I agree, times have changed rather than ended. Some things will inevitably end - the active lives of many people currently involved in the folk scene, for instance. Will others take over from them in running clubs and festivals or will there be a new scene springing up elsewhere - in schools and colleges, for instance? Who knows.

Lots of people have been wringing their hands over cuts in 'Arts' funding. I'm afraid I find much of this to be special pleading on the part of people who have vested interests on behalf of either themselves or their friends. Many people who control the allocation of funds and resources now are people who would have been involved in either theatre or music at university in the late 60s or early 70s. They are now in a position of some power and have public money available to put in the way of people they know or admire themselves - with the result that many artists have become accustomed to fees from publicly-funded bodies that folk clubs, for instance, can't match. Not that I'd turn down any of that work myself, of course.

And it's quite correct that it is a great time to be an acoustic musician in terms of access to material. In the early 70s you had to put yourself about a bit if you wanted to hear a lot of traditional or folk music. Now you don't have to though you can miss out on a lot if you never leave the house. It's also much easier to source material as a performer. You don't have to go through archives or collections at Cecil Sharpe House, for instance. Indeed, I suspect there are a lot of performers around who have done nothing more strenuous than go through their parents' record collections - or got someone else to do it for them.

I played at a folk club recently who said they were doing really well. They'd moved to a new venue a couple of years ago and were now regularly getting full houses, even for singers' nights. They used a small, unobtrusive PA that just took the level of sound about the sound of any background chatter and made it just that little bit easier to present your music. They didn't have loads of the organisers' mates doing floor spots (they saved that for singers' nights) so the overall standard of the evening was at least controlled.

Many of the people there were people I'd also seen recently at other clubs where we'd been playing. It would be nice to think they'd turned out to see us but at the same time they are all clearly still passionately committed to the scene - which is something to be respected and applauded. I hadn't spent a lot of time in folk clubs for some years until recently but coming back on to the scene I've found it generally in much better shape than I would have expected.

I don't think that the current economic situation is necessarily disastrous for folk music in the UK. It may engender a little more realism in terms of headline artists' fees and maybe even provoke promoters to give a chance to some other acts who maybe haven't received the Folk Roots/Radio 2/BBC Three seal of approval yet. It may also lead to some 'Arts' administrators having to demonstrate that they are providing value for money in terms of their salaries. Far too many of them seem to write their own job descriptions once ther are in post. A few P45s wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, especially if it means a few more Sure Start Nurseries are saved.