Re The Claque. No, I haven't heard of them....judging from the mollusc's reaction this is obviously to my eternal shame but that's hardly the point.

Why would I have heard of them? They never play anywhere near where I go to see gigs, they don't have a website (beyond a page on someone else's) and there's no where like MySpace on the internet that I can actually hear them if I went looking to do so. Good luck to them....I'm sure they're very good but the fact is they're happy to do residencies around their own area and not stray much further apart from the odd festival (and perhaps an occasional pilgrimage to the self-proclaimed epicentre of the folk universe over in East Sussex)

This was the quote from Faye Roche's posting that I was reacting to...

"Of course, opinions are subjective; you can't compare Lau with, for instance, The Claque and say that one is better than the other; it's a matter of taste. That's why the awards are meaningless"

We put on Lau at our club just over a year ago (supported by Jackie Oates and James Dumbleton). This was before they'd won any folk awards but we still had over a hundred people, it was a great success and the event was reviewed very favourably by Robin Denselow in the Guardian a couple of days later. Lau have a vibrant record label, a go-get-em agent, great management and publicity behind them. They play all over the world, tour the country, appear at all sorts of festivals, advertise, get written about. Not only that you can sample their wares on the internet (I'm listening to six preview tracks from their upcoming album on MySpace as I type). In short, they have a professional attitude. Of course none of this would mean a bean if they were rubbish. Fortunately they're not....in fact they're bloody good. When you see them live it's not an experience you forget in a hurry.

Is it really any wonder Lau get acknowledgement in the Folk Awards? ....and that The Claque don't?