f4
towards us. So all’s well with a world that didn’t end in the biblical flooding to the south of fRoots’ mountain-top dungeon after all, though it was a close run thing. Now we’re seeing eyebrow-raising predictions of the scorchingest summer for a century. Yes, we’ll believe that
A
when we roast in it… I’m sorry to report that traditionally it buckets down when my birthday falls – like this year – on the Saturday of one particular annual festival, a statistic only broken the year when Tarika from Madagascar also played the event on that very day and they had an unbroken record of taking the sun wherever they went. Clearly the weather gods decided on compromise for it tipped down the whole day until the very minute that our Indian Ocean chums hit the stage, upon which the clouds parted, the crowd roared its approval and it stayed sunny from there on. Spooky that.
0 0 0 0
But back to February… being long in the English teeth and having jack-of-all-traded widely, I do have great admi- ration of and sympathy for the people who run the Folk Awards, because I can see things from all sides of most fences, sometimes from perching on them. Gone are the certainties of youth…
Out there on the wild wild web soon after this year’s event I read one person say “I watched the Folk Awards. I go to several major folk festivals every year and always check out who is on at the others. How come I'd never heard of half the winners?” while another wrote “Pre- dictably the same winners as before from a very selective area of the folk scene, which ignores virtually all of the less well-publicised but equally, or more talented.” Then the usual stuff complaining that nobody knows who the judges are, and a comment reported from A Place On The Internet That I Don’t Go saying words to the effect that if a bomb fell on the Albert Hall that night, nobody on the ‘real’ folk scene would notice the difference. I mean, really…
I did have one complaint about this year’s very profes- sionally run event – one that can’t have done us any harm at all out there in general public land. There were actually quite a few really deserving new names getting multiple nominations this year, or even winning, but none of them got to play and so be seen on the TV. Now, wearing my fence-squatter hat, I do recognise the realities of this. Gone are the glorious pre-recession days when the BBC gave hundreds of folk scene worthies a free ticket and a massive feast and BBC4 paid to put it on TV. Now they have to sell lots of tickets to the public to fill a big prestigious venue to pay for the event, which we’re very lucky to have. So there’s bound to be a calculation which says fill the live performance bill with big names. I get that.
It’s just that – applying the same logic that I aimed at festival organisers a couple of issues back – how do those new names get to be big names if nobody gives them the chance to show their wonderful stuff to a bigger audience?
Ian Anderson
nother year, another BBC Folk Awards hap- pens, another festival season hurtles
Photo: Judith Burrows
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