The smaller Festivals or the "fringes" of the larger Festivals are much more in tune with the essence of Folk, which to me is friends entertaining friends with a minimum of financial involvment and a lot of social contact. Once you have huge halls and vast stages you lose this contact and the music loses its Soul. You are in to "Folk Cabaret" not true folk music and when you have uniformed guards contolling entrances (as happened at Sidmouth last year ) then I think they have lost the plot! There seems to be two types of Festival at the moment, one putting on this folk based Caberet and controled by a few agencys and thus we tend to get very simmilar line ups and the other run by dedicated Folkies which tend to be far more sociable and frendly yet still have superb acts. Guess which I prefer?

Jim McAdams