MGM asks:

"Inclusive" of what, Al? And why?


I'm not Al, but let me play the other side of the street for a moment and attempt an answer.

Before I sat under the traddie bodhi tree I was an eclectic so-and-so. Songs I did at the Folk Club included...

King Strut (Peter Blegvad) (done as a dramatic monologue)
Nicky (Momus) (free translation of Brel's "Jacky")
Round Midnight (Monk/Henighan) (after Robert Wyatt)
Dominic Takes A Trip (Edwards) (a song of my own whose sole purpose was to take the p*ss out of two other regulars at the club)

You get the picture. Inclusive of what? Any damn thing. Why? Because I thought it would be fun.

And the fact is, it was fun. Having somewhere you can go where you can get up on stage, as a complete amateur, and sing anything you feel like, to an audience mostly consisting of other amateur performers - it's great. I still go there from time to time, and I wouldn't be without it. Acoustic nights and open mics, and unmiked 'open stage's; they're great.

But I think - choosing my words carefully - that the word 'folk' has a very important meaning which has very little to do with this kind of club, and nothing to do with any of the songs I listed above. I think folk-meaning-traditional songs need preserving and celebrating and enjoying and messing about with, and the anything-goes FC environment doesn't encourage that; if anything, it encourages forgetting them altogether. I also enjoy the 50+%-traditional singarounds I go to now much more, partly because I enjoy the songs more and partly because they're much better performed; I've really worked on my own singing as a result, in a way that the FC would never have encouraged me to.