It's weird. The folk club five minutes from my house meets weekly and is usually packed. It's mainly singer songwriters and cover versions with the odd trad song thrown in. A lot of the stuff I hear when I occasionally go there isn't my cup of tea - but people enjoy it and are having fun. There certainly aren't hordes of traddies bursting down the doors to close it down and tell people what they are doing isn't folk. And the club has organisers, but they don't impose anything on anyone, they just do things like ensure the club keeps going, because they want to give their time in this way. I suspect they quite like things as they are, but that's not a problem is it?

Meanwhile, the singaround five minutes in the other direction advertises itself as 'mainly but not exclusively traditional'. That's what it tends to be - you'll hear lots of trad songs - often unnaccompanied - but no-one tuts or leaves the room when Gordon sings Wheels On Fire with his guitar chugging away or Chris does a country and western parody with banjo backing. There's even the odd songwriter turning up and they always get a respectful hearing. The bloke who organises it (when he's not off around the world in his caravan) is encouraging, not authoritarian and gives his time freely because he wants the singaround to keep going. Again, he probably likes things as they are, but again that's surely not a problem. There's always a decent turn out.

Some people even go to both. Maybe (the horror! the horror!) they like a bit of variety in music. Both get a sprinkling of young people, if that's important, who are quite capable of making up their own minds about what they like.

So I guess I don't really recognise the picture that's being painted of authoritarian traddies shoving singer songwriters on the flames and dancing round their burning corpses. It doesn't happen in Chorlton, I tell you!

I wish when these vague and general comments about authoritarian types who destroy people's careers and generally make the folk scene a horrible place were raised, the people raising them could give specific examples. Otherwise I'll continue to trust my own experience. And I have changed my mind - I used to think the folk scene was crap when I first made the leap from listening to folk music on record to checking out live stuff, but now I think its just a bit odd - but often endearingly so.

Meanwhile, when I last saw Charlie Parr - a folk singer if I ever heard one - I was easily the oldest person there and could have been the dad of most of the audience (figuratively not literally, of course).

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By the way, I agree entirely with Leveller about the pathetic spectacle of the Butlins Folk Weekend banning kids. But I think that's a business decision and nothing to do with the lives of most folk enthusiasts.

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Gone again. I said I wasn't going to bother with tis thread anymore and I lied.