>>I'm sorry but I don't think that the main priority of folk fans should be to attract 'young people' into folk - and especially not by dumbing it down in order to make it more 'acceptable'. I find this attitude to be not only patronising and insulting to me and my contemporaries but it is also patronising and insulting to young people<<<


If you don't attract the young people and 'pass it on' then it will die. And young people want to make it their own. It's not dumbing it down. Seth Lakeman is not dumbing music down, far from it,imo. He's making it vibrant, exciting, danceable..all things that so many young people love. They don't want to have it plain, the way some may sing it. They want it with rhythm and dance and excitement. Not all, but a great deal of them at least.

That's not dumbing it down at all. It's just being young.

I saw Devil's Interval last year at Siddy and they were great. But do you know one of the things that made them so lovely to watch? It was Jim...Jim Causley has charisma. He was such charm, that young lad..he's got 'it'...He makes traditional music FUN...he laughs and he's relaxed. It's obvious that he enjoys what he does and that enjoyment reaches out into the audience..

BUT...the audience was all middle aged and beyond. There weren't any youngsters in that room, apart from the three singers...and that saddened me..and enraged me too, because The Devil's Interval should be playing to people of their own age as well.

The folk world has to wake up to this problem.

One way round it is to mix folk music up with more popular music, spread the audience wider, like Cambridge does..that way so many more people will 'give folk a try' I wish that Sidmouth would do this, I truly do...I wish they'd let down their fence of 'English Traditional' etc and open up....because if they do, you watch a far younger audience start to flood in..and when they come they'll taste the English Tradition as well, and some will love it.

Get rid of the 'club' and open up this world to all.......