Ooh dear, where do I start?

Tom Bliss

My comments have not been damning, though (perhaps they might feel so to a few if they touched a raw nerve, in which case my apologies, but maybe it needed saying).

Was the comment in parantheses aimed at me? If you've got anything specific you wish to accuse me of, please do so rather than resorting to innuendo.

From previous threads -

I just get so weary of reading posts here which not only fail to recognise, or seek to minimise, or deny, the influence of 'trade' music on the stuff we all enjoy hearing and doing, but worse, seek to present hard-working low-earning artists as harlots - often in terms can can wind up making folk enthusiasts, as a tribe, seem mean-spirited, 'hsibbons' (that's snobbish inverted, by the way), and frankly just ill-informed about what it takes - and means - to be 'successful.'

There are however a significant number of people (a group well-represented on internet forums) who delight in a 'hsibbons' view of trade music. They suggest, for example, that the influence of commerce is damaging to the tradition, that professionalism is a kind of prostitution, that the registration of arrangements is a kind of theft, that anyone wanting to make a living at music is only in it for the money (rather than a committed artist), that doing it well is bad, that being innovative is bad, that concerts are a betrayal of the song-handing ethos, and so on and on and on.

Sounds pretty damning to me.

I am aware that it looks like I'm biting the hand that feeds me - but I'm not getting lots of stick from my club-running chums.

So how do they respond to your accusations? Do they nod sagely and say "Oh yes. Not us of course, it's all those other clubs."

You have said elsewhere that there are (or possibly were) 400 clubs in the country. You have played 201 of them, there are another 30 that only book big names and 75 that used to book guests but no longer do for whatever reason but I doubt if they suddenly developed a deep loathing for paid performers; it was probably more a matter of finacial risk.

That's 306 leaving 94 some of which probably do book guests but just haven't booked you yet and some of which have never booked guests, perhaps because they are really glorified singarounds or, just maybe, because they think that anyone who wants to be paid for singing is scum.

I'm finding it hard to see any evidence for a widespread negative attitude to professional performers and yet "This has caused me more disappointment than anything else I've encountered in the folk world over the past 10 years".

I'm also aware that there is sometimes a big gap between what touring artists think privately, and what they're prepared to say at the supper table after the gig.

Are you saying that you know that other artists agree with you but are just too polite/scared to say so? That's quite a claim.