Slop [4]

“Hey, Google AI. I am sitting in a coffee shop writing an extended essay for my blog. Can you suggest a few snappy one-line jokes that I could use to liven it up.”

“I am fiercely defending middle earth from a corner table. All I am actually conquering is a blueberry muffin.”

“My favourite writer is the guy on the corner table. He wrote a whole blog post about the wifi password.”

Thank you, Google AI. We’ll let you know.

During lockdown, there was a New Yorker cartoon depicting a man in his bedroom working on a laptop: he had lined up various stuffed toys and teddy bears, and pinned up a handwritten notice saying “Coffee Shop”. The caption read “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am a writer.  Why do you ask?” That made me smile: I felt, in a quite harmless way, “seen” by the cartoonist. The AI gags have the outward form of jokes, but lack any discernible humorous quality.

The simplest kind of joke is the pun. An algorithm could very easily spot that “big of me” sounds a bit like “bigamy” in certain dialects. But that is not very funny in itself. 

There are a number of joke-formats which are pretty much context-free pun-delivery systems. I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has an "Uxbridge English Dictionary" round, in which contestants propose false definitions of words. 

Condescending : A felon in an elevator

Senile:  What a tourist does while they are in Egypt. 

It would be possible to create a narrative wrapper in which some confusion or misunderstanding gave rise to those wordplays: but the “Dictionary” conceit means we don’t need to bother. 

The same is true of children’s Knock-Knock jokes: they are just a formula for pointing out that some first names sound like the beginnings of meaningful phrases. “Isabella...legal Requirement on a Bicycle”.  “Amos...kito”.) 

Interestingly, the only way to get children to actually laugh at these kinds of jokes is to intentionally subvert the formula. 

Knock-Knock

Who’s there?

Europe.

Europe who?

No, you’re a poo!

See also "A little old lady", "Doctor" or simply "Doo-up".

In the traditional format, the person who started the joke delivers the punchline by adding some words to the knocker’s name. In the subverted versions, the respondent is tricked into supplying the punchline by adding the “oo” sound. There is something rather post-modern about subverting a form before you appreciate what is being subverted. 

So, in Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx is making conversation with Margaret Dumont and another society matron: 

“Let’s all get married.”

“You can’t marry both of us. That’s bigamy!”

“It’s big of me too. It’s big of all of us. Let’s all be big for a change.” 

It’s a fairly feeble pun, so why is it funny? Because it is being told by a man with a funny walk, a false moustache, an over-sized cigar and a slightly exaggerated New York Jewish accent? Because we have agreed in advance to find it funny—because Groucho is universally recognised as the wittiest repartee-artist America ever produced? Might it not even be that it is funny because it is not funny; the joke is really that a comic genius is stooping to such slender material? Later in the movie, after an impenetrable remark about a Prince Albert velvet coat, he breaks the fourth wall and announces “Well, all the jokes can’t be good!”

But what do we even mean by “Groucho Marx”? Do we mean what we can see on the screen: the accent, the eyebrows, the cigar—or do we mean “the knowledge of Groucho that we bring with us to the movie?” Is the line funny because we know that Groucho was an immigrant, grew up in impoverished tenements, was forced to drop out of school to become an errand boy, gradually worked his way up through Vaudeville….? And, indeed, because of what we know of the Great Depression, the Jewish diaspora, 1930s Germany, the Upper East Side….? 

Rowan Atkinson said that Sir Charles Chaplin, despite his obvious comic genius, is just not funny any more, because the world in which the jokes were made no longer exists. But then, why do we laugh, some of us, at Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, whose historical context is arguably more specific and more essential? 

Two arguments diverge: and I am sorry I cannot accept both. 

Down one path is pure formalism. The joke is funny because it is funny and it would still be funny if we had generated it by pulling letters at random out of a bag of Scrabble tiles. 

Down the other is something much more context-related: the joke is funny because a New York German Jew is telling it to some posh ladies in the 1930s.  And it is funny because it is a very old film which I remember watching with Daddy, in the “midnight movie” slot, on a school night; and he thought it was funny because he remembered laughing at it at the Truro Plaza before the War. 

