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men’s club – hosts two different styles of evening – a concert club with guests and residents, and a night of acoustic floor spots with local acts in the second half. Admission is free, the audience brings donations for a raffle, and there’s a collec- tion for guest fees. And how do they con- trol the dreadful floor singer syndrome?
“We go to open mic sessions and per- form and invite some of the better per- formers along to the folk club; they bring friends and some have stuck with us and some of the acts have started to embed themselves in the folk circuit.”
The Grayshott Folk Club, which meets
at Grayshott Village Hall on the Surrey/Hampshire border, does not wel- come floor singers. “People pay good money to see performers who are profi- cient at what they do and the quality of floor singers can vary enormously,” says Des O’Byrne. “If the floor singers are any good they should be trying to get paid gigs on their own merit. Besides, there are other places in our area where floor singers can go and sing if they feel the need.”
Are folk clubs still relevant? “It is up to individual clubs to maintain their rele- vance. We diversify and on occasion we offer different types of music and try to broaden our appeal as a live music club, and although at heart we are a folk club we sometimes go a little crazy to try and shatter the image that most people who don’t know have of a folk club.”
W
hether they are piling out of a folk degree courses or other music education or simply young musicians who’ve stumbled on folk
music through alternative means via open mic nights or the informal pub sessions that have especially become a staple diet of the Scottish scene, there are new paths and different outlets being created.
“Teeth cutting used to happen in folk clubs, with performers developing through and beyond into the professional world,” say Ralph and Jill from Guisbor- ough Folk Club, Cleveland, which meets on Sundays at the local rugby club. “But change is happening as younger folkies – with some notable exceptions – seem to gravitate to festivals, arts centres, smaller theatres, concert venues, etc, missing out the folk club experience altogether. Festi- vals grew out of the early clubs but change has come about with bigger events cater- ing for a different target clientele. Rather than ask if folk clubs have relevance to the modern folk scene, maybe the question should be ‘does the modern folk scene have any relevance to folk clubs?’”
I talk to the great sage, Pete Coe, a veteran of the early folk clubs who has seen life on both sides now. He cut his teeth at the Songwainers club while a stu- dent in Cheltenham before teaming up with Chris Richards, helping to run the Black Diamond folk club, Birmingham and going out on the road as Richards & Coe. What he’s done since as a singer, melodeon, banjo, dulcimer and bouzouki player, songwriter, dancer, recording artist, caller, band member, teacher and folk club organiser must surely mark him as one of
the folk world’s most significant, produc- tive, enduring and consistent – if least her- alded – grass roots figures. He also relishes his reputation for outlandish shirts and grumpy opinions.
“When me and Chris ventured out doing gigs ourselves, we discovered that many clubs were being run by other pro or semi-pro singers. The Watersons, Nic Jones, High Level Ranters, The Spinners, Roy Harris, the Elliotts, Dave Burland… all setting a good standard of repertoire and performance in their own clubs, hearing and booking each other. Like many of these we drifted away from organising as our gigs took us away from home and it was left to others to take up the organis- ing reins. I eventually came back into organising a regular club and it disap- points me that many current pro singers aren’t involved in organising their local club, yet still earn much of their living from folk clubs.”
The monthly Ryburn Folk Club he runs at the Malt House in Rishworth as part of the Ryburn Three-Step folk devel- opment which organises various folk activities in and around West Yorkshire’s Ryburn Valley, has the same problem that confronts most other clubs – how to attract younger audiences.
“Even when we’ve booked a younger guest artist we struggle to attract younger audiences. When I first started going to folk clubs the guests and audience were always older than me, but they had the songs and they were always most welcom- ing. A year or two later it was my genera- tion who organised and attended as audi- ences. Nowadays there’s many more out- lets and resources for younger people to access folk music. So, I think the only way to attract younger people is for younger people to organise too. Young artists are still dependent on our ageing generation to provide them with folk club bookings and many are retiring or snuffing it.”
Peter Garrett, who has run the month- ly Beehive Folk Club near Sheffield with Ken Atkinson for over thirty years, con- curs. “We’ve booked young guest artists on many occasions but very rarely do they
seem to have a young following. I'd hope there is still a future for folk clubs but I am afraid that unless the young artists who are learning their craft today put in the efforts that we have made over the years to actually run clubs, then I think that in another ten years they won’t have any venues to perform in.”
I
s it a fair accusation that the young crop of musicians entering the scene are displaying an arrogant sense of entitlement without the commitment or vision to put in the hard yards to keep the grass roots scene vital? Not entirely. The last time the BBC Folk Awards gave a gong to folk club of the year it went to Sam Lee’s Magpie’s Nest project in London, a movable feast that certainly broke the mould and attracted younger audiences.
Between excursions with John Spiers,
near-world domination with Bellowhead, expansive concerts with Remnant Kings and gigs with Fay Hield, over the last eight years or so Jon Boden has put considerable energy into making a success of the monthly singers club in Dungworth. The club meets in the public bar of the Royal Hotel – one of the venues of the Yorkshire village’s famous carol singing tradition. No floor spot but a guest artist followed by a singing session attracting an average of 50 paying public. And, being a public bar, plenty non-paying lurking in the corners, often chatting.
“It’s going great,” says Jon. “There’s quite a bit of background noise, but there’s a lot of crossover; what’s been very successful is the number of locals who’ve come into it who are not necessarily into folk music but like it as a social occasion. I tend to book people who sing loud because we don’t use a PA so they need to be heard over the background noise… and people who don’t mind background noise, which is an interesting thing. Anybody who’s been playing folk clubs since the six- ties is used to pin-drop silence at folk clubs. It’s a very respectful environment in the folk club function room so it can be a cultural barrier for people who’ve been playing in function rooms for many years and expect to be listened to in silence.”
Audience at Folklub Glasgow, one of the relatively rare folk clubs attracting a younger crowd.
Photo: Sean Purser
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