Much the same for me really; I was escaping the effects of amplified music on my adolescent ear drums, and one day wandered into a local pub and sat and watched this elegant beautiful guest singing unaccompanied with an audience of about five or six. I even bought her record - Airs and Graces. Loved The Plains of Waterloo, hated The Band Played Waltzing Matilta; still do! Or was it that lovely couple from the Albion Country Band with the melodeon, concertina, oboe & hammer dulcimer who sang like angels from whom I bought the wonderful (and wonderfully titled) Among the Many Attractions at the Show will be a Really High Class Band? I love that album even now; the definitive Folk Album!

Thing is though, this sort of small intimate performance was hardly new to me; I used to go to poetry readings at Modern Tower in Newcastle in the days you could see Ivor Culter and Phyllis April King performing to an audience of fifteen. I used to go and see free improvisation too - people as amazing as Derek Bailey & Lol Coxhill all playing in tiny rooms to tiny audiences. Intimate as you could wish really.

In Folk Clubs the vibe was different though, an underlying righteous hostility that people still pick up on from time to time. I keep saying we need to drive a wedge between The Tradition of English Speaking Folk Song as an international treasure of the English Speaking World, and the Folk Revival, the surly attitudes of which very often just puts people off. Put me off a lot back then I must say, and I still encounter a lot of that today actually.