Sorry folks. No time to read the thread in full but just an observation. My local folk club is on a sunday in Topsham and runs the usual combination of singarounds and gigs with pro artistes.It's five minutes from my home and I go whenever its humanly possible given the amount of touring and recording work I do which keeps me away from home for over half the year. The guest nights are well attended and so are the singarounds. The same crowd tend to populate the singarounds but are often noticeably absent from guest nights which attract a widely varying audience. Some of the people who run the club are the same people that first got me in to all this 40 years ago. Still singing and still going strong!! I went last sunday to record Jackie Oates and James Pemberton and the gig was absolutely sold out. All the gigs I got to last year were either sold out or very well attended. Back in the late sixties/early seventies, we could go to a folk club or a session of some kind every night of the week. This appears to now be almost the case down here again after all this time. There's a new singaround just started in Ide and a whole bunch of other things going on. The open mike night at the Barnfield studio theatre is packed on fridays with young and old and has now extended itself into a series of extra concerts as a spin off. I got to several major concerts before christmas in larger venues. Seth Lakeman at the university, Cara Dillon at the corn exchange and so on. All big gigs with good crowds. If folk,acoustic, roots, world, (acid,surf,disco, funk, reggae, blues,house,hip hop,jazz,rocknrooool, oh and country) is dying in your neck of the woods, move to devon cos its all happening here!
Happy musical new year.