"First time I heard Bob Davenport in 1964(he's well known for plain speaking) a floor singer got up and spent fully 3 minutes explaining the song he was about to sing. Bob stood up and shouted from thn back- 'Sing the fucking song man, stop talking about it'"

Ignorant bastard! There's plain speaking and there's downright fucking rude. If anyome said that to me they'd get a pretty curt response at the time and a warning afterwards that it they ever did it again they wouldn't be able to sing until they'd had a lot of cosmetic dentistry.

Personally, I like to hear the provenance of songs (OK, maybe not so much in a singaround). When he ran the Osmotherly Folk Gathering, Richard Grainger has a Sunday lunchtime session where singer/songwriters were invited to talk about the background to their songs before singing them. I really enjoyed that.