"It might be anything totally amature open stage to a pro guest with pre-booked support but the unifying factor is the intention to perform to an audience. That is totally different to a singaround."

Well that doesn't even seem "very" different to the singarounds I've been to, let alone "totally" different to them.

But then maybe I've never been to a singaround, because at the folk clubs I've been to I've always thought I was "performing to an audience", even when the atmosphere was very informal. I've always felt like the other contributors were also performing to an audience too

Don't get me wrong, I use the term "singaround" too - I know that it'll mean there won't be a headlining set and there'll be a bunch of singers generally singing one song each and going round the group as many times as there's time for. I know what a singaround entails.

It just strikes me as perverse and pointless to wall that off from "folk clubs". As a latecomes to folk, the singaround has always struck me as as the most "folk" thing about "folk clubs"!

As Kit&Cutter, already mentioned once in this thread, put it on some recent blurb, they found the participative nature of folk clubs "Brechtian".