Oh, and another band that I find amusingly eccentric, and again unclassifiable, is Tabloid Vivant:

Tabloid Vivant

Again, the band's 50% female. The vocalist might appear to be of ambiguous orientation, but he's my older daughter's boyfriend! There are folk influences there, but I also detect a bit of Bonzo Dog.

The fact that my daughter's best friend and her boyfriend are both in bands that get a lot of gigs on the small venue circuit, and that all my kids play instruments (synth, guitar, flute, cello) seems to bear out a discussion I was having some time ago with Jim C, who was arguing that the "youth of today" are largely passive consumers of music, whereas I was arguing that there's a huge undercurrent of youngsters out there making their own music and ignoring the big labels and presures to conform to what's "commercial". You'd be surprised how many songs there are out there in "youthland" slagging off the NME, Radio 1/ Radio 2, etc.You could argue they're cutting their own throats...after all, NME is never going to feature a band whose most requested song is "Fuck The NME", is it?

Virtually every under-25 year old I know is in a band, or associated with one in some way, so although they're not playing what we'd regard as "classic folk", they *are* out there making their own music.