67 f


Katy Spicer with William Kimber and Cecil Sharp


And certainly in those days the place was awful technically, in terms of sound and lighting.


“Yes absolutely. I mean we had no real stage lighting, other than putting up two lighting stands, which were always proba- bly a bit iffy on health and safety, and that silly bar around the stage with domestic spotlights on them! And we not only hired in sound engineers, but sound engineers who could come in with kit. It was all very, very rough and ready. But I just thought we can’t have a venue and say that we are the centre of folk arts and really not do anything, so we’d better start a perfor- mance programme.”


“My first programme started in 2009 with Jim Moray, when fRoots gave him the album of the year award which was a love- ly addition. But it was a very tiny pro- gramme, maybe one gig a month, if that. We used to have, because they were based in the building office-wise then, the Ukulele Orchestra Of Great Britain, so they usually did a concert here, so that went in


the tiny little brochure but at least things were beginning. And then I thought, well, maybe I should have a look and see who our information is getting out to, which was primarily using the membership list at that point because we didn’t have a mail- ing list for the venue. That was the moment I realised that of those three and a half thousand individual members that we had at that time, there were only about three hundred that actually lived in the Greater London area!”


A


mong the major achievements of the Spicer years have been the influx of major project and capital funding grants from the Arts Council. When did all


that start kicking in?


“Much earlier than I’d expected, because coming from a background of working more or less always with sub- sidised arts organisations, I suppose that it was partly my personal goal to get this organisation funded, primarily because it’s that kite mark stamp. People know that if


the Arts Council are funding you, whichev- er part of the British Isles you’re in, then it must mean something, and it helps open the door to others.”


“We had just about done enough to show that we were moving in the right direction when the Arts Council started doing a survey into folk music, rather than folk arts in general. They had this relative- ly small pot of money, and they wanted to look again at what the best way of using it was. By that point, late 2008 into the beginning of 2009, we’d started delivering the Take 6 project, which was the pilot to The Full English. Malcolm Taylor, who was the then Library Director, had got that funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund just before I joined. Rachel Elliot joined us in July 2008 as our Education Director, so she started pushing on expanding what we were doing, and we’d started having conversations with schools and the wider arts education sector. I’d started the per- formance programming, albeit very small, and around April 2009 we did our first


Photo: Ian Anderson


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