But if we take the road less argued, we have to confront an even bigger question. What if it turned out that Groucho was not a second generation New York German Jew after all, but an English aristocrat who got into Vaudeville in his spare time, to finance his love of fox hunting? We contextualists would have to say that the joke is suddenly worthless: where the formalists would be free to say that Groucho-on-the-screen is a construct. It doesn’t matter if it is an actual man named Julius Marx, an entirely different man impersonating him, or, for the sake of the argument, a computer generated animation or an animatronic simulacrum. 

If it’s funny, it’s funny.

To which I can only see two responses. 

Either we have to say that its a silly question because a robot, an animator, or an impersonator could not in any world have created Groucho Marx: Groucho is the product of his unique biographical circumstances.

Or else we have to become very extreme subjectivists and say that now we know that Groucho is not real, we just feel, in our hearts and our guts and our humour glands, that we can no longer laugh at him.

Which is a very good answer. But I can think of a very good refutation of it: “You may no longer laugh at him, but I do.”

To which the only possible reply is “Well, you shouldn’t.” 

There is really no pressing need to let me know that you don’t think that it is a very good joke and you never found the Marx Brothers especially funny. You can by all means substitute Bernard Manning or Bernie Clifton or Wee Jimmy Krankie and the argument will be exactly the same.

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Slop [3]

Technology changes art: of course it does. Once someone worked out how to reliably lip-sync sounds and pictures, the particular artistry of the silent movie passed into obsolescence. I am quite patient with "difficult" art forms, but I find it really, really, hard to get my head around Metropolis or Nosferatu. It’s a form of narrative we have mostly forgotten how to read. 

Artists use the tools they have available: of course they do. Once someone has worked out a reliable formula for oil paints, then painters can do more and different things on their canvass. But some artists still choose to work within the limitations of watercolours or pastels. The fact that novels exist doesn’t mean that no-one will ever again write a haiku. I happen to love the cheap four colour comic books of the 1970s. I don’t think there would be so many red and blue good guys and purple and green bad guys if the artists had had a wider colour palate at their disposal. But I don’t think that if some luddites smashed the new colour separation system with lusty stroke, then a new Steve Ditko and a new Jack Kirby would inevitably arise.  

People used to say that prose written with an old fashioned dip-pen was identifiably different from prose written with a modern fountain pen; and that you only have to read an article to spot whether the journalist uses a ballpoint or a typewriter. There is something to this: I would be very unlikely to write a long, looping dissertation of this kind if I had to dip my quill in an ink pot every seven words—or even if I had to use correcting fluid every time I changed my mind. Perhaps CS Lewis was right that the clatter, clatter, clatter of a typewriter made it hard for young poets to get the rhythm right. Perhaps if I had to translate my diary into an obscure self-invented cypher I would discover a stylistic affinity with Anne Lister or Samuel Pepys. For a long time I used to write longhand drafts on plain white A4 notepads; and at one stage I tried to replicate the process with an Apple Stylus. Maybe I will do that again someday and see if anyone notices the difference. 

And so we come to the Hard Question. 

Eventually, I will read a book or a comic or listen to a song and say “That truly is the best thing I’ve heard in years. I haven’t been so engaged with a prawn salad since Knausgaard’s fifth volume. The world building is comparable to Stephen Donaldson at his best. How did you put into such simple language exactly how I felt when the Colston Statue was pulled down? How did you communicate the exact emotional sensations I felt when I confronted my bully in middle age? I want to meet the guy who wrote this and shake their hand.”

And you will say: “The guy who wrote it? Oh, didn’t you know? It was generated by AI.” 

You remember Douglas Adams’ digression about Lallafa, who wrote the best poetry in the universe? He lived and died in obscurity, but was subsequently contacted by time travellers from the future, and as a result, never had the experiences he wrote about in his poems? But (due to the way the grandfather paradox works in Adams’ universe) he was able to copy the texts from an edition of his poetry that was printed before history was changed. 

“Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what's changed? The first people say that that isn't the point. They aren't quite sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn't it.” 

So: what is the point? 

The philosopher Jimmy Carr says that it is a false problem: AI is very good at what he calls “left brain things” but incapable of what he called “right brain things”. I don’t think any modern psychologist would accept the left brain / right brain distinction, but it is clear what he is talking about.  AI is very good at say, flying to the moon, because flying to the moon requires you to do a very large number of very difficult things quickly and without a single error. But AI would be unable to, say, write a country and western song, because song-writing is about “the gestalt”, the whole, which it can’t emulate. Songs are about human connections and human feelings which a string of code, however complex, can’t possibly have. 

