I just had to get away fro the negatively titled thread...... which has turned so positive!

Here's a few posts from the "other" thread to get us started :-)

Subject: RE: Its why people dont go to folk clubs....
From: Phil Edwards
Date: 19 Jul 12 - 06:00 AM

Concluding my previous witter: you could say, if you were feeling uncharitable, that this is why people don't go to folk clubs - who the hell wants to sit through two hours of sixth-form bedroom poetry and Dylan wannabes? Alternatively, this is why people don't go to folk clubs: who in their right mind would turn out on a weeknight to hear a bunch of amateurs murdering old songs they got off records?

Both very persuasive arguments, if you feel like being persuaded in that particular way. But they both have one big problem, which is that the premise is false: people quite clearly are going to folk clubs and singarounds, in quite substantial numbers, week after week.

The real reason why people don't go to folk clubs? There are too many people there.



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Subject: RE: Its why people dont go to folk clubs....
From: GUEST,Blandiver
Date: 19 Jul 12 - 06:51 AM

At Chorlton the MC hadn't arrived by then

The only thing that baffles me about Chorlton is the need for an MC. I respect Les as the Gaffer (just as I respect all clubs must have a Gaffer) but I'm all for open anarchy and people being civilised enough to sing in turn without waiting to be invited or introduced. That said, at The Moorbrook, it's a jump in song & music session that teeters on the edge of becoming a session proper when the diddle-de-dee lads are heaping tune after tune. There is, of course, only so much of this the soul can bear; at which point I'll switch on my shruti box and start improvising on my fiddle in prelude to a typically freewheeling rendering of Harry Cox's The Crabfish in rough antithesis of the accumulated muso slickness which needs regular exorcism least possession sets it (the resident musicians are of A1 calibre but always manage to avoid being simply slick).

Still, it's come-all-ye, all welcome, and great fun, and always rammed, and I'm more inclined to bitch about those who can't play than those who can, and that's all part of the general crack (not craic, which is something else entirely) of the occasion. Last week my wife sang The Bonny Boy, unaccompanied, silencing the noodlers by improvising a wordless melismatic prelude of tender virtusity. I know I'm biased, but it was so perfect that afterwards I felt there was nothing more I could add, and so we packed up and went home at around 12.30am leaving the diddle-de-dee lads in full swing & the locals deep in their cups. I've little doubt that some of them are still there.

In all my Folk Years (which must be akin to Ferret Years) I've never known anything like it. It is openly egalitarian, totally supportive with 100% idiomatic trad focus in both song & music. Indeed, many of our biggest chorus songs are written - like former (& sorely-missed!) resident Ron Malaney's humanist anthem Breathe with Me, which our resident canwr Cymru Vicky Lewis sang last week and we took it into realms of the Sacred Harp. People come into the pub to stand at the bar & savour it; when someone finishes a song the most applause always seems to come from outside the room, which is, I feel, exactly as it should be.

I've never been so happy in any Folk Context ever, with the possible exception of the old Colpitts glory days in Durham and the Woodbine & Ivy Band choral session at Limefield a couple of years back. When it's an honour to be there, you know it's the best.