This is certainly one of the most surprising and welcome packages of the year, and the good news is that there’s a second volume due out next year to coincide with the third Pirates of the Caribbean film.’Rogue’s Gallery’ is out on 21 August on Anti-/Epitaph. Aki Nawaz has faced the threat of jail, alienation and vilification with his new album, All Is War (the benefits of G-Had). The London-based leader of Fun-Da-Mental found his house besieged by the media when they caught the whiff of a story around the track “Cookbook DIY”, which discusses the making of a suicide bomb and equates it with government scientists making bombs for the White House. “It’s actually a sad song about cannibalism at sea, with guzzling Jimmy wanting to eat gorging Jack, but deciding on little boy Billy instead,” he says. “I don’t know why he thought of me except that perhaps he thinks I’m a sick bastard.”It seems that very few people turn Hal Willner down, and normally scheduling is the only thing that gets in the way. “Usually we get who we’re looking for,” he says without a trace of smugness.In anyone else’s hands, Rogue’s Gallery could have been a messy compromise, but Hal Willner has pulled off the nigh on impossible yet again.

I hadn’t even realised that it was West Indian, as I’d always assumed that all good folk songs come from England.”Ralph Steadman’s interpretation of “Little Boy Billy” was just one of many collaborations that he’s done with Willner over a 25-year period. “I’d worked with him in the past, so I knew he had great vision, and that this project would be left of centre enough to be interesting,” he says.His son Teddy performs an exquisitely pared-down version of “Sally Brown”. He didn’t realise that a childhood favourite would have racist connotations: “I had to look up the real words online and found out that there were these very dodgy verses that I’d never known about. The version of ‘Good Ship Venus’ was by American folk humourist Oscar Brand, who oddly enough couldn’t bring himself to sing the line ‘the mast was the captain’s penis’, opting instead for the tame, almost prissy alternative: ‘a mast of a phallic genus’.”Richard Thompson, who contributes “Mingulay Boat Song”, is a fan of Willner.

“I supposed that I liked the fact that one was sweet and sad, and the other was disgustingly filthy,” he says. “The version of ‘Turkish Revelry’ that Hal sent me was by an amazing singer called Paul Clayton, who was an early supporter and friend of, and influence on, Bob Dylan. “I didn’t set out to do a radical version of ‘Drunken Sailor’,” he insists. “I wanted to properly interpret the song, not as a museum piece, but as contemporary folk music. And, uh, drunkards don’t sing, that I’ve ever noticed, in neat musical syntax.

Not down at my local anyway…Back in LA, Loudon Wainwright was working on one of the most debauched songs,”Good Ship Venus”, alongside the far more sedate “Turkish Revelry”. The fact that he got David to come in and do a completely mad interpretation of ‘Drunken Sailor’ … it sounds like music from Mars or something.”David Thomas believes that when you want a metaphor for the condition of humanity you can’t do better than reference drunken sailors and mad ship captains. “If he’d asked all folk musicians, I don’t know if it would’ve been such a great album.