The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #130823 Message #2948789
Posted By: GUEST,Steamin' Willie
21-Jul-10 - 04:07 AM
Thread Name: Scots musicians deny claim that folk is fading out
Subject: RE: Scots musicians deny claim that folk is
Jack,
You asked how every kid was going to hear the Imagined Village albums.
Well, my son's girlfriend thought I was "cool" because I had it, as she has it too. (My son had downloaded it for that matter, not realising she had bought the CD.)
I then checked and the Empire and Love album was in the top 50 iTunes downloads for that week, (that's top fifty worldwide...) I have a sneaking suspicion that it is not just weird beards and real ale bores that are doing all the downloads.
Further, tracks keep getting played on the BBC, not just by Mike Harding, but prime time by Chris Evans, Simon Mayo, Steve Wright... The ones listened to by a few million people, so no wonder they sell so many.
Could it be that the usual suspects don't own Carthy & co after all? Could it the that music we like to think of as folk appeals to a wider audience after all? I get a hell of a lot out of going to mainstream music festivals because the kids are doing good music, real good music and can relate to "roots." Mind you, call it "folk" rather than "roots" and the image of the sandals and saving a world that disappeared forty years ago springs to mind for them. It does for me for that matter, and I have been playing in folk clubs now for over thirty years....
Music is what you want it to be. Full stop. My wife, (a hell of a lot younger than me) thought my interest in folk was, to put it mildly, quaint. (When we met seven years ago.) I went though her collection and found, as she studied at Edinburgh there were a lot of Scottish bands, over a hundred CDs of bands I (and the bands themselves) would class as folk, play in folk clubs and (just to wind her up fully) three different CDs acknowledging me as either a song writer or a session musician on the album.
And she said there is no folk music in the Edinburgh scene......
Reminds me of Sir Thomas Beecham, the conductor and one of the wonderful quotes attributed to him. "The British don't understand music, but they love the noise it makes."