I thought there might be some interest in this - everyone loves a mystery - but wasn't really prepared for how much.
The level of curiosity from folkies was especially thought-provoking because everyone involved in running the awards said that the names of the judges are not in any way intended to be a secret.
So I asked for a list.
In particular I asked for a list from John Leonard at Smooth Operationsand from Fergus Dudley at the BBC, whose job it is to oversee the contracted-in services of Smooth Operations, which is part of UBC Media. And I was surprised at how complicated the request appeared to be to those most directly concerned. The implication was that instead of shining a light on the awards it would open a can of worms.
Interesting, eh?
So I wrote something else, inviting folkies - or anyone really - to make a practical contribution to the inquiry if they wanted to, reasoning that it would be useful to demonstrate to the BBC and Smooth Operations that I wasn't some lone online lunatic hell-bent on, you know, finding stuff out. Thanks to everyone who bothered to email Fergus Dudley, among others, to let him know you were watching and interested. He's at fergus.dudley@bbc.co.uk if you'd still like to get in touch.
So far I haven't managed to find the whole list of names, although there's been a steady trickle of people ringing and emailing to say that they're judges, wondering whether I'd like to talk to them about it and being encouraging.
In fact, it's been a brilliant week from that point of view. The 15-20 people who got in touch directly all suggested that there were a great many more who'd be interested in the outcome. Phil Widdows over at Folkcast wrote a great open email on the subject to Mike Harding, who presents Smooth Operations' folk show, which I urge you to read. And in response Harding started his own blog, which can only be a good thing.
So, what to do next?
I know, I know... If only there were some way of getting hold of information that everyone says is intended to be in the public domain but isn't. Some mechanism intended to hold institutions paid for by public money to account.
Oh.
Fortunately, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 exists exactly for situations like this. So this morning I asked the Freedom of Information department at the BBC whether it would be able to tell me who the judges of the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards are by supplying a list.
While I was writing this post about it I received a formulaic reply from the BBC
So there you go. With any luck there'll be an answer within 20 working days, which is four weeks. It's no big deal, the world will not end: the BBC actually has a department for this.
So I ask Fergus Dudley, John Leonard and everyone else who's been weirdly fearful about what happens next: what's the big deal?
The response to my posts yesterday and the day before about the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards has been quite astonishing... It looks as if I put my finger on something that had been troubling a lot of people for a while.
If anyone is interested in getting their voice heard on the subject, they could email the man at the BBC who is supposed to be responsible for making sure that the folk awards and Smooth Operations comply with the BBC's rules about transparency. A good place to start would be to ask him to make sure that the list of judges is made public.
His name is Fergus Dudley and his email address is fergus.dudley@bbc.co.uk He's on Twitter as @FergusDudley, though he appears not to have tweeted for quite some time.
You could also email Smooth Operations to let them know how you feel. I don't have an email address for John Leonard - anyone? - but there is a general one, which is info@smoothoperations.com
And the second thing is that a couple of people have contacted me to say that they are judges for the folk awards and were very happy to see my blog posts. So I was thinking that if there are any other judges out there who'd like to "out" themselves in the name of transparency - since the BBC and Smooth Operations agree that there has never been anything preventing them from doing this - you could email me hereand if there is a decent sized handful I could write a separate post about what the folk awards look like from that point of view.
I had a phone call from John Leonard (below), who runs Smooth Operations and therefore the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards, about yesterday's blog.
His starting point was that he didn't want the names of the judges to be public. "I'm very aware about the better off record companies being able to lobby people on the panel," he said.
Which ones, I asked? I know Seth Lakeman was with EMI but isn't any more as he's struck out on his own. So which large record companies have a foot in the folk scene at the moment?
"I couldn't possibly say which ones," he replied, before mentioning Topic and Proper. However, he later changed his mind about these companies, suggesting that I was putting words into his mouth. I had raised the way in which Topic and Proper seem already to do quite well out of the folk awards, and asked how their influence would increase if the names of the judges were on the record? He wasn't sure but seemed very certain that the forces of capital would do something bad to the judges if their names were to be made public.
He added that another downside of judges making themselves known would be that they might use their position to get free CDs.
There is a list, he explained, of new music sent out to all the judges every year, based on what's been played on the Mike Harding Show (which is also produced by Smooth Operations). I mentioned a comment that was posted under yesterday's blog, from Marjory Carlisle, about two friends of hers who are judges for the folk awards but who, as far as Marjory could see, don't seem to get out and about much. "If they listen to the Mike Harding Show they will hear most things," he said. Then he changed his mind, saying within seconds that "the Mike Harding Show scratches the surface of the folk scene". He also explained that in order to have one's position as a judge rescinded one has to have not filled in the form the previous year.
Discussing the extent to which the relationships between the judges and the nominees are transparent, he emphasised the form that has to be signed every year by the judges, saying that they will not vote for musicians with whom they have a working relationship. But wouldn't it be better, I asked, if the judges - perhaps a different group of people less well-connected in the folk scene - could simply vote for the best contenders?
"I used to think that," he said. "But I was persuaded that I was wrong," adding that this was related to BBC compliance.
