Singing from the Floor: A History Of British Folk Clubs

by JP Bean

(Faber, £17.99)

THIS wonderful book by Julian Bean is an oral history of what erstwhile Britpop Pulp member Richard Hawley rightly characterises as “one of the biggest revolutions — musical, political

and social — this country has ever seen.”

Previous books have touched on this phenomenon, Georgina Boyes’s The Imagined Village (1993) being probably the best. There have been books too on the contributions of individuals such as Ewan MacColl, Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention, which acknowledged the role of the clubs on their careers and, in MacColl’s case, on his role in the growth of the clubs.

Yet the focus on single individuals tended to obscure the multi-faceted mosaic that was not the top-down creation of a few leading lights, but rather an uprising from the bottom.

It’s significant that Hawley refers in his brief preface to a revolution rather than a revival, for while the latter description has been applied to it by many of its protagonists, it is a term suggesting blowing a moribund tradition into life rather than what it actually was — a revolt against the hegemony of Tin Pan Alley over the pop music of the early 1950s.

Interestingly, it was a revolution without ideologues. While many of its earliest pioneers were either communists or of the less identifiable left — a fact which Fleet Street and the occasional renegade MP like Aidan Crawley used to characterise them as dangerous reds — they followed no recognisable party line. Indeed, the Communist Party apparatchiks of the time regarded them with great suspicion and many of the schisms which disfigured its history were between people like MacColl and Eric Winter, supposedly Party comrades.

What fascinates in this book — reminiscences which could have been a dusty sociological tome, for the folk scene was nothing if not a powerful social phenomenon —  is that instead it is a veritable cornucopia of quotations from those who know what it was like to gather in a coffee-bar basement or a room over a pub to sing songs as old as the 17th century or as new as the latest mining disaster. They could well declare, like the subject of Wink Martindale’s Deck of Cards song:“The story is true. I know; I was that soldier.”

To read it is a bit like climbing up from the public bar into a room where there may be no stars, as the music biz understands the term, but rather a place where virtually anyone can get up and do their thing. 

There may no longer be 1,700 folk clubs, as there were in 1979, but there is still a circuit which allows budding performers to earn their spurs. As Jarvis Cocker declares on the book’s cover, it’s a “vernacular spectacular.”