THe trouble with this is you are abusing each other, and that's what is at the root of our problems. the lack of mutual respect.

Okay JIm you went to folk clubs expecting trad folk songs. But for every one of you there were a dozen people interested enough tpo go to folk clubs because of what they'd seen on the telly.

For ages they could go two or three folk clubs in most English towns. There they would find Seekers, and Spinners style folk groups, guitarist folksingers like Tony Capstick, Derek Brimstone, Jansch, Gerry Lockran...

Then along comes Karl Dallas and in the influential Melody Maker folk pages. He announces we have an English Bob Dylan called Martin Carthy - in the words of the late Derek Brimstone (he would never have been so damaging in public to a folk club movement that he loved and gave his life to, but he said this in private). I used to go round folk clubs that had been running for six or seven years, and the week Martin had been round the place was empty - people were bored shitless by an evening of purely traditional folksong.

Karl Dallas probably meant his adulatory review of Martin kindly, but set against the backdrop of MacColl spitting vitriol against Donovan et al, and really encouraging people like yourself to get on the high horse - it bloody well did for the mass folk club phenomena which was such a terrific thing about being a teenager in the 1960's.

There are alternative histories to the one you keep saying. I saw awful things in the 1960's. I saw an audience yelling at Fred Jordan to get off stage - he was on a sort of folk package show (modelled I guess on the Rock and Roll package show) with Jansch at the top of the bill. Things that weren't right. I saw the Journeymen , the residents at The Jolly Porter being horribly rude talking volubly through the set of a fabulous young American folksinger called Marc Roberts.

It was then all this disrespect of each other started. And its bloody well time it finished.

I mean in real life do you go round yahboo-ing ang and telling other people they're talking bollocks. Most of us don't. Its not the sort of world any of us want to live in.