"Barley Temple" is a wonderful piece of work - one of my favourite albums in the last few years: Sedayne & Rapunzel in great & relatively restrained form. Anyone who hasn't heard it is missing a treat.

It doesn't make me agree with Sean any more, though!

You just do your own thing and, if people like it, so much the better.

This is, always, sound advice. As Graham Bond said to Peter Hamill, right back at the start of the latter's career, "you've got to do what you've got to do".

But I think Richard's on to something, too.

The point is that it's NOT art music nor pop music, and if you can understand that then the concept that there is an international common aspect (not one of form) makes sense.

We fancied a meal out last night and ended up in a 'roadhouse'-style pub, which did some decent beer and some excellent meals of the "hunk of meat and some chips" variety. The music on the PA was a bit of a downer - the needle seemed to be stuck somewhere around 1957 ("Diana", "Kiss me honey honey"), with occasional excursions into the early 60s. Mostly it was too quiet to make much out. Anyway, in the middle of all this I heard "The light dragoon". It wasn't, obviously - presumably it was something with an American folk influence, possibly by Burl Ives - but the style and shape of the tune just stood out: it was clearly more different from, say, "Unforgettable" and "Da doo ron ron" than they are from each other.

Which is why I think Richard has a point about it being a good thing to bring more folk music to more people (although I don't think weird instrumentation is a barrier). I can only go on my own experience, and my experience is that of hearing a few traditional songs and liking what I heard, and then discovering quite suddenly that there were lots of them. That second experience was what really did it for me - not only did traditional songs sound good, but you could sing them until your voice gave out without repeating yourself. It was an amazing, life-changing experience, and I'd like more people to have it. I don't want people to discover 'folk' as an optional extra in the great popular music fruit salad, like the token folk album on the Mercury list or the occasional John Peel session from June Tabor - I want people to discover 'folk' as an ocean of song, a world in itself.

Having said all of that, I think "where are we going wrong?" is a thoroughly useless and misdirected question. "Traditional music - are we having fun with it?" would be more like it.