Might the Revival just be a cultural flourish, like Teddy Boys and Punks, which will live on with echoes aross the generations until the next thing comes along? My wife, a tender 36, bought a Neil Young live CD from 1968 the other day; my response was typical enough - "I'm only 48," quoth I. "Too young for Neil Young!" Which is true enough. I got into The Revival when I was fourteen in 1975, though diverse aspects of The Tradition had been affecting me all my life prior to that. I keep saying that even at 48 I'm still bound to be the second youngest in any folk club we go to, and generally speaking that remains the case. There are odd exceptions of course, but they tend to be really young. In folk, there's several missing generations - assuming a cultural generation to be around 7 years or so - and I know I'm pretty much the exception in my immediate generation for being into folk, which has always felt odd as (with but few exceptions) all my folky pals are ten years + older than I am myself, even here on Mudcat!


Last night I was watching something on BBC1 called Secret Country which featured a couple of jolly young chaps singing folk songs in the way of lot of jolly young chaps do these days. I didn't get their names, though you ay catch the programe again on BBCi or somesuch. From what they were saying they'd discovered a song called Thousands or More hitherto unnoticed in the hedgerows of the Sussex weald, which is fair enough as the novelty & potency of such songs remains timeless, but I found the whole thing a little too contrived to be engage me beyond a casual smile. But then again, though a committed Bellamist, I tried listening to the Young Tradition the other day and took it off after less than a minute and replaced it with some early Coppers which went down a treat.

Crisis? What crisis?!