Back to the original question......

Cellarfolk (Brighton) is a singaround in a function room, which books very occasional guests drawn from peolple who have visited us on a normal singers' night. It works well, with 15 to 30 people coming along on the normal sinaround nights.   

Yes guest nights are variable. Because regulars have seen guests as ordinary circle singers first then there have been no disasters - but one very good performer who we see quite often at a normal singaround was very disappointed that quite a few regulars were missing on his guest night.

A bit of history - Cellarfolk was started in May 2007 to address problems we'd encounted in our twice weekly bar singarounds (Brighton Singers' Club). While we had an excellent public bar for our Sundays, it relied upon folk club etiquet to be honoured by all those in the bar to allow for a good night (and many of the nights over the years were amazing!). However in later years we found an increasing number of people/singers coming along who were happy to talk over other singers (their right in a Public Bar) and generally only listened to their chums - so the atmosphere was destroyed.

We reluctantly abandoned Public Bar sessions and shifted Brighton Singers' Club to the Function Room of a nearby pub (Crown and Anchor, Preston Village) where the evenings have developed into a very different (but far more satisfying) singaround with chat (average about 9 people both for Wednesdays and Sundays).

AND we have the lovely Cellarfolk sessions as a bonus from the experiment to solve the problems of the long running Brighton Singers Club.

Ian Fyvie