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Folk Clubs & Bankers

Mike Harding | 13:16 UK time, Friday, 27 February 2009

I'm not sure whether nostalgia isn't a thing of the past, and perhaps it was passing, or there again, perhaps it was meeting today and
interviewing him for the programme, but it got me to thinking ­about folk clubs
and the folk scene of the Sixties and Seventies.

Maybe it was because we lived in gentler times then, maybe it was because in them there days, bank managers were blokes you actually got to meet, and their job was looking after your money and not taking it down the dog track to bet on the one with three legs.

I don't know, maybe I am at last becoming a grumpy old man, but Clive talking about his
apprenticeship in the folk clubs round Ashton and Stalybridge set me off to
thinking too.

Perhaps if anything good does come out of this "credit crunch" (sounds like a chocolate
bar to me) it might be that we stop buying stuff we never needed anyway, and
stop listening to machine made music, and start going out again into what's
left of the pubs and listening to people as ordinary as ourselves making music
for the sheer joy of it.

That was one of the points Clive made in his interview: that the best music, even in Nashville, happened when people just got together and played together ­for free.

So let's do that - let's all go down the pub and make some music. But don't tell the bank managers with their bodhrans where we're going.

I, by the way, am off out right now to an old Irish pub near the train station where some cracking musicians meet up and where the pool table has an old bicycle leaning against it and the landlord has a broken watch and never calls time.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    The recession of the early 1980's created a whole load of songs about the manufacturing industries and institutions that disappeared: John Tams' Vulcan & Lucifer, Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding and Ed Pickford Johnny Miner being just 3. It is going to take a dedicated song-smith to write anything half as good about Banking and Derivatives, but someone yet might.

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