When it comes to gypsy violins, Tanya probably knows more than most Londoners. Despite her Sloaney English appearance, complete with Hermes scarf, she's from an impeccably White Russian family based in Chiswick since 1917.

However, she wasn't the only person in the room measuring the distance to the exit. Most of the very English people in the big smoky bar, on chairs arranged tactfully around a giant pool table, also had rather wary looks on their faces. The Chelsea Arts Club is where well-bred bohemians of a certain age, whose faces bear the marks of a lifestyle of smoke and drink (elegantly handled), gather to drink, sun themselves in the garden, listen to jazz on Sunday nights and reminisce about their glory days.

The membership was visibly unsure what to make of the foreigners about to burst into their sanctum, unmanageable eastern European gypsies who might howl, wail, emote or even (Heaven forfend) weep.

They didn't. There were two violinists and a guitarist, and they slipped in so unassumingly that the audience took a while to notice they were there. The lead violinist, Sergei Erdman, had a properly wild crop of black hair and the kind of mischievous grin you might expect of a gypsy maestro. The two younger players, with shoulder-length hair reminiscent of old heavy metal bands, were paler and more sombre, more like your average tormented Slav.

What they played ran from traditional sobbing songs - broken hearts and moonlight - to witty send-ups of their style, which they called "gypsy avant-garde", to sounds which were like nothing so much as the chirrups of birdsong, with one violin picking up and answering the birdcall of the other. And, however much they bent and stretched their beats, they had all the brilliance and discipline of classical musicians.

The Loyko trio, from Siberia, is the inheritor of a long tradition of gypsy music in eastern Europe. The gypsies of that authoritarian part of the world were encouraged to give up their nomadic caravan lifestyle and settle - but no one could stop them making their howling, mournful dance music.

Music was the ladder by which they entered Russian society. Before the Revolution, gypsy musicians and dancers were what you got at the kind of nightclub where vodka and champagne flowed freely and Imperial army officers worked off the strains of a long day of obedience by dancing on tables and smashing glasses in fireplaces.

When the aristos left Russia en masse after the Revolution, trekking west to Europe or east to China, the wisest gypsies left too. Nightclubs from Harbin in China to Bucharest and Paris rang with the strains of their wistful music and the clatter of gypsy earrings, as musicians and patrons dreamed of lost homes. Stalin wasn't kind to those who remained in Russia. They died, hid or, in the jargon of the time, were repressed. Those who went west fared little better at Hitler's hands.

But, in the past generation, the gypsy musical tradition has resurfaced in Russia and in the West, in cleaned-up, modernised shape (just as Jewish klezmer music from the shtetls is enjoying a revival, led by descendants of the original players who are now scattered from Central Europe to the United States).

The word is that Sergei Erdman was taken up by the classical music world and trained in violin technique by Yehudi Menuhin. In the ultimate proof that crossover has become mainstream, today anyone who chooses to can study gypsy violin at the ultra-conservative Budapest Conservatory in Hungary, alongside or instead of lessons in the more conventional classical violin.

By the end of the first tune at the Chelsea Arts Club, Tanya was smiling with relief. "They're good," she whispered, and quietly put the bag she'd been cradling in her lap down on the floor, and her anxiety about hairy men scraping out dirges with it. By the end of the third piece, she was clapping along and saying, no longer in a whisper, "they're the best!" She didn't leave until after the second encore.

By then, the rest of the audience was on its feet in full crossover frenzy. The London bohemians' sedate Englishness was forgotten. Two old-timers were jigging up and down on the floor and everyone else was clapping and cheering and whistling as if they'd been transported back in time to the wildest of gypsy taverns.

Meanwhile, the shy musicians were blushing and bowing and bashfully grinning, with all the modesty that the rigours of the 20th century had taught them.

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I have no sympathy for him at all. A convicted drug dealer breaks the conditions of his parole. End of story. John Tuohy

Many thanks Urban Fox - an excellent reminder about the world's worst weapon of mass destruction - aka double standards. Well done! LM

I agree that certain jokes are carried too far and that people consider them as just jokes but they are not. There is seriousness in saying the world is round after proving this and saying that London is the centre of the World by manipulating the atlas. All are not fools. Timesonline should be given credit for fighting against this joker. Thank you. Firozali A. Mulla, Dar-Es-Salaam

I agree with your story but would like to point out a different issue. I do feel sorry for the poor lad, but why wasn't Mr Khayam arrested on the spot or even searched or shot if that's the way the police had promised to deal with suicide bombers? Why can the police shoot a innocent man on a tube, wearing a outfit clearly nothing in resemblance to a suicide bomber, yet let someone who clearly looks like a suicide bomber escape so blatantly? How can the police miss someone who travels on a train so obviously looking like a bomber. I say the police are a joke. They stop and check people with back packs yet they did not even stop and search him. Are the trains and London really safe? I don't really think so. I won't be travelling back there in a hurry. Aneeka Iqbal