Yo Breezy -

The men in white coats turned out to be some passing sheep. A quick trip to Specsavers fixed my problem. All I have to do now is somehow to get these gorilla nets off me ...

Fair comment on MS (and Donovan too, for earlier posters), up to a point - but bearing in mind that all music is a form of synchronised noise, and that the urge to 'instant replay' a particular track (or tracks) from any given player is wholly a matter of personal taste and opinion, I'd have to suggest that there isn't any 'good' or 'bad' music at all. What it comes down to IMHO is the reaction of amazement and wonder that results from hearing a specifc offering, and how durable it turns out to be over time - so let's not get too critical when that doesn't happen, eh? That was my own unspoken and instinctive reaction to what I heard on the radio and on records when I was a child, long before it was suggested to me by my late uncle that maybe I should take up the guitar and have a go at it myself. I duly did that, and ended up with a straight-line trajectory from The Shadows to Donovan, to Bert Jansch, to Joni Mitchell, to Isaac Guillory (from whom I learned that 'it doesn't always have to be the same'), to Leo Kottke and beyond.

From the regrettably late Isaac Guillory in particular, I learned to listen with an open mind, and to give everything I heard a fair shake, regardless of circumstances and who was playing. (I attended what was very nearly Ike's last gig at the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, towards the end of the year 2000, knowing all too well that he was very nearly gone by then; and I was amazed at how well he held it all together, in spite of the appalling amount of pain he was in by then.)

I also attended what turned out to be one of the very last gigs ever played by Tim Hardin, before he ODed on heroin and brought his act to an unnegotiable end. It took place on a summer's evening in 1980 in a pub down in Putney, just along the embankment from the boat sheds ... I'd gone down on spec. from where I was living at the time, to see what was what - and found to my great pleasure that he was presenting a lot of new material. I realised right away that I definitely wanted to hear it - because it was jolly good stuff, and IMHO was at least as engaging as his earlier 'pop' material. Unfortunately, his audience that evening consisted mainly of people who were a good deal younger and more brash than I, and who were also uniformly uncool, possibly shouldn't have been there at all, and clamoured loudly and annoyingly throughout his set to hear his older creations ('Baltimore' etc, which I also still feel were very good). After a few numbers of this nonsense and insolence going on, and with all these people shouting ignorantly right through his performance, he gave a resigned shrug and a half-smile and obliged them with the older material. Barely three months after that ruined gig, his final accidental and unfortunate encounter with heroin silenced him forever, to the very considerable loss of the folk-musical world. How much effort would it have taken for those people to simply have sat and listened, and maybe in the process have discovered something new and valuable, and encouraged the man sufficiently to keep him off the needle and continue with his voluntary retreat from his killer habit? It's far too late to say now - but not too late to bear in mind the negative effects of unreasonable criticism, and to mindfully withhold it in all of its futile destructiveness under all circumstances.

There you go - more garbled musings from the madman from Shetland ... but who else is going to speak up for those incredible musicians, who all crashed and burned too early through accidenta or unwise lifestyle choices? There are far too many of them already, and no doubt there'll be more of them in the future. The best we can do is to encourage them to keep on playing and creating new material, make them feel to be wanted and valued, and in the process somehow keep them between the ditches.