Spleen Cringe

The Snail, you're missing the point.

Indeed I am. The point of my string of "Is it...?" question was to illustrate what a diverse, disorderly and disconnected business the whole folk scene/community was. It consists of braided streams, isolated creeks and a few stagnant pools. Some of its factions overlap and interact, some deeply loathe each other. To talk of a "mainstream" seems to me to be meaningless.

Nancy Wallace is clearly a talented young woman but, from listening to her MySpace page, a fairly conventional singer/guitarist. Her current (slightly out of date) gig list consists of two folk clubs and an arts centre.

She has appeared at The Magpies Nest who said of her -

Nancy Wallace was born a folk brat, and spent far more of her formative years than is healthy in the back rooms of Suffolk pubs, singing and playing her little heart out. In her teen years - and possibly as a result of a concussion caused by a stray morris stick - she joined an electric barn dance band playing the trombone.

(See http://www.themagpiesnest.co.uk/artists/nancy-wallace for the full article.)

All pretty normal. What makes her "outside of the known and established folk firmament"? (Your emphasis.) What makes her an "off-piste artist"?

matt milton

We're talking about one particular album (Nancy Wallace's 'Old Stories') being nominated for a Horizon award. It's a bit less Smooth than the usual.

I don't think either of them would have made a Radio 2 playlist.

So does being "mainstream" mean meeting with the approval of Smooth Ops and Mke Harding? I think that's about 98% of the folk scene. Great! We're all on the fringes.

It looks to me as if this "outside the mainstream" business is just a piece of marketing hype cooked by journalists (or one journalist in particular) to feed their own agenda whatever that may be.