I'm with Diane on this. There are too few professionally organised folk clubs who bother to sell their wares beyond the aging group who have always come and are now dying out. There are also too many "folkies" who sneer at Kate Rusby, Seth Lakeman or Show of Hands who go out and do the business.

The Carthy's, Garbutts of this world who have name recognition and still play the clubs aren't going to go on for ever. What happens then? If your idea of heaven is a group in the corner of a pub singing the songs you've sung for forty years ("keeping alive the tradition old boy") I suppose it isn't a problem. If you have a wider agenda for the music that we're supposed to be interested in then it is!

I find it scary that when I started going to clubs at fourteen I was the youngest there and nearly forty years on I'm still one of the youngest.

Steve