The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #67410 Message #1125830
Posted By: treewind
28-Feb-04 - 02:29 PM
Thread Name: The role of folk clubs today
Subject: RE: The role of folk clubs today
Breezy, there used to be a club in Manchester which some of its participants nicknamed the "singing songs and talking bollocks club".
For some reason, I am suddenly reminded of it...
The people now in their 50's in folk clubs now are the identical people who were going to folk clubs 30 years ago, who were then in their 20's. We could all hack it then, we were mature enough (or were we?), it was a young person's scene. Maybe we identified with it too strongly - it was 'our scene' and we didn't notice we were getting older and insular and intolerant of younger newcomers.
As for anonymous guest before, it's no use writing off folk clubs and illustrating your view with a session as an example. Most clubs (of the more organised sort, not a bar room session) try hard to welcome newcomers - if they fail to do that the club shrinks to death.
It seem to me that successful clubs nowadays typically run monthly and are in large rooms that are generally community friendly - village halls, social clubs etc. The ones in grubby little pub back rooms are the ones that are struggling, and especially if they run every week. There are exceptions, of course.
I suspect there are more pub sessions of all sorts than there used to be, and at the other end of the spectrum there are folk concerts in Art Centres and similar venues. I've also noticed that some of the larger scale club organisers also run less formal sessions in parallel, which complement the more performance oriented club and give the less experienced an easier start at performing for the first time.
Anahata