"Only pay what you can afford not what artistes ask"

Breezy, if you said that to Pete Coe (the same who you praise so highly a few lines later) you'd get a very different opinion. He's adamant that performers should charge a proper fee and not sell themselves cheap. Ultimately doing gigs at budget prices (or underpaying your guests, from the organisers point of view) threatens the livelihood of performers like Pete who does it full time and also devalues the whole folk business. Clubs and their audiences expect to get something for almost nothing, and then performance standards are likely to go down as you only book cheap guests.

Bideford folk club recently paid us MORE than we asked and afterwards we were talking to Jerry Bix (one of the organisers) and he suggested that a performer should charge either full whack or nothing at all
(e.g. for a charity). He said their policy is to build up their money on singers nights and then pay their guests the normal fee. They only have about six guests a year and it works for them because they have lots of enthusiastic singers.

That's unusual for a club that mostly operates as a singaround. We've done others like that for far less, but often that didn't matter because we were enjoying it anyway, like the Song and Supper at Wherwell which typically features whoever's recording at Wild Goose studios (just over the road) that weekend.

Anahata