Anahata, you took the words out of my mouth (or off my keyboard) with your comments about peoples perceptions and the musical forms we are expected to follow. Music in a pub? Ah, that will be Irish.

I've played in many sessions in Coventry (in England) including many Irish sessions. There is a large Irish community in Coventry and I love playing the music.

However (here it is), here is a story about one particular session (no names of course) which because of it's origins has a particularly English flavour.

It started a few years back when a local Northwest Morris team (I was one of the musicians) used to frequent a particular pub for after practice drinks. We got friendly with the landlady and started to dance out there quite regularly, alway ending up with a session. The session was eventually set up as a regular fixture, with a few other musicians from outside the Morris side joining in as well.

Not surprisingly, most of the musicians were linked to the English dance scene (both Morris, step and social dance) and that's where the repertoire of tunes were mostly from. Not by deliberate, conscious design, it just happened that way.

The odd Irish/French/Scandinavian/French Canadian etc. tune crept in, but of course that is in the nature of English dance musicians.

I don't think any of us really noticed what we had done until members of the "audience" (it's a city centre pub and always full for session night) started asking us if we were Irish, congratulating us on the excellent Irish music etc etc, as ably described by Anahata.

Then the local paper included us in their "What's On" column (as an Irish session of course), some local theatre and arts people got interested in us because it was an "Irish" session, and even the blinkin' landlady started advertising it as an Irish session. We tried to explain the best we could and played and sang merrily on.

Musicians come and go, some have been fleeting visitors, some have become regulars and some have even been genuine Irish (as in IRISH/IRELAND....). We sit and listen to, and enjoy, what we don't know and join in with what we do.

But the core remains English. It's not that we don't like or play Irish/Scottish music, it's just that in that place, with those people, on that night, English just "feels right."