f58 “W
e wanted to run the club as our contribution to the local commu- nity and bring
more people into the pub as a social activ- ity. As soon as you put something on in a function room it’s quite a thing to step in and commit yourself to the evening; but if you say there’s some music in the pub, don’t listen to if you don’t want to to, don’t pay if you don’t want to, but come along and see what you think, it’s much easier for people to drift into. And anoth- er thing is that one of my obsessions is really loud singing. I got into folk singing through camp fires, which can be quite rowdy, and then I was at Durham at a time when there was a really loud, very musical singing session on a Thursday night. I need that volume now somehow to enjoy it. My best experience of commu- nal singing has been in rowdy environ- ments rather than the manicured space of a function room.”
He talks about the dichotomy of natu- ral unscheduled singing sessions in pubs and music in a more formal folk club set- ting. “I remember John (Spiers) and I did a gig at a folk club and it had this old stage and we started setting up, then the organ- iser turned up and said no, we don’t use the stage, you perform from the floor, it’s not democratic to use the stage. I think that’s a fallacy. It doesn’t make it demo- cratic to sing from the floor. If you’ve got someone performing at one end of the room with lines of people facing them that’s not democratic.”
“If you’re having a performance in a function room then put them on stage and get them a decent PA and put some lights on them, that’s part of the artistry of how you present it all and in fairness I think a lot of folk clubs have done that and work at presenting a performance with good PAs and good lights and run in very profes- sional ways. I think that’s great.”
“People may say that’s not really a folk club then, is it? It depends what you want to use the term for. To me, if you’re interest- ed in the folk club as a concept for commu- nal singing and the social aspect then my
London Troubadour audience 1960.
personal view is get it out of the function room; and if you’re into it as a concert per- formance, find a space with a black back- ground and a few lights. There’s nothing worse than trying to do a gig with white walls, strip lighting and no atmosphere.”
“There are lots of new folk clubs springing up now which don’t follow the same model of the old ones; they are a bit more individualist in the way they put things on. Whether or not they’re called folk clubs doesn’t matter.”
He makes the point that old-style folk clubs can be intimidating to the uninitiat- ed. “I remember going into folk clubs as a 20-year-old and everyone looks at you because they never see anyone under 40, which can be off-putting. They’ll sing a song and everyone might go that’s great, that’s obviously the Fairport Convention version – have you considered listening to the Bert Lloyd version? That’s great but it can be overwhelming. That may be part of the reason older clubs don’t pick up younger audiences but then does that really matter? It’s easy enough to set up a folk club so do we have to stick to the old- style folk club if new ones are coming along? Maybe it’s better to view it more as a social club. Those older established clubs tend to be close-knit so maybe it’s an unre- al expectation and unfair to criticise them for failing to attract younger people.”
“What’s more important is that older folkies – of which I now count myself as one – support new folk clubs. If we older folkies view ourselves in a supporting role then that’s the way we can guarantee the future of the folk club scene, although they don’t need to be called folk clubs.”
Jim Moray agrees with him: “We need spaces for traditional songs and tunes in a way that suits the music. So there is a rele- vance for folk clubs but not necessarily for Folk Clubs as a fixed-format entity. And attracting younger people into clubs has always seemed like the wrong question to me. I’m interested in attracting young peo- ple to the music itself and I don’t mind if that’s in different spaces or formats. So the plain answer is to focus on the music and the social/community aspect and let the rest of it mutate to fit the circumstances.”
And if those circumstances are house concerts, which he has recently started putting on, then that’s absolutely fine.
“I’ve always put on gigs and played with things and done little experiments and tried to get things started, but it’s never developed into a club as such. We had Chris Foster here as a house concert, which was very interesting. I’m thinking of doing more of those. I’m interested in peo- ple doing new things that fit in place. The folk scene in general has a lot of tail and dog wagging each other. Venues and festi- vals think they’re booking things on offer and performers are performing things they think venues and festivals want to book.”
“There can be a folk club mode of performance which isn’t transferable to bigger venues. So all that stuff about learning your trade in the clubs doesn’t apply because the way you play in a club is
more conversational. It’s a good skill to learn but once you get into theatres it goes out the window.”
“Folk clubs wouldn’t book me at first. I’ve always done solo gigs but the main focus was a band, but the bulk of my stuff has been folk clubs for a while now. When you go to a folk club you are a guest in someone else’s space; but when you do a theatre or arts centre show you invite them into the space you have creat- ed for them. But clubs with a strong iden- tity – as long as you accept you are a guest in their house and while you are under their roof you do things the way they run them, you get on well. There are some really good clubs. Hitchin Folk Club. The Black Swan in York. The Ram in Thames Ditton. The Goose Is Out! in South London. And I’m patron of Dow- nend folk club in Bristol, which is a good example of a concert-type club but still has identity and a club feel of a folk club with good sound and good lighting.”
Martin Carthy has devoted most of his long career to playing in folk clubs since the fabled day when, at 17, he was bowled over by the singing of an elderly fisherman called Sam Larner when even Ewan MacColl felt humble. He has also been vocal about the loss to the folk club movement when it lost its political heart, something crystallised for him at a festival in Telford in 1982 with the Watersons at the time of the Falklands War, when Jim Woodland was booed for singing his anti- war song Ghost Story.
“That's when I realised how much things had changed… the day folkies for- got they were dealing with political songs was the day it almost became unglued,” he said. '”We took it for granted but it shocked me when the Falklands war was happening and you weren't hearing songs about it. It made me so angry I wrote one, Company Policy.”
P
erhaps politics is coming back into it, though, in the form of Grace Petrie, who once sang “I’m not folk enough for Whit- by ’cos I can never grow a
beard” (on Revolutionary In The Wrong Time). Slowly but surely, Grace is being accepted by the folk community and two years ago started her own folk club in Leicester, where she plans recordings and podcasts. And yes, it has a raffle, so she really has become an honorary folkie.
“The more liberal end of folk clubs started to embrace me a couple of years ago but I did find it hard to break into because I’d been trying for years. Coming to it as an outsider, it can be very cliquey in a way it doesn’t mean to be. There’s so much shared knowledge about the music and tunes it’s like another language. I thought I was a folk musician based on a Bob Dylan-esque definition of folk but in terms of traditional English music I don’t have a clue. The volume of knowledge of those tunes and that music, if you’re not born into that or have friends who are part of it, it can be difficult to break into. There’s a lot of etiquette to folk clubs that outsiders wouldn’t know.”
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