Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: time to do something!
From: Dick Gaughan <dickg (@) dickalba.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 03:14:01 +0100

[ in reply to a post on the subject of attracting a much larger audience for "folk" ]

I've spent most of my musical life ignoring people telling me "You can't do that" so in some respects I have a lot of sympathy with where you're coming from.

In 1981 I initiated an organisation called "Perform" and watched anything constructive it might have achieved be negated by people who didn't actually want to *do* anything, they just wanted to complain about how terrible it all was and demand to know why wasn't someone (someone else, that is) doing something about it. So I tend to smile wryly when I see someone with the same wish to do something some of us had back then initiate yet another round of "it's all fucked, why don't we do something about it?" and wish them more success than the previous dozen times someone has tried.

Greater publicity will not attract more people to listening to what we call "folk" music. We've had greater publicity by the bucketload over the decades and it didn't draw them. It might come as a dreadful, unpalatable shock to many people but the harsh, sad truth is that the majority of people don't listen to "folk" music, not because they don't know it's there, but because they *don't like* most of it. Perhaps that might bruise our vanity but it's true. Some of them might like some of it a bit better if they got to hear more of it but in general they don't like it because they don't like it and they don't think it has anything to offer which is of any relevance to them and their lives.

Changing the style in which we play it will not attract more people. Style is transient and so we'd be forced to change style every few weeks. To what end?

I want to ask a question that Jack Campin has already asked and I saw no satisfactory answer. Why is it presumed that greater popularity is in itself a laudable aim? We had mass popularity in the late 60s/early 70s. In 1972 there were over 2000 folk clubs in the UK each attracting an average audience of over 100. That's around a quarter of a million people every week attending live folk events. If popularity means success then where is all the success accrued from that period?

But that in itself contains an illusion - that all the people who went to folk clubs were there for "folk" music. Many of the people who went to folk clubs back then were attracted by a large number of performers who used folk clubs as stepping-stones in a planned career which took them elsewhere. Many of the them went to folk clubs because they gave a voice to a generation and it was a way of being anti-establishment. Many went because their mates went. Many went because getting pissed and singing loudly out-of-tune was acceptable. And a dozen more reasons, unconnected with music.

I keep saying it and I'll probably keep on saying it - if you want the great unwashed to listen to "folk" music, make them feel it has some relevance to them. Then you'll attract a small number.

I have never seen any convincing evidence that "folk" has ever been popular in a mass market sense. Certain elements which became "folk" started out as popular music but the idea that there was ever a time when everybody ran about singing "folk" songs strikes me as quite absurd and part of a Golden Age nostalgia.

"Folk" is in general music which demands concentration and thought. And the evidence of what achieves mass popularity in most cultures throughout the world is that most people don't want concentration and thought, they want wallpaper and hamburgers. If you want to help them realise there's much more to life than that, wonderful, that's what I spend my life trying to do. But we have to start from where they are, not where we'd like them to be and where they are is not liking "folk" music because they find most of it boring i.e., it's not hamburgers. And it's pointless trying to force-feed Partan Bree to people who think hamburgers are the ultimate in haute cuisine.

There is a lesson to be learned from the NUM strike of 84/85. Many of us spent huge chunks of that year doing benefit gigs. In Scotland, many of these gigs were held in Miner's social clubs, clubs which 6 months earlier wouldn't have given people like me the chance to sing on a Karaoke night let alone a headlining spot on a concert night. Yet, they were jammed in to the rafters, singing along with songs they hadn't known existed. Why? Because we were singing about *them*. 19th century "folk" songs like The Blackleg Miner were suddenly no longer old boring songs sung by retired hippies and old farts and bearded wierdoes, they were thunderingly up-to-date contemporary comments on their own lives and experiences. And many of those people are still going to "folk" gigs 17 years later. We had managed to show them, by relating to their own lives, that "folk" had relevance to them.

Without relevance, we're a group of antiquities collectors. There's nothing wrong with that and I don't use the term in any derogatory sense, but if all we're doing is preserving tradition then we will be a minority interest and we should accept that and enjoy ourselves without being angst-ridden about getting a wider audience.

If we do think we have something of value to offer a wider audience then we need to make what we do relevant to that audience. Not relevant in terms of superficial fluff like style or presentation or glitzy stagewear but relevant in terms of content.

Anyway, every time I say this nobody listens so I don't expect this time to be any different. And I'll keep doing what I do, trying to sing songs to the people those songs are actually about in the knowledge that most of them aren't interested - but some of them are and they're the ones I want to reach.

I said asking the right question was more important than getting an answer. Here are the three questions I ask myself about everything I do before I do it, and I don't do it until I've answered them -

"What do I want to say, who do I want to say it to and why do I want to say it to them?"

--
DG

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