That sounds very clever, but I am not sure what it means. 

Is the claim that the series of sound-waves that we label Fulsom Prison Blues have a form and complexity that no algorithm, in any possible world, could have produced?

That Johnny Cash’s brain is a unique piece of software, produced by his unique and complex life experience, that no piece of code could possibly emulate?

Or is Carr just saying that if an algorithm had generated Fulsom Prison Blues, it wouldn’t be worth listening to?

I am frequently bewildered by modern art. But I do understand that a male sanitary fitting can be regarded as art because Marcel Duchamp intended it to be art. If it turned out that some plumbers had just left it lying around by accident then we wouldn’t be interested in it. 

I believe in the Folk Process. A professional song writer in, say, the eighteenth century writes a song. He writes it for a professional singer dressed as a shepherd to sing in an eighteenth century theme park; or to print on cheap paper and sell on the street corner for a penny. Someone hears it and sings it to someone else, and someone else sings it to a third person, and so it goes on, ear to mouth, mouth to ear, ready for Cecil Sharp to discover two hundred years down the line. By which time, the bits which are hard to sing have been rubbed off; the bits of poetry which are hard to remember have been made memorable -- and some sections very probably reduced to nonsense. It is an object of faith among folkies that an individual composer, however good, cannot replicate this Process. Chris Wood always says that the greatest song writer of all time was "Anon". You can always tell a song which someone made up from a song which just grew. 

But one could surely now imagine a Marvellous Mechanical Folk Song Machine. Feed in a mediocre song at one end; copy it a hundred times with intentional errors; and you will probably find that something very like a folk-song has come out at the other end. What ought my attitude to that fake-song be?

Do I value the Folk Process because it tends to produce The Trees They Grow So High and Barbara Allen?  Or do I value those songs because I believe they were produced by the Folk Process?

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Slop [2]

My Grandfather remembered a world without radio. My parents grew up in a world where Uncle Mac and In Town Tonight reigned supreme. When I was ten years old, the natural order of things was to come home from school and watch Play School and Jackonory and Penelope Pitstop and John Craven and Blue Peter and the Magic Roundabout and the Six O’Clock News and Nationwide--but where “computers” were only found in Star Trek and Doctor Who. My parents were deeply suspicious of Television; and my Grandmother refused to have one in the house. Daddy admitted that when he was a little boy, he was told he wasted too much time at the cinema. I myself have an Iphone, an Ipad, a MacMini and a NeoLaptop (and wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to get through the day without them): but I am still inclined to worry that Young People Nowadays spend a bit too long on their Screens.

 

Daddy’s objection to television was that it dominated a room, where radio had stayed in the background. You listened to Tommy Handley firing jokes at you or Dick Barton escaping from Baron Scarheat’s nefarious trap: but you did so while doing your embroidery or playing draughts or assembling a scale model of a Spitfire. For all I know, this may have been true: in the olden days, radios were big cumbersome things that took a long while to tune and warm up. I have a half-memory of a time when The Radio in my parents’ house was a large, heavy, black object with shiny metal controls that was Switched On or Switched Off at particular times. The only voice I ever remember coming out of it was the one that said “Are you sitting comfortably?…. Then I’ll begin.” It was that long ago.  

Daddy also objected to the way TV controlled our life-style. He had a notion, I think, that “switching on the television set” ought to be one of a number of perfectly valid  answers to the question “What shall we do this evening?” to be chosen only after “play Monopoly” and “go for a walk in the park” had been considered and rejected; and that having made our decision, we should consume whatever wholesome fare Aunty Beeb happened to be showing. In the olden days people “went to the pictures” without necessarily knowing what movie was on. 

This was consistent with the endless complaints from Mrs Mary Whitehouse and her ilk, that Television was too rude, too violent or merely too interesting. If you were the kind of person who studied the Radio Times and decided to watch The Benny Hill Show, you could hardly complain that Benny Hill was purveying post-card humour (q.v) -- and if it bothered you, you were quite free to switch him off. But if most people were not making a positive decision to watch a particular show, but merely consuming that night’s bill of fare, then the BBC had an obligation never to show anything which could conceivably scare or embarrass or corrupt anyone.

This theory of Television created considerable friction between the older generation and those of us who regarded Blake’s 7, the Wombles, Rentaghost, Top of the Pops and Little House on the Prairie as unbreakable social commitments. 

