When I lived in the North East it was quite possible to have the choice to attend up to three different clubs on the same night every night of the week. Some were traditionally biased others had a broader outlook (in fact for ten years I helped to run a folk and blues club up there)but nobody worried about it. When I moved to Nottingham in 1978 I found less clubs there than back home so I suppose we were more fortunate. Like many fellow folkies, in the early eighties, I was to experience the majority of social/economic upheavals mentioned in the original thread which certainly curtailed time to spend in the folk clubs. This was also the period when Martin Carthy described the folk scene as becoming "flabby and constipated" and what I saw in place of the excitemennt of the two previous decades were clubs with an "anything goes" attitude and a general lowering of standards. All the items previously mentioned like the lack of function rooms in pubs and the enormous prices charged by some pubs who still have them plus the countless counter attractions for young people that have sprung up in the last twenty years have, of course, taken their toll on the folk clubs which when I was in my teens was one of the few places that you could go to hear live music. Thankfully the good clubs of today are coaxing some folkies of previous years back to the fold and that is certainly the case of the club which I have been involved with for the last sixteen years through the good and bad times and currently the very, very good times. However we have been told that we are "too traditional" so we must be doing something wrong.