class paternalistic politicising (after which I went to see The Fall, as I recall). I don't have it any longer, but I wrote it under the name of Ralph Harris & they published it under the rather nifty heading Ewan Whose Army?