I think when I was at school I would have been far more disadvantaged by not having seen Blue Peter or Doctor Who than by not having had a bath or new shoes or any breakfast. Which is worth keeping in mind when you talk about social media bans.

Granny regarded The Television as a very extravagant luxury, like a grand piano or a chauffeur driven car or a slice of avocado toast. How could some people be claiming Family Allowance and Old Age Pension and Unemployment Benefit when they were so fabulously wealthy that they could afford a Television Set? 

Grandad said that his first day at work, at the age of twelve, was as an office boy in an attorney’s firm, at a time where there were still rooms full of clerks copying out letters with fountain pens. I am not sure if I quite believe this. It would have been, what, 1912, when typewriters were already ubiquitous. Maybe old fashioned solicitors felt that it was good manners for legal letters to be hand-written? But certainly, Grandad lived through an era of enormous social change. He would have heard the first radio broadcasts, visited the first cinemas, seen or heard about the first TV shows, and lived long enough to take an interest in my Amstrad PC. His grandfather would have remembered the first electric lights, the first telephones and witnessed the rise of the railway system. 

Which generation’s lives were most changed by these new inventions? I think that the rise of the Mass Medium—television—represented a bigger change than anything I have experienced in my lifetime. Having a Computer in my pocket is very different from having a Television in my front room: but not as different as “not having any concept of TV” would have been from “taking TV for granted”. I think you would have to go right back to the exodus of ordinary people from the farms to the factories in the eighteenth century to find a comparable social upheaval. 

Will the arrival of Artificial Intelligence be like the invention of Steam Trains and Television? Or will it turn out to be a smaller thing, like when we noticed that Usenet is a bit passé and that all the cool kids are expressing themselves via the Twitter? 

*

CS Lewis said that he was once discussing patriotism with and nice old vicar. 

“But sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?” he asked. 

“Yes”  replied the clergyman “But in England it’s true”.

I do not have square eyes. The human race has not evolved into beings with gigantic bottoms and enormous thumbs, perfectly adapted to watch daytime soap-operas but not to do anything else. TV didn’t signal the end of cinema; cinema didn’t result in the closure of the theatres. Young people today read as many, or as few, good books as they ever did. Video entirely failed to kill the radio star. 

"But haven’t people always said that new technology will rot young people’s brains; destroy their morals; take away their capacity for conversation; remove their capacity for critical thinking; present them with violent and immoral role-models, and in general, create a society of mindless, screen-addicted automata."

“Yes. But this time, it’s true."

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Slop [1]

Do you remember Before Watchmen? 

Do you remember Doomsday Clock? 

I have certainly forgotten the HBO Watchmen TV sequel, although I believe at the time I said it was rather well done. 

When Doomsday Clock was coming out, someone sensible on the Internet asked:  “How long will it be until we stop treating any Watchmen sequel as a blasphemy against Alan Moore, and start treating it as one more comic book with an unfortunate copyright history—like Superman and Howard the Duck and everything Stan Lee was ever involved in?”

And my answer was “When someone other than Alan Moore writes a really first rate and important comic featuring the Watchmen characters.” 

Truthfully, the idea of a  New Gods comic drawn by anyone apart from Jack Kirby is very nearly as silly as someone who isn’t Alan Moore trying to continue Watchmen. But once you have read The Great Darkness Saga it is very hard to carry on being a purist.

I am not up to speed with Grant Morrison’s material, but I have heard they have done rather decent things with Kirby's pantheon.

This essay is not about superhero comics.

People who want to promote gigs or festivals very often use generative artificial intelligence to produce striking posters or flyers. If they are unwise enough to post those flyers on Facebook, the first “below the line” comment is almost certain to be “AI Slop”. 

And the artwork is usually very sloppy indeed. It is painfully apparent that every single sea shanty band, and every single sea shanty session (including, until I changed it, the one I run) is using roughly the same AI generated poster of some jolly pirates singing on a boat or at a dock. Sometimes, photos of the actual band have been turned into cartoons and superimposed onto a sepia or parchment background.  Very often it’s a kind of montage, like a movie poster, with singers, boats, audiences, pints of beer and, for some reason, sea monsters, hovering over an abstract background with no particular relationship to one another.  

Some of my shanty friends have gone so far as to say that they won’t attend any gig that uses this kind of publicity material, and indeed that gigs with those kinds of posters deserve to fail. 

