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59 f “W


ith our club in Leicester one of my objectives was to diversify the audience a bit


and get an osmosis going between tradi- tional folk and contemporary folk and the singer-songwriter sort of stuff I do. Folk clubs are different from other gigs in a million ways. There’s a lot of faux pas you can commit if you don’t know the eti- quette involved. If we want folk to be more inclusive and don’t want traditional- style folk clubs to die out, then we have to give people who’ve never been before a bit of a break. We’ve had much younger people at our club than the average folk audience member and they don’t neces- sarily understand these etiquette things and you feel you’ve gatecrashed a private event. It can be intimidating.”


“The nature of it all being closely passed down from parents to children and siblings and so many bands being made up of people who’ve known each other since they were born makes for a really amaz- ingly rich scene of musicians, but it makes it very hard for musicians who don’t come from that tradition to get a foothold. I come from the punk side of things and my audience now is half-folkies and half non- folkies. I did a big gig in London at Christ- mas and it was split half and half between people who were really disgruntled that there were no chairs and half who would- n’t dream in a million years of being at a gig with chairs.”


“The first folk festival I played was Sidmouth and a lot of people were com- pletely and utterly horrified. But I’ve learned, and I hope it shows, that I have a great respect for the music and tradi- tion – I don’t mean singer-songwriter stuff, but English folk and tunes and I think that stuff is fantastic. It’s interest- ing to me how little mainstream space folk is afforded when, as an industry, it is quite self-sufficient.”


The club is called Fire In Your Heart (taken from one of her songs) and she says it is “inconsistently successful.” Yet she is driven by the desire to attract younger audiences.


“I’m concerned when I go to straight folk gigs that the audience is a lot older than my audiences in other scenes and we have to do something about that. The tra- dition of folk clubs is a really beautiful thing, and traditionally quite a radical thing too. It would be a tragedy if it was to die out and it shouldn’t just be preserved, it should be reignited and reinvented and brought back to its radical roots. My par- ents were talking to me about the Leices- ter folk society in the seventies when they were at university and saw Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and they said it was a really cool thing to be a part of.”


“But my own experiences of trying to flog my own political music on the folk scene have met a lot of resistance and I’ve had to realise it’s far less radical than I thought it would be. I want to bring that back, which was part of the reason I start- ed the club. I’m gay and I talk about that


London audience at the Nest Collective’s Unamplifire, 2018.


on stage, which shouldn’t be a political issue but it definitely still is. I’ve had a lot of people on the folk scene who’ve found what I do too abrasive and in your face. Maybe there’s some subconscious homo- phobia going on, I don’t know. I swear too, and coming from the punk scene I never anticipated that would be a prob- lem, but suddenly I was getting all this crit- icism for swearing on the folk scene.”


She’s still never played at Whitby, though.


Belinda O’Hooley and Heidi Tidow, too, are trying to ignite the folk club ethic, organising pop-up gigs


“We’ve had very good experiences at folk clubs,” says Belinda. “On the whole we’ve been welcomed but you can’t help but notice it is a sea of grey hair. Because they’re older there’s almost a parental feeling and you’re being nurtured in this little nest. But what happens when these people die eventually?”


“Some clubs still struggle with social media and online ticketing. You have to write a letter to get your tickets and you think, ‘for God’s sake, can’t you just press a button?’ They say how do we get more people and we say get on Facebook and Twitter. And they can be offputting. One club we played was almost like a border control. It seemed like a facility for these men to play and stroke their own egos.”


“But there are some great ones too. One really good club is the Poppy Folk Club in Nottingham. They have a couple of the songs at the beginning and do all their floor spots at the end and you can stay if you want.”


Recently they were invited into a school to talk about folk music as part of National Schools Diversity Week.


Heidi: “So we went in to talk to these eleven- to sixteen-year-old kids. We were really nervous. We started by saying, ‘Do you like folk music?’ and they all said no. They had no idea what folk music was. But when we started chatting to them about the oral tradition and how the


songs were about their lives and their struggles and were people’s own stories they started connecting. We sang All For Me Grog and they loved it – they were laughing their heads off. It’s all about connections and inclusion.”


And what of the young singers them- selves making their way in the clubs? Sam Kelly knew nothing of folk clubs and the first time he ever entered one was when he was booked to play. “When they asked me to play at a folk club I didn’t even know what one was. I did used to pass a club every day and never even knew it was there. A lot of them don’t seem to have much of a social media presence. But I love them. As a performer I think they are bril- liant places to play. I’ve learned so much playing in folk clubs”


Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, one of the big hits of this year’s Sidmouth Folk Week, is also a strong advocate of folk clubs and credits floor spots with playing a crucial role in developing his art. He dis- covered folk music at the age of ten and playing violin, concertina and melodeon, graduated to sessions and then clubs.


“I enjoy singing in folk clubs and those floor spots helped me develop rapport with the audiences. The age of people doesn’t bother me – I get on better with older people anyway and they’ve always given me a warm welcome.”


Last word to Vic Smith, stalwart of the thriving Lewes folk scene for many decades: “Whether clubs will survive beyond the present generation of organ- isers who are ageing I don’t know. There aren’t many left, but the generation that went to school in the late forties and early fifties, came out with degree qualifica- tions and then went back into their com- munities, had a feeling that they owed their community something because their parents hadn’t been well educated. All sorts of organisations… politics, am dram, music… were run by this generation of men and women who felt they needed to give something back.”


F


Photo: Sabrina Dallot-Seguro


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