"Well I'm sorry, we've got to draw the line somewhere. you can pay to come in, but you're not singing here"
Know where you're coming from now Al - met hundreds of you when I used to help with the door at the Singers Club
The clowns who turned up and demanded to sing, no matter what they sang or whether they were able to hang two notes together.
Or the ones 'looking for a gig' who would give the door-person their name, as the to "give us a shout when it's my turn" then sit in the bar, not showing any interest whatever in what was happening upstairs in the club they were asking for a booking, or demanding half a dozen songs when there were a dozen visiting singers on the list.....
I avoided clubs that would put up with that shit like the plague - those were the ones you were guaranteed to go home from not having heard a folk song, or having heard a night of mostly crap singing - if there was ever a 'golden age' on the folk club scene, it was when clubs like that where virtually non-existent.
The Grey Cock, The Singers Club and virtually every club have been part of, were policy clubs in the sense that we tried to present what we believed was folk song and tried to establish a standard of singing that wouldn't send the audience home thinking, "folk song is tuneless, talentless crap and not worth bothering your arse about".   
I've been happy to go to clubs where a fair amount of time is given over to floor-singers occasionally, but not as a general policy, and the best of these nights have always been the ones that were organised to attempt to guarantee a bias towards singers who didn't have to read their songs from crib-sheets and could hold two notes together.
Jim Carroll