One of the joys of Festival Folk at the Oak, and to some extent the Fringe in general, is that a concert goer can never be sure what to expect. Even for someone like myself who is relatively absorbed in the folk music scene, I am never able to recognise the majority of names at the main folkie venues. Sadly Gareth Davies Jones is one name that I wish had remained within that majority .

Ostensibly, a mix of good guitar playing, a clutch of songs with a conscience, and an ideal venue for intimate acoustic music should have made for a thoroughly enjoyable night. However there were two main factors that prevented this mix working for me, firstly Jones' insistence on singing with a transatlantic twang, secondly his approach to songwriting, that seemed to be more rooted in the library than life experience.

Remarkably the American accent pervaded every song, which in the case of Jones's traditional material was both surreal, and (for me) destroyed any sense of integrity, or the idea that the material whether original or traditional was relevant to the songwriter's own emotions. The result is akin to James Blunt singing Billy Bragg's cast-offs.

While I am in no way opposed to songwriting with a conscience, it can be made entirely redundant when the need to write in a conscientious vein seems to override the material itself. Jones clearly felt the need to hide behind his research, with the result at points seeming like a Wikipedia article with a few rhymes shoehorned in. A typical example of this was the song 'Princess Victoria' on the subject of the notorious shipping disaster in the Irish Sea. Rather than creating a reflection on the event Jones opted for a disasterous attempt to narrate the events hour by hour, with rhymes such as

'at 9am the wave burst through/ they sent an SOS at 10.32' and 'and out came the lifeboats from Galloway and Down/but they could not find her/the directions were wrong'.

Clearly Jones has the ability to write in a catchy, and thoughtful manner. 'Shoreline of Ghosts' testified to this, tracing the decline of the coal mining and fishing industries in southern Scotland. Yet such moments of poignancy did nothing to justify why a man from Northern Ireland would opt for a generic Americana singing style, while singing songs that are very much rooted in the the British Isles. If I could have been bothered, I would have taken him aside and related the occasion of Pete Seeger singing 'Freedom Come All Ye', and deliberately singing in his own accent, resulting in a performance of great conviction. To adopt nuances while singing that are not based on ones own accent is a guaranteed way of diffusing any power that a song might have.

His one song from North America, 'How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live' was introduced as being written by 'Blind...somebody'. Blind Alferd Reid who wrote the song- one of the first examples of a protest song to be recorded- surely deserves more of an name check than just a reference to his disability. Yet perhaps Gareth Davies Jones is actually less interested in discovering the roots of his material, than he is at indulging his own potential for churning out songs based on information plaques that he has come across while travelling the coast of Britain. In this way a Gareth Davies Jones concert can be best likened to watching a repeat of the long running BBC documentary 'Coast'. Maybe he could write the music for their next series.