Thank you Jon, I didn't know that. I suppose I should have checked "Coppersongs" before uttering.

No, WLD, I don't agree with you again. There are plenty (proportionately) of working class it seems to me in folk clubs, and very few plummy accents. I speak RP but am not plummy (IMHO) thanks to a young childhood in Australia and a conscious rejection of upper middle class values as a rebellion while I was at public school. I hear very very few people in folk clubs who speak better than I do.

I don't see many young people (and from my perspective that's people under 40) and fewer still young women. That puzzles me a bit in that it was treated as a given when I was at university that when people like me then went to listen to underground rock, or to discos, many women went in stead to folk clubs where they would not feel so sexually intimidated.

But then I look at my daughter's female friends dressed for a night's hunting and realise that perhaps today it is the young women who are almost as often the sexual aggressors. Every so often some of them will come with her to a folk club if she is going to sing and they will always say that they really enjoyed it - and last year at Sweeps fest one of her friends (not, as it happens, a female one but a male one, who plays in a dark metal band) commented that what he really liked most about it was that people were making music rather than just consuming it as product.

At the end of the day, however, the evening out for the young is driven by hormones, probably more overtly than ever before, and the folk club is not now a suitable venue for that.

Nonetheless, there are still many young people writing songs. They just aren't folk songs. They are still playing them. Just not in folk clubs. The medium of rejection of the values of ones parents (a common part of starting to grow up) is no longer the acoustic guitar, and gradually less and less (IMHO) even the electric guitar, but the electronoc loop. I submit that it is a lot easier to express the anger with which you reject oppression by the gerontocracy by the use of an electronic loop, using skills you acquired playing shoot-em-up games, than by having to learn an instrument.

Which may be why the instrumental skills of the young we do see in instrument-playing music are so remarkable.

What I can't explain is why with almost the sole exception of my daughter, who can be very very loud indeed as a singer, young singers and particularly young female singers don't sing out unless they have a microphone and some don't even then. Metallers growl. EMO singers scream. Those are the exceptions. Indies whine rather less loudly, and most of the rest mumble and simper.

I can't make up my mind whether this is thread drift or not.