"Largely barren"... hmm.

I wasn't, strictly speaking, around - I was here, but I'd stopped taking an interest in folk music well before 1982 and I didn't get back into it for 20-odd years. But I do get the feeling that there was a sense of having taken folk into lots of different areas - folk, fine, but folk and what else? - the whole "folk-rock" thing being part of the process. So there was folk on Top Gear, folk on stage at the National, folk in working-men's clubs, folk on TOTP, even an entire folk opera (Bellamy and Townshend, Tommy and the Transports - compare and contrast). And, just as prog rock ran out of steam in the same period, there was perhaps a bit of a sense that it had all been done - after Lark Rise, after the Transports, after "All around my hat", after "Capstick Comes Home" (1981); a sense of "what are we going to do now?". Fortunately the songs were still there, preserved for a new generation (or, in the case of my age group, a new generation of old farts) beneath the icecap of general oblivion. It's ironic that now, when folk has become fashionable again, it's very much a retro, revivalist style - and what's being revived is by and large the 1970s, the heyday of prog-folk.

I wish Nic well with all my heart, but from that article it sounds as if he's still thinking in those folk-and-what-else? terms. I dare say his own songs are all right - "Ruins on the shore" is OK - and I'm quite into Radiohead, but the old songs are something else.