Having lived much of my life in Folk Years, I see the singaround in terms of both Seance & Holy Communion. I have been transported and transfigured; I have seen visions and passed through portals into hitherto unknown realms of exquisite wonderment. I have openly wept at the transcendent beauty of a traditional ballad & damn near pissed myself when my concept of incompetence has been defined afresh and the variables of the known universe have been shifted accordingly. But worse - far worse - I have been bored into states of terminal shitlessness by those preening musos whose faultless techniques and performance abilities, though lauded by most, have had me bidding a hasty retreat to the bar, there to rediscover the will to live in a pickled egg washed down with swift half of Talisker.

Recently, two determinedly non-musicians got up and treated us to a rendition of The Great Pretender in which they sang along to a pre-recorded cassette tape of them singing along with the record, complete with incidental ambience. They used the words, much good that it did them of course, and the I swear that the 3 minutes they were up there seemed as 15 (hence Folk Years). But in such moments we pass through into a realm of a near absolute surrealism, shading our eyes in the presence of a universal brilliance which many I'm sure have mistaken for God but which is, most assuredly, human, however so uncommon it might be.

The Folk Club is a collective happening - it lives and breathes, it consumes & it excretes, it absorbs and humiliates; we leave our egos at home along with our expectations (in one of those safe place which means we spend most of the next day looking for them). Above all, we are enriched by the ecology of folk in its natural habitat wherein the only thing that matters is people doing what they're moved to do, to whatever ability they are uniquely gifted with.