The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #165660 Message #3983944
Posted By: Vic Smith
22-Mar-19 - 02:50 PM
Thread Name: UK 60s Folk Club Boom?
Subject: RE: UK 60s Folk Club Boom?
A big thank you to Mike for his comments about the way our club was run in Lewes. By the end of 2014, I (Tina a couple of years less) had been running a weekly folk club with a very few short breaks for 50 years. We had done our share! We could have gone on, but frankly, it was no longer our turn. We gave a year's notice to local activists that we wanted to call it a day and we did have two groups of people approach us to take over but when we listed everything we did and explained the hours that it took each week to make sure that we had a good or a full house every week, they both found the hours daunting.
One of the reasons was that Steve Gardham's list above of
festivals, sessions, singarounds, concerts, workshops, seminars, TSF meetings etc., etc.
were actually starting to show more vitality, more entertainment and better musicianship than many folk clubs - including the regular session that you are involved with in Ditchling, Mike - were showing. It's all very well to obsess that there are only 186 folk clubs or whatever in the country but what if they are not where it is at any more. I can still see the top performers that I want to see in concert locally and I seem to be hearing better things elsewhere than clubs from people who were regular floor singers at our club. I still go to paying folk clubs but as an ex-organiser it pains me to sit through a sub-standard floor spot having paid £7 - 10 to get in. An 'all-inclusive' policy is admirable in some ways but when I am listening to something I consider turgid when I have paid to come in is irksome. There is also one club in Sussex that, like Jim Carroll says, seems to have turned its back on folk song. All the photos on their website show guitarists sitting hunched over their music stands. No thank you. I don't go there any more.
Another reason that we left off running clubs was because of our increasing involvement on the management team of the Sussex Traditions Database and website. When the folk club closed, the several thousand pounds that we haa accumulated in the club's bank account was gifted to Sussex Traditions.