homepage : press : Folk music, multiculturalism and cake - part 1
Folk music, multiculturalism and cake
(part 1)
[press release, 22 November 2003]
Simon Heywood discusses the phoenix music club - deliberately provocative questions by Mark Gibbens.
[MG] What is the Phoenix Music Club?
[SH] In a nutshell, the Phoenix Music Club is our attempt to fill a big and fairly obvious hole in the Sheffield live scene by providing a small- to medium-sized venue for acoustic/folk/traditional/rootsy music. We want the audience to feel that they're coming to the club rather than a gig, in the sense that audiences won't already know about every artist on the bill, but they will feel like taking a chance on turning out to see an unfamiliar name. We want to put a sense of trust and adventure back into the audience's relationship with a local roots music venue. And we want it to be fun. And fairly informal, cheap and cheerful. And we want cake.
[MG] Isn't it just another folk club?
[SH] We want to preserve the feel of a really good, thriving, smallish folk club - the informality, the sense that the performers and audience are all in it together, the willingness to take chances with experimental and diverse programmes, and the way the performance absolutely monopolises attention and takes centre stage - the intensity you can achieve when people are really interested in engaging intimately with the performance. This is the sort of gig we grew up at, and it's the atmosphere we want to recreate.
What's a bit different from your average folk club, as we know them, is that we want to function as a kind of 'crossroads' between artists who wouldn't normally share a stage - bringing together people from the many traditions, styles, cultures and ethnic groups which reside in, or visit, the city. In addition, we aim to showcase cutting-edge national performers alongside the best of the local and regional scene, which is really lively and probably hasn't got enough outlets to go round all the artists who deserve them.
[MG] Is it just music?
[SH] No, it's cake as well.
Also, the other related idea is to programme musicians alongside practitioners of other traditional and vernacular performing arts. Sheffield has several fantastic storytellers, dancers, performance artists, and writers, as well as musicians, and we want to provide a platform for those as well.
[MG] What led you to set up Phoenix?
[SH] For me personally it was the fact that I got fed up listening to myself complaining about the decline of the folk club scene. Since the early-ish 1990s, there's been a new generation of performers and audiences coming up on the Anglo folk scene (the Eliza Carthys and Kate Rusbys), but there's been no new generation of volunteer or semi-professional promoters and organisers, and the grassroots "folk" scene has contracted very noticeably as a result, particularly at the smaller end of the scale.
There's been no new generation of small-ish local live events with which, once upon a time, the folk scene was once positively festooned. Consequently, there's been a tendency for Anglo "folk" or "traditional" music programmes generally to become more conservative, possibly (although I hate to say it) a bit too conservative for the long-term good of the scene. The new acts tend to sound quite a lot like the old ones. To a certain extent this is a sign that the idiom has matured, which is a good thing, but the folk scene at the moment seems to have lost the confidence required for any kind of wholesale experimentation or "what-iffing." This is very different from the way the folk scene started, it was self-consciously creative and experimental and ground-breaking.
We want to break the mould a bit, and one easy way of doing it is to take the blinkers off a bit and pull in artists from outside the usual folk channels - the folk festivals, sessions, competitions, summer schools and what not. On the one hand, there's a wealth of diverse talent which seems to have insufficient access to a grassroots "folk" audience in the UK, and on the other, there's a fairly young, lively grassroots audience, which would probably like all sorts of stuff, did they but get the chance to see it.
You can't necessarily expect large-scale promoters, agencies, record labels, and the like to take all the risks because they're commercial outfits and they need to recoup their investment. Smaller, semi-professional outfits can take a bit of a risk being, as they are, run by voluntary associations of obsessively driven self-sacrificing maniacs who don't mind having their houses repossessed. Our mission is to lose our shirts on the "best kept secrets" of today, in order to train up the superstar MBE's of tomorrow. As it were.
[MG] How will you get a wide range of people interested?
