"In the club my good lady and I started in 1980 we had a guest EVERY night.

The first five floor singers got in free, everybody else paid.

Some nights even I, as organiser, didn't sing providing I could rely on the first singer to set the "right" mood.

It was a VERY successful club. One night the landlord of the pub tried to ask me to pay for the upstairs room (which was never used)

I said I would move the club elsewhere ........... within a month he has put a small bar in there.

Halcyon days!"

Indeed. I owe all my musical credentials, for what they're worth, to the Tree Inn Folk Club in Stratton, Bude. I've played the harmonica since a little lad, and in the eighties I'd bought a few records of Irish music. My favourite album was Music from Sliabh Luachra Vol. 6, a solo album by the young Jackie Daly. It wasn't long before I could play every tune on that record (except for the few with sharps and flats, as I played only the diatonic harp at the time). I loved Planxty and De Danann and the Bothies too. At one point in the very early nineties I heard that the folk club, which I'd never attended before, were putting on Andy Irvine. Well what a night. After that, we went to just about every guest night, which was every other Friday night. The bloke who ran the club was John Maughan, a brilliant bloke who is these days known as the Boscastle Busker. We'd had Wood/Cutting, Flook, Roy Bailey, the Watersons, Martin Carthy, Liam O'Flynn, Eliza and Nancy Kerr, the Poozies, Ron Kavana, Ceolbeg with Davy Steele, the Kippers, John Kirkpatrick, the House Band, (and in case he's reading...) Brian Peters, Les Barker, Marilyn Middleton-Pollock, Dick Gaughan, Show Of Hands, Vin Garbutt...begod, dozens of others... and on the non-guest nights I was eventually railroaded into getting up and playing my mouth organ in front of PEOPLE. I'd never done anything like that in my life and I was forty bloody two. But it was the making of me and I forgave the club for all those nights when I sat through interminable ballads sung by blokes with their eyes shut...Since then I've played in loads of pub sessions all round Cornwall and at weddings and Burns nights and parties and the rest and loved every minute. I've made a CD (Blowing Through The Reeds) and I've penned more than forty articles and submitted Irish tunes for Harmonica World, the magazine of the National Harmonica League, and I'm on YouTube. So you won't find me knocking folk clubs, not ever. Subjective? Sure. But bugger off anyway!