It is the same story everywhere and one which makes me wonder if folk music has any future at all. If it does, it looks as if it will not be preserved by folk clubs (much as I like them), or coffee houses or by any concert series.
I was talking about this to Marion when she was here a few days ago. My feeling is that the social context in which folk music was made no longer exists - and I will accept many definitions of folk music. For me rugby songs are folk songs. Some hymns are folk songs. Daft songs sung in the back of a bus are folk songs. Songs passed around at sing alongs (if there are any more) in Cockney pubs are folk songs and in fact any songs which are passed on directly are folk songs.
There is a very great resistance to live music per se. I went to try to set up a gig in a venue where I had previously packed the place with one of my bands. The disc jockey who was running the place looked at me with bored contempt. He regarded musicians as morons who were too stupid to operate a record player. That was where "real" music came from as far as he was concerned. His disco brought people in whereas live music only drove people out.
Young people grow up with a huge amount of expensively advertised, technically perfectly recorded sound. The pop vidoes they watch rarely hold a shot for more than a few seconds, because they are taught not to concentrate any longer. What part of their culture involves singing and playing to each other and exchanging songs?
It is not only folk music which is attracting a smaller audience - indeed almost no audience at all. The number of gigs available to blues, country and rock and roll bands is also diminishing.
I think that to have any prospect of long time survival, folk music has to be part of people's culture - and that does not mean just practised in near secret by eccentric batches of people over fifty. I was not surprised when someone recently said that being a fan of English folk made him feel lonely. It is no longer a living tradition and has not been so in my lifetime. You can not go into a pub in any English town I have lived in and expect to find a group of people playing traditional English music. The same is true in Germany. If you found a group of Germans playing "traditional German music" in a pub for fun, they would be looked upon as very eccentric indeed. Oddly enough, were the same musicians to be playing "Irish folk" everything would seem natural! That is probably because Ireland is one of the few countries in Western Europe which is still developing and preserving (you can't have one without the other) its folk culture.
Most fans of folk music are over fifty because folk music is no longer a tradition in our society, but an eccentric revival which is now dying out.
That should put the cat among the pigeons. The floor is now yours, ladies and gentlemen!