Thanks Good Soldier; Nice to see my name mentioned there alongside some good mates and people I respect greatly (Nic Jones Dick Miles, Steve Turner, Gerry Hallom, Keith Kendrick, Roy Harris, Nic Dow, Johnny Collins, Pete Coe, Pete Castle...) I've been playing English music professionally since 1978 and it's never been easy. It's always been a minority taste even in folk clubs. The reason I do it though is because it's what I love.
Back in the 80s/90s I was really into World Music as a listener. I think some great stuff was brought to our attention because of it. Salif Keta springs to mind. It included everything from foreign pop music to real authentic folk. But it was commercially based. I remember complaining to fRoots at that time that they fell over themselves with enthusiasm about some scratchy cassette recording from Africa but expected musicians based in UK to have the production values of a Michael Jackson even though, in real terms, we were perhaps less well off!
The English folk scene has always been very self centred. My two ventures into what could be classed as World Music were kept at arms length by the folk clubs. First a duo with Bengali singer Aroti Biswas - admittedly we didn't do much because she got ill and died, but the couple of posthumous tracks I put on one of my albums were greeted with umm?s even though I still think at least one of them (The Two Magicians) was great. Then in the 90s the Anglo-Romanian group Popeluc could have been really big. We played all over, but not many folk clubs. Not many World Music venues either for that matter - they liked the idea of the group but when they heard a demo they tended to say, No, too folky!. They needed drums and electric bass. So we did arts centres, community festivals, The Dracula Society! All sorts of things.
Anyway, I'll keep doing what I do. In folk clubs and anywhere else that will have me. I still enjoy it and a good folk club gig is hard to beat. I still do mainly English and mainly traditional but that's two more definitions we could argue about. And have done!
Pete Castle
http://www.petecastle.co.uk