"Pat pointed out to me last night that a survey was carried out some time in th seventies that suggested there were around 1,600 clubs in Britain - Dave puts up 186 as evidence of a "successful folk scene" - do the math and come back and tell me that is an improvement, or even holding its own"

I think it would be almost impossible to find out how many folk clubs there currently are in the UK today; there are things coming and going that I only hear about because I'm good with my social media and actively keep my ear to the ground.

Important to remember just how long ago the 1970s were. Given we're talking about a 45 year span or so, I can't consider it a tragedy or even that surprising that the number of folk clubs would have declined a lot. Given that folk is a specialist music, given that it had an untypical blip in mainstream consciousness in the 1960s and early 70s, that doesn't really surprise me.

I think it's far sadder that the number of live music venues as a whole has declined so rapidly over a much shorter space of time. I think it's sad that the idea of going to hear (or participate in) live music is unlikely to be a regular cultural part of my son's teenage life the way it was for me (irrespective of musical genre).

I see traditional music in much the same way I see other non-mainstream musics like jazz or death metal or minimalist techno or contemporary classical music or indeed any other regional-specific music. It's specialist-audience music. I can't think of folk music as being in crisis because there are folk clubs I go to every month in which young people are singing traditional folk songs.