My heart goes out to you Don - there's no doubt in my mind that much of the success of the Sheffield/Area folk clubs is down to a long established folk infrastructure that keeps all club types buoyant. It even includes a successful freelance "Beginners' guitar" teacher who encourages his charges to get themselves off to the local clubs to listen, learn, and eventually perform themselves. He runs classes on 2 nights a week and provides a ready supply of new recruits to local clubs.

I've been going to folk clubs here since 1972, but it was already well established before then – dating back to the folk revival of the 60's, and no doubt boosted by Irish folk musicians playing sessions in a number of different pubs. Establishing such a tradition obviously takes time, but there must be a point of "critical mass" at which things really take off, and folks realise there's much more to life than the TV and canned beers at home. Getting that message out into less enlightened areas isn't easy obviously, and I don't have any ready-made solution, but local radio and local newspapers do a reasonably good job for us here; the jungle telegraph also works it's magic, but again that's partly down to there being a well-established culture. The Stirrings Folk Magazine provides up-to-date venue listings and has a good circulation, so there's no shortage of good quality information.

As far as suitable venues go, I suppose we're blessed with a healthy distribution of pubs per square mile across the region. The income generated from folk and acoustic music sessions helps some pubs on otherwise quiet mid-week evenings too.

Good luck to you; I hope you manage to get your message across – it's certainly a worthwhile one.