names and timing. This immediately points to one characteristic of local folk clubs – their relative transience under a given title. There were others too, even less long-lasting, which for a time engaged people’s enthusiasm but faded out after a few years or months, among them the Black Horse Folk Club, the Bull and Butcher Singers’ Club, the Cannon Blues and Folk Club, and the Concrete Cow Folk Club; and how the new Merlin’s Roost Folk Music Club would do (founded autumn 1984) still remained to be seen. There were also gatherings on a regular but less formal basis, like the Sunday lunch sing-songs that drew 50–100 people at the Bull Hotel in Stony Stratford, then shifted to the Black Horse at Great Linford, where (as one leading singer put it) ‘anybody’s welcome to join in, play along, sing a song, add some harmony to a chorus, or simply have a beer and listen’.
Amidst all these changes there were always some five or six clubs which devotees could attend. The accepted system was that club meetings were arranged on a periodic cycle, avoiding mutual competition by functioning on different nights throughout the week or month. A real enthusiast could spend almost every night each week at one or other of the nearby clubs.
There were detailed differences between clubs, for, as one experienced performer commented, ‘each club goes its own way, does it how it works for them’; but there were also recognisable patterns. Almost all were associated with a local pub, meeting weekly or fortnightly in its ‘special function’ room. They were open to casual visitors, but also normally had membership subscriptions, and the entrance fee of around £1.00–£1.50 was lower for members. Around 40–70 typically came on any one night, roughly half men and half women, with 120 or 150 for a well-known artist. Clubs usually ran both ‘singers’ nights’, at which the club members provided free entertainment, and evenings with visiting ‘guests’. The visitors were paid a fee, the amount varying according to reputation and distance: a local musician might get £10–£20, a well-known non-local artist up to £100. The balance between singers’ and visitors’ nights partly depended on club size (and hence funds). A well-off club aimed to have three or four guest nights to one ‘singers’ night’, but this was not always easy since even with an entrance charge of £1.50 the room (and audience) might not be big enough to recoup the cost of an expensive guest.
An evening session involved a high level of participation from those present, and even where there were invited performers local members often performed too as ‘floor singers’. The general atmosphere was relaxed, with people sitting around tables drinking as they listened or joined in the songs, but there were elements of formality too. Starting and finishing times were fairly strictly kept to, there were accepted conventions about introducing and applauding performers, and the organisers tried to stop too much moving around during the performance of a song – in contrast to some other musical performances in pubs. Since finance was always a problem the evening often included a fund-raising raffle, sometimes with a recording by the visiting performer as the prize.
The clubs were run by local organisers and committees (with the partial exception of the Folk-at-the-Stables, backed by the professional organisation of WAP – though even there the artistic side was organised by a local teacher and folk musician). The work involved was extensive – arranging with the local pub, booking guests, ensuring a supply of floor singers, organising publicity, and entertaining visiting artists. Above all the organisers had to worry about funding – and for most folk clubs this was precarious. True, a certain amount came in from club fees, entrance charges, and raffles, but against this there were the constant expenses: rent of the hall, publicity, entertaining, and guest artists’ fees. Most clubs just could not afford high fees. This was probably one reason why they had few professional artists – in the sense, that is, of full-time musicians; for in the other sense of accepted standards many folk performers were regarded as ‘professional’, combining full-time jobs with regular appearances in the clubs. The fees remained low from the performers’ viewpoint, but clubs still found it hard to make ends meet and for this reason local guests often agreed to take minimal fees or to perform ‘free’. They might still be entertained to food and drinks, and a token of, say, £10 might be pressed on them in the form of a gift. The organisers usually found they were ‘dipping into their own pockets’ for stamps, phone calls, petrol, entertaining guests, providing the tickets or prizes for the raffle, having visiting artists to stay or just putting money ‘into the kitty’. Regular members too joined in, not least through the pressure to make generous contributions via the fund-raising raffles. Given these constraints, it is scarcely surprising that some clubs were ephemeral, rather that there were always some folk clubs flourishing, several having lasted for years.
Folk clubs were to be found not only in the immediate area, but also in a circle around it. There were folk clubs at, for example, Nether Heyford, Daventry, Aylesbury, Luton and Dunstable, all on occasion patronised by Milton Keynes residents. How far people were prepared to travel depended on both commitment and mode of transport (most in fact had access to cars). Some devotees spent just about every night of the week at some folk club or other in what they classified as the vicinity, up to twenty-five miles or so away. One husband-and-wife pair, for example, keen folk enthusiasts and performers, regularly spent their evenings (after work) as follows: Sundays, Daventry Folk Club (the oldest in the area, going since 1965); Mondays, Hogsty Folk Club, Aspley Guise; Tuesdays, either the Nether Heyford Club or the Black Horse Folk Club at Great Linford; Wednesdays and Thursdays, ‘not so good because people had no money’, but sometimes playing at home; Fridays, alternately the Cock at Stony Stratford or the Whittlebury Folk Club; Saturdays, Folk-at-the-Stables, Wavendon. This weekly cycle was not unique. Another example, typical of several, was someone in a demanding, full-time job who nevertheless ‘lived for folk’: Sundays, Daventry; Mondays, Hogsty; Tuesdays, Old Sun Folk Club at Nether Heyford; Wednesdays, teaching German (his one non-folk evening); Thursdays, practising; Fridays, the Cock, Stony Stratford or Whittlebury; Saturdays, live performance locally or further afield.
There was also the wider network of folk clubs that had been growing up throughout the country from the late 1950s, each with their own local cycles. Folk enthusiasts who had to travel to other parts of the UK could (and did) consult the English Folk Dance and Song Society directory of clubs and made a point of attending them. As one much-travelled folk participant put it, ‘they’re all the same – and, different. You can go into any and know they’ll be friendly.’ Women might feel self-conscious in a strange pub, but in a folk club ‘you feel quite comfortable’. It was accepted form to walk into an unfamiliar club anywhere, perhaps asking ‘Any chance to sing?’ or perhaps waiting to be persuaded the first time, but then recognised in later visits; names and personal contacts were not needed, for the system was open and familiar. One experienced folk attender summed it up: ‘you just feel at home straight away – a home from home’.
The folk club world was thus country-wide, and in contrast to some other forms of music the national network of clubs was known and accessible to all enthusiasts. This wide perspective among folk music devotees also came out in the regional or national folk festivals, and Loughborough, Reading, Norwich and Cambridge were among large folk events attended by local enthusiasts and performers. Folk news-sheets (like Shire Folk and Unicorn) were also springing up in certain regions, and these too encouraged wider awareness of the folk music world, as did the English Folk Dance and Song Society and Perform (a national society to encourage live music, with strong links to the Milton Keynes folk world), and the established practice of folk performers circulating as guest artists among folk clubs and festivals up and down the country. For Milton Keynes dwellers their local clubs were what they were most regularly involved in, but they were also very aware of the country-wide ‘folk world’ of which they were a part.
Many of those who attended the folk clubs went as receptive and participating audience or provided ‘floor’ performance from time to time. The clubs also thus rested on a pool of informal local talent in the form of floor singers or instrumentalists and – not least – chorus participants, apparently so readily available in Milton Keynes folk settings. But there were also the actively performing groups, together with a few individuals who themselves travelled the ‘folk club circuit’. Of these categories, the most important locally were the bands, for though some well-known performers (like Matt Armour or Beryl Marriott) lived locally, they made relatively few local solo appearances and even then mostly performed in