My own position is a little less absolutist. I make some use of ChatGPT and GoogleAI  to bounce ideas off and, indeed, chat to; but I would not let it edit, much less write, anything going out under my name. The main strength of my writing is that it sounds like me; and AI would have the effect of making it sound exactly like everyone else

And I am pretty sceptical of using  AI as a search engine, or as someone said, an “automated librarian”, because its answers are frequently plain wrong. 

Case in point: I am researching, which is to say, vaguely ruminating about, a short, medium or long piece comparing Calvin and Hobbes with Winnie-the-Pooh. Calvin and Christopher Robin clearly have a lot in common: both are six years old; both have stuffed toys, and indeed, stuffed tigers, with whom they have imaginary adventures. And, incidentally, the creators of both characters became quite resentful of their success.

Now, the first Pooh story was originally published, not as part of the collection we are all familiar with, but as a special feature on the front page of the Christmas Eve edition of a London newspaper.  Was that original text any different from the published version? Both Google AI and ChatGPT said that the newspaper published the story without the framing device. You remember that the book begins with Christopher Robin asking for a bedtime story: the newspaper jumped straight in at  “A long time ago, about last Thursday….”. As a result, Christopher Robin has different pronouns: in the book, they were “you” but in the newspaper they were “he”.  

Which makes complete sense: but happens to be incorrect. You can fairly easily find a facsimile of that first printing, and it begins with the “real” Christopher Robin dragging the toy Pooh downstairs, exactly as he does in the book. 

Which doesn’t do me any harm. I am the kind of person who likes going back to sources. My current Work in Progress is a critique of CS Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. When I asked my New Online Best Friend who on earth this “Alanus” who Lewis treats as an important authority could be, it told me that he was referring to a fairly obscure medieval allegorist named Alain de Lille. My first instinct was to head straight over  to the Internet Archive, download a copy of The Complaint of Nature, and see if I could make any sense out of it. (Spoiler: I couldn't.)

Lewis himself would have strongly approved of this: he said that he wished that, rather than reading boring modern books on Platonism, he could persuade his students to simply go away and read the Symposium. 

That is my first response to anyone who pontificates about the evils of the TickTocks and the FaceBooks. The terrible porn infested online echo chamber can provide me, in a few seconds, with primary texts that only a few years ago would only have been available from academic libraries. 

But not every harassed student will use the technology in that way. Many of them will use ChatGPT instead of reading the original books; or assume that ChatGPT is right even when it isn’t; or even use ChatGPT generated answers instead of writing their own. 

This was also true of Google and Wikipedia.  

Which is perhaps not the most original insight I have ever had:  

“New technologies can be used in bad ways and less bad ways”.

“A new tool may be helpful or harmful, depending on what you are doing with it.”

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Slop

 A series of very short articles

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Sidmouth Festival Diary [Saturday]

 I got a review!

Obviously I didn’t get straight off the train from Exeter and hop on a bus from Temple Meads to Wells to join some shanty-adjacent friends who were having a camping weekend / mini festival / birthday party in a field near Priddy. Because that would have been mad.

And equally obviously there was no difficulty in getting an Uber or a Taxi to come to a field in Priddy in Sunday morning to pick me up.

I definitely decided that I was NOT going to walk into my flat on Sunday afternoon and take a nap. So I sat down in my book nook chair to catch up on emails and the Guardian. And instantly fell asleep for three hours. 

[And equally obviously, I am not going to canteen shanties on Monday evening, and definitely not going to hear Pressgang Mutiny in the Folk House on Tuesday. Because that would be silly.]

I suppose the festival beard will have to be shaved off. The lockdown beard was not a good look. The hair on my head has kindly gone from brown to light brown, receded slightly, and regained some curls since the trendy and expensive barber started to sell me expensive moroccan hair oils. But the hair on my chinny chin chin has absurd streaks of white in it.

I have a holiday diary I kept just after I had started school. The last page says “after excitement of these, we are glad to be back at Number 3.” (Number 3 being the house number I grew up in.)

I am certainly looking forward to sleeping in an actual bed, using an actual toilet, showering alone, etc etc.

I wonder what would happen if I carried on writing and publishing diaries in weeks when I am not festivalling?

Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.
Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.
Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.
Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Friday]

Final day. 

