Thanks for those answers chaps and chapesses.

I guess the big issue re quality is that the benchmark is not universal - and what one group of people think is 'very good' might be considered 'very dire' by others, specially newcomers who have not had their ears trained properly yet. (Though some will love it from first hearing, of course).

Certainly folk music can be strong meat to those with a sensitive palette. And as others have said, it's not just abut people being in tune or in time (or not), because by some folk criteria these are less important than other totally different qualities such as story-communication, provenance or personal growth.

Maybe we could say that the things that go on in folk clubs these days can be defined by a number of different and at time conflicting philosophies - with perhaps three that are key; participation, repertoire and style. You even could call these the X,Y and Z axes of folk if you wanted, and then every individual, and to a certain extent every club, could be plotted onto a 3D graph according to how important they rate each of these philosophies.

Acorn 4 mentioned the 'Manners threat' (love the Freudian typo, Acorn!) and though it became impossible for me to contribute to that one I did read it with a great deal of interest. We saw adherents to each of those three philosophies in that thread and their commitment was compelling. I found myself agreeing passionately with people who were in irredeemable conflict with eachother!

Certainly I feel there's room for everything as long as there's a live and let live approach - and clear labelling.

In the past I've suggested that the chief challenge facing folk clubs (in fact the whole folk movement) is not one of quality or promotion or conservation or originality - it's merely about branding. Or to use a less contentious word, language.

If there were universally understood and different, non-confusable terms for Dave's 1 2 and 3 - (and, ideally, terms for the main sub-sets of 3 too - booked/vetted supports against floor singers, for example) most of the problem would disappear. (Hey - maybe we should use XYZ co-ordinates in all publicity to warn people where we stand)!!

But as long as we use the words 'folk club' to describe such massively different types of event, the endless skirmishes of our civil war will continue, and we'll go on confusing the pants off the rest of society.

It wouldn't solve the problem of regulars/members expecting guests to be poor, but maybe if we fixed the big problem of branding we'd have a LOT more clubs and more people could find the right level and outlet for their talents.

Who knows

Tom