Digressing slightly, here's my favourite Flying Saucer Attack number: At Night. (Best played loud and in a darkened room.) FSA should definitely (a) reform and (b) do some traditional material. Can you imagine what they could do with True Thomas or Little Musgrave?

you've got to admit that too much diction (to paraphrase Television) is horrible unless it's overdone for effect Syd Barret style

Not with you there. Clarity doesn't mean RP. Whatever I listen to, I like to hear the words well enough to learn the song for myself, but that doesn't mean everything has to be "Ear-ly one mor-or-neeng". In fact one of the things I like about that FSA track is that the vocals are clear as a bell (in their own way).

When I was young and pretentious (and into the later Soft Machine), my best friend was raving about some new band - I think it was Bad Company, which dates me - and I told him I couldn't really be bothered with them: "Thing is, I've got a fundamental aversion to rock." I was being pretentious - and he never let me forget it - but there was a grain of truth there; put me in front of a guitar-based rock combo straight out of the mid-70s and I'll just get bored. (Guitar-based rock combos straight out of the late 70s were a very different bag of nails - at least, they were until U2 came along.) Unfortunately this rules out an awful lot of folk-rock. Then there's my fundamental aversion to protest songs... maybe I'm just fundamentally awkward!