Folk Music

Tonight is Wednesday night which is folk night on the wireless (we only have one radio station here at Cornwell Towers). Tonight is their annual awards night, and listening to it has brought home to me just how much I hate Folk Music. Now I have very broad music taste. I like all sorts of music but Traditional British Folk (or Fulk as one old friend insists on pronouncing it) music stands out as the most offensive of all. Worse even than squeaky opera.
The awful warbling racket accompanied by squeeze boxes, fiddles, mandolins and the like is really quite unbearable. Now, many, many years ago when I was a student I would sometimes to go to folk night at the Ye Olde Ackhorne Inn, in York, and that didn't seem so bad, but I was young and would experiment with anything (something to do with grass, beer and girls, I expect). During my Rock And Roll Years, when I was a free range sound engineer for hire I worked with a lot of folk music. Indeed I regularly worked for one of the most highly regarded (and smallest) folk venues in the country, and worked with some of the country's finest folk musicians, and I didn't mind that to much, though some of the evenings did seem to drag on forever. I found when you're working every day with live music you enjoy working with good musicians, in good venues with good audiences even if the music itself isn't your cup of tea.

I don't actually mind some of the more contemporary stuff (A little Ralph McTell never hurt anyone, but I do mean a little), but the traditional foll-de-doll, finger in the ear, cat-a-wailing about bad harvests, shire horses, lost loves, dying of plagues and taking pigs to markets. Euuurrrrghhh! just the thought of it makes me go all a bit funny. All those badly home knitted jumpers, warm flat cider, overly sensible shoes and straggly beards. I know that an awful lot of the music I like has its roots in folk, but that's only because things tend to evolve and folk came first. There is a reason why all the later styles came about: to replace folk music.

Nowadays we have Fender Stratocasters, Roland 303s, drum kits and Stylophones. Is time to put down the hurdy-gurdy, remove fingers from ears and let Folk Music go. It's like a 17 year old, farting, arthritic, deaf and blind Labrador with bad breath and bed sores. It's has a good innings, but it's time to move on. If you have to live in the past, then please, do it without singing.

Don't let Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon and Marc Bolan (or even Kurt Cobain) die in vain; they died so you wouldn't have to listen to whining ballads about a less than bountiful barley crop in 1452.

There. I feel much better now that's off my chest.