"Most enthusing about sessions in pubs are players, not singers. Whatever is played in a pub session is treated the same as background music as during the playing of it, conversations continue, drinks are ordered and there is no audience, those playing are playing entirely for their own amusement."

Hopefully true, though I'd rather say that there is a voluntary (as opposed to captive) audience rather than no audience. Our session lasted twenty years and survived several landlords and all participants got unlimited free beer all night. The gaffer even gave me my taxi fare home so that I could have a few pints. Now you don't get that if you are not significantly contributing to the ambience and getting lots bums on seats. So maybe not an audience in the strict sense, but a lot of appreciative people nonetheless. Filling a pub on a Friday night all year round in a remote area with a short tourist season was not our aim but we achieved it anyway. And on alternate Fridays we had several other village pubs in which we did the same thing.

"A Folk Club is different. It is normally held in a designated space that has been reserved for that specific purpose for that particular evening. All those present are there to listen and participate. The material performed to widely varying degrees of competence ranges from traditional to pop, and, no sorry the latter is NOT folk music, even if it is being sung, normally appallingly badly, by "folk"."

I think the club I was brought up in eventually lost its way, at least in part for the reasons you state. Incidentally, not everyone by a long chalk was there to participate. A good number of people were passive audience. The main difference is that in a folk club you are performing. I don't think that's true of pub sessions on the whole, bar the occasional song for which there was reverential quiet from the pub regulars. One other thing: the habit of booking folk music stars for gigs at clubs I always saw as a double-edged sword. Sure, it got people in (usually) and might have enlightened a few as to what they'd been missing. But it also puts career people on a pedestal, as does the issuing of slickly-produced fourteen-quid CDs in glossy boxes. To me, that runs against what true folk music should be about, even if the star performers often performed real folk music.