[SH] They say word-of-mouth is the best publicity, so we're talking about it a lot! We are currently doctoring spin for all we're worth, leafletting the city, and contacting the national and local media. We have a brand new website, for which we're dreaming up various features. We're having fun and being imaginative with the extras and details, because it all adds to the feel of it. The local press have been very interested. There's something about the idea that seems to strike a chord and we have a definite feeling that there's an audience.
[MG] Why do you think we don't have any folk music in England like they do in Scotland and Ireland?
[SH] Well, England does have loads. England can give both Scotland and Ireland a run for their money in terms of volume and quality of material. And of course traditional music isn't the only item on the menu in Scotland and Ireland - perhaps it holds its own more in those countries, but it's in dialogue with orchestral, pop, rock, dance, electronic, and everything else. Folk music has always been one voice in a dialogue. Even before radio there was print and the music hall, and before these there was the church. And this is a very good thing.
But English music isn't always as widely supported or recognised as it deserves. Why this is, I have no idea, and I wish I did. I think that, today, the ignorance and neglect of the numerous vernacular cultures and traditions of the many and diverse communities who share the territory of England, is still fostered by elites expressing a fear that anything "English" is either irredeemably quaint and/or tainted by racism.
These anxieties are flawed responses to real problems, but again, I don't know why the English should be more scared than the Scots or Irish about this. Both Scots and Irish traditions have their fair share of the twee and the quaint, and some people really prefer it that way. I don't myself, but then again, my suspicion is that obsessive fear of quaintness is itself a bit dodgy. Methinks the English do protest too much about it. I wonder if it isn't in fact a hangover from the empire, and as such is implicitly racist. Imperial nations require an imperial culture and an imperial identity; not a local, particular identity, and English traditions, like most traditions, are bound up in the local and the particular. Specific things are done in specific communities on specific days, often without much knowledge or interest taken in what's being done next door, still less a mile down the road. However, up till the last century, educated white English people got used to thinking of themselves as latter-day Romans, fit to rule the world, and the habit of mind has lingered. (This is also why we were virtually the only people in the world gullible enough to voluntarily follow the US into Iraq in May 2003: anything to be in on the imperial process.) During the empire days the English collectively clung for comfort to the assumption that the English are far too clever to bother with quaint local customs and doing funny things on midsummer's day, these things being the special preserve of Johnny Foreigner. At the same time, in Scotland and Ireland as elsewhere, people were deliberately talking these things up, in order to argue that they were allowed to be something that wasn't English, so to speak. Within England, traditional culture was definitely there, it existed, but it wasn't collected or recorded quite so systematically, and urbanisation and industrialisation eroded the older tradition-bearing communities and their culture quite early on. And to this day, many English people are still horrified by the idea of folk-singing or Morris dancing, for example.
I sense that this horror is sometimes related to a fear of racism. In the 1930s you'd have been right to worry about racist morris dancers, but genuine racists in the early 2000s tend to listen to very fast punk rock. Something else must therefore be accounting for the ongoing anxiety. It strikes me that it might be a hangover from a subconscious reluctance to admit that the English, deep down, are just the same as everyone else - specifically, in that everyone else does, in fact, for sound reasons, tend to have a musical idiom which is at least partly home-grown, and observe funny customs on midsummer's day, or equivalent, often quite harmlessly, and usually they have an absolute whale of a time doing it. The world is full of such stuff, it's as universal as language, and it's there in English culture to this day, but somewhere in the climate of educated English opinion there's a bonnetload of bees about some aspects of it, I suspect because they constitute a reminder that we're no more or less human than Europeans, Arabs, Africans, Indians, Asians, Siberians, and native Americans. At some level this is still subconsciously a difficult idea for the educated English mind to accept. Objecting to contemporary morris dancing because it's implicitly racist is setting the truth on its head; arguably, the objection is itself grounded in a form of racism.
The English have a rich, lively, under-valued and fundamentally innocuous traditional music, and any suggestion that they don't is vacuous posturing by tossers like Kim Howells, as Kim Howells would probably phrase it.