I hear what you're saying, Al - and in class terms this has always been my beef with The Revival anyway which manifests in all sorts of way. In a recent interview of one of the new VOTP releases I pointed out the hallowed & sanctified upper middle-class academic air of such things is entirely at odds with the very ordinariness of the working class women & men who made & sang these songs, much less the earthy subject matter of the songs themselves (read it yourselves in the next issue of Stirrings...)

But this is Revival Ville - and the people who sing such songs now are very different to the people who were singing them 200 years ago, and the reasons why they sing them are different as well. I even had to point out to someone the other night that they weren't a Traditional Singer, but a singer of Traditional Songs. They accused me of dabbling in semantics, but I had to insist that it was a difference that any lover of traditional song had to be aware of; like the difference between real trains and 00-scale replicas that I dare say even the most ardently deranged model railway enthusiast would never question.

Yesterday in MCR, we listened to a street musician with a guitar essaying contemporary popular songs to a generally appreciative audience. It was, in truth, a timeless scene that could have been any time in the last 700 years and longer - that of a gifted singer knowing exactly which buttons to press in his punters to get the readies. As Harker points out in Fakesong the revival quickly switched from descrition to prescription pretty early on (i.e. the 1954 Definition which still excites the orthodoxy today) but the reality is that the context and experience of Real Popular (i.e. Folk) Music has little to do with the so-called Tradition.

Once I had the honour of MC-ing a Saturday gig at the Steamer in Fleetwood during the Fylde Festival (I am the world's worst MC - I never did it again). That gig is one of the hardest in the world, packed as it is not with Folkies, but with locals. When Bruce Mathiske took the stage something amazing happened. I don't know what it was - a meeting of hearts, souls, minds... God knows what; but the audience wouldn't let him go - they loved him with a passion & the contact was deep, immediate and pure. I don't know if that's the sort of thing you're on about, or if Bruce Mathiske is one of your sort of guitarists, but that night, I believe to this day, I witnessed the essence of Folk Music as a living, breathing thing.

That said, my ideal gig is doing experimental electro-drone Jew's harp & pocket trumpet improvisations to an audience of 6 upstairs in The Red Deer at Sheffield. There, in that rarified air, where the audience would frown if I dared talk to them, am I happiest...