I am dictating this into my Iphone on a train. Apple notes has a built in speech-text feature, so what could possibly go wrong? The next station is Taunton. I heard Prescot Mutant give a talk about sea shanties. They think they derive from cotton-screwing songs. There is a popular Jamaican tune which goes almost exactly to Sam’s Gone Away. Why are there no English cathedral-building songs? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They are not comfortable with the “she says she won’t but I think she will” line in Chicken on a Raft. I wish I had been taking notes. See it, say it, sort it.  Against my better judgement, I sang McDermot’s War Song (By Jingo) to the Middle Bar group at the Anchor , but they seemed to think it was funny. Th he shanty people thought that “silver spades” and “golden chains” might be references to sea burials, the “silver spades” actually being an anchor. I don’t approve of automatic standing ovations, but I definitely stood up and clapped at the end of Peters Field, a cycle of songs by Sean Coolney, (Young Uns), Sam Carter (riding high still from last night), and Eliza Carthy (whose dad was in the front row).  The folk opera format meant we got a very detailed account of the event with voices and names given to individual victims (and some of the soldiers) . Several songs are destined to become standards. The word “Peterloo” wasn’t mentioned until the last line of the final song. Spiers and Boden did what was very much a Spiers and Boden set, which is pretty much exactly what you want on the last night. There is still a wild boar in the woods, the bush still pricks their heart full sore, and the identity of the baby in The Birth of Robin Hodd is still a surprise if you haven’t heard it before.

[The shanty crew were actually called Pressgang Mutiny.]

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Thursday]

Who was it who said that travel infantilises you? Like a toddler, you suddenly find that you have to specifically plan and take account of your bodily functions.

The same is true of festivals. 

That is obviously just a general comment. Definitely nothing awkward or embarrassing happened last night. 

Yesterday I had to play the fine old game of Festival Tetris. Studying the programme, there logically must be a way of fitting in all the things you want to do. [But everything turns out to be the wrong shape.]

Rowan Gatherer, the front man for the Goblin Band, was doing a solo set in the Kellaway Cellar, which was more or less obligatory [for me to attend]. He is great. It is hard to put your finger on what he does — he sings songs and lets them speak for themselves, but with a definite preference for the silly and absurd.  He sang The Muckspreader, the Mallard, I Am a Mortal Unhappy Old Chap and If I Were a Pretty Young Girl, which is practically a rugby song: "I would marry a milkman, and we’d milk each other all night long, I would marry a boxer and we’d beat each other all night long, etc etc". People who go to Bristol sessions are warned my repertoire may be expanding.

I have discovered that some older folkies don’t like the Goblins. Too silly and too shouty? I still think they are the best thing out there. 

"So, if I go straight to the Methodist hall, I can hear Jennifer Reid and Macdara Yeats doing their talk / performance on Dublin / Manchester street songs, finishing at 3.15 and still get to hear Daoiri Farrell doing Irish songs in the Ham at 15:30." Except…disaster….Daoiri on first at Ham, so his set nearly finished by the time I get there: oh woe! 90 minutes between now and ballad session unaccounted for!

I sensibly did a thing which needed to be done to my tent to ease Saturday’s departure. 

Best set of the day, and possibly of the festival, was Sam Carter’s tribute to Nic Jones. Sam is a fine performer, and while I do not play guitar, it seemed to me that he was accurately reflecting Nic’s playing style without (of course) attempting to be The Bootleg Nic. He did all the songs you would expect him to do: pot stoves and gold that he hasn’t found and lovers drowning and ruins on shores and people who are under the impression that Canada is a seaport town. Will Pound, (harmonica and squeeze box) and Jennifer Butterworth (banjo and vocals) opened for him. They can only be described as virtuosos, and were clearly having a great time. “I love music,” exclaimed Will after one exuberant tune.

[They were the people who would have come on after Daoiri Farrell, so everything fitted together quite well in the end.] 

And while it was perhaps not a complete surprise, NIC JONES HIMSELF WAS IN THE AUDIENCE. He cut short the multi-minute standing ovation with “play some more songs”. 

I HAVE SHAKEN HANDS WITH NIC JONES

[Background: Nic Jones was the pre-eminent trad folk singer of the 1970s, and Penguin Eggs is frequently voted the second best folk album of all time, after Liege and Lief. He suffered a catastrophic car crash in 1982 which ended his career, although he had a brief comeback in 2010.]