Steamfolk is predicated on the notion that Folk is essentially a bourgeois / middle-class fantasy based on various selected high-lights of working-class culture that have been dismanted and reconstructed / reinvented elsewhere for ease of consumption, though seldom by the lumpen proletariat themselves for whom the whole Trad/Folk thing tends to be pretty much anathema. I love it myself, but then again I love libraries, galleries, museums, antique shops and hoary academic contexts as much as I love hedges, ditches, and the filthy old public houses which are now vanishing fast before a wave of creeping cultural blandness. Real Working Class Folk culture these days (i.e. Blackpool) is of little interest to the middle-classes except in terms of patronising irony. Plus ca change!

Here's a thing, in the freezing sleeting rain of Blackpool yesterday we passed a side of rudely liveried hens arm in arm in sisterly unity as they kicked through the puddles singing Didn't we have a lovely time the day we went to Blackpool in perfect approximation of the Macrame Beat classic which was a hit for Fiddler's Dram in 1979 (same year as THIS, BTW, just to give it further contextual consideration). Didn't catch much more of it, but it struck me as oddly relevant to the various conundrums going down here (& elsewhere) as cultures clash and such elements are adopted / discarded / debased along the way.