Jim - How would you suggest we, as audience, react to a singer who can't hold a tune and can't remember words without holding a crib sheet, and so is incapable of interpreting a song because they have to read it?

How about with patience and tolerance? I mean there but for the grace of (insert your favourite supreme being here) go any of us. Talented and un, well rehearsed and not, lucky and un.

A folk club should not be a bloody fraternity. What's next? Hazings?

Can you sing and / or play up to "OUR" specs?
Is your repertoire to "OUR" tastes?
Are you entertaining enough for "OUR" group?

"WE" don't care if you love what you sing.
"WE" don't care about your content as much as your form?
"WE" do care if you make "US" look good or bad.


To anyone else who is interested -

Nobody is going to tell me the lovely older (and I do mean old) gentleman in my club should not be there, because he doesn't play his banjo very well or forgets a lyric now and then. Or that another bloke shouldn't be there because month in month out he sings the same few songs, especially when eveyone loves singing along with him. Or the lady who self-admittedly does not sing very well but writes and performs the most touching and compelling poems about growing up in a coal mining town. Or that I shouldn't be there because I am a Yank singing traditional English songs, when so many of my English fellow members sing Americana.

Don't confuse a sad desire for five minutes of fame with a shared deep abiding love of singing and playing music of a certain vein. It is a place where we hope to be accepted regardless of talent, ability, stage presence, simply because we love what we are doing.

Diane - responding to issues raised by OP of shelling out to listen to shit

If non members decide to attend a unknown club because they have an interest in a paid guest performer that is fine. They paid to see the guest. They got their monies worth. This does not give them the right to complain about the abilities and performances of any member of that club taking up other floor spots.

That is just bad manners.

Gervase - But I have to confess that I'd rather stick pins in my scrotum than subject my friends to some of the dire stuff that one finds at the average club.
To generalise sweepingly, folk clubs are a bloody embarrassment. Every third person is someone you have to make excuses about, "Oh so-and-so's a great singer, so do forgive...," or "she used to be brilliant, but...", or "No, really, he's doing really well, given that..." It's like introducing a perfectly normal friend to a convention of train-spotters or any other slightly obsessive-compulsive and socially-inept hobbyists. You really don't want to do it.

Chrissakes! Then don't! Are you telling me that second rate singers and musicians are good enough for you to sit through but not your friends? Maybe you are selling your friends short? Why do you go? Is there not something that draws you? Makes it worth your while? How do you know it wouldn't be the same for friends?

p.s. thanks RB for backing me.