In terms of how one is to make a name for oneself on the folk scene, he says that he started out on the folk club circuit when he was 19 and thought it should probably still be done the same way. "I just went around all of these clubs. It's up to a you to get to know all the folk journalists but the first job of a young band is to get themselves a promoter." He named Alan Bearman and Adastra as possibles, adding that "there's one in Scotland".
He also said that he doubted that a young band was entitled to consideration on its merits until it has paid its dues. "If a band is just starting out do you think they are seriously eligible for a folk award?" he asked. Not unless they're really good, I replied. But it would also be good if the structure of the industry and its marketing were transparent enough for them to be able to make their way. Especially since the internet has turned the music industry on its head.
We returned to the idea that only someone wealthy would be able to lobby 170 people, as if it would be expensive. I thought (a) he may not have heard of burning CDs or sound cloud and (b) if your career is at stake you invest in it. This may be a thought that only someone who's had to pay back student loans would take seriously though.
I asked whether he'd heard of a terrific live folk band called The Destroyers. "Why haven't they sent us their album?" he asked. I was really quite surprised. "Perhaps they didn't know who to send it to?" I offered.
They may have done, as far as I know, but they play mainly in cities - not folk clubs - and there is no sign of any kind of management on their website, so they may not be on his radar even though they've been around for five years.
Earlier in the day I'd been sent a link to this page on the BBC website relating to compliance when running BBC awards ceremonies. It makes interesting reading, especially the parts about transparency (near the top) and, section three, about the judging: "The judging system should normally be clearly explained to the audience and must be explained to entrants via on-air/online announcement and the terms and conditions."
There is also a mention of a senior editorial figure who is responsible for making sure that these rules are applied. In the case of the BBC Radio two Folk Awards, this is Fergus Dudley.
If you double click on that it should become legible. I heard from John Leonard first, who said he'd heard from Dudley that I'd been in touch with him too. So I tried again.
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I was especially interested in all this as I recently discovered that a good friend is a judge for them and asked him to do an interview on the subject.
While being generally helpful, my friend's main concern was that he was under the impression that he wasn't supposed to tell anyone that he was one of the judges, having signed a piece of paper seven or eight years ago when first invited to take part, agreeing not to nominate anyone with whom he has a business relationship and also not - he thought - to broadcast the fact that he's on the panel.
"I think there are somewhere between 150 and 180 of us from all over the music business: PRs, festival organisers, that kind of thing," he said, once we'd agreed that I wouldn't use his name.
"I think I probably know about 100 of them. If you go to the folk awards and look around you can make an educated guess about who they are. There are two levels: the general level and the people who are behind the major awards like the lifetime achievement award. That's up to the company - Smooth Operations", which is contracted by the BBC to produce some radio shows, including Mike Harding's, as well as the folk awards.
"I get a form asking me to nominate up to three artists in each category, from which the company takes the four most nominated for the shortlist. Then we get to vote again for the winner.
"In terms of how I make my nominations, I just keep my ears open. I buy a load of stuff and I get a load of stuff given to me during the course of the year. I suppose the thing the judges have in common is that we're in a position to find out what's out there by going to festivals and listening to music in general. In some ways I wish the list of judges was public because it might save me some of the money I spend buying CDs.
"I think there are probably a lot of women on the panel because those are the people who work in the industry. And as with any sort of award you are going to get a lot of griping by people whose taste doesn't match the judges'. Folkies have a great sense of ownership over the scene."
I wondered why my friend was not supposed to let on about being a judge? I'd think that must be counterproductive, since it makes it much harder for musicians with no real knowledge of the folk scene to get their stuff heard by people with influence. And this in turn would create a bit of a ghetto-ish vibe.
The sort of vibe that, for instance, might lead you to wonder when you compared the list of nominees with the list of this man's clients, whether there was some kind of a stitch up going on? By my reckoning there's about a 50 per cent correlation between those two lists (though interestingly it's the newcomers and the best live act nominees - the two sections with the least opportunity for middle-man input - that most noticeably buck the trend).
In a small scene there are several possible explanations for this, since causation could go either way. By this I mean that it's possible Alan Bearman is such an amazing and powerful agent that he is most folk musicians' first choice. Or that it's such a small scene that he's the only agent some folkies have heard of when they're looking around for representation. Weirdly, though, in the three or four years since I've been writing about folk I don't think I've ever met or heard from him.
So I asked Mike Harding - the BBC's best known folk DJ and the presenter of the awards - why the names of the judges are secret? And, um, he said that they aren't. In fact, he suggested that I get in touch with BBC compliance department to get hold of the list.
It was the work of a minute to get through to Julian Grundy in compliance, who was helpfulness itself and pointed me back to Smooth Operations, who are responsible for the running of the awards. I went through to a Viv Atkinson there, who told me that Kellie While was my woman.
I've lopped the bottom off this email because it had her mobile phone number on it.
Things went a bit quiet for a day or so and in the mean time I went off to Salisbury to interview Richard Shindell. Then...
In case you can't read that last one (I can't), it says
Hi Kellie, Some points about the status quo. (1) If you think the judges aren't susceptible to the fact that the bigger record companies get their stuff circulated better than smaller ones (or artists with no label), I think you are mistaken. They are exactly as susceptible as everyone else. By not printing their names you make it impossible for unsigned artists and smaller bands with little marketing and PR to attract their attention at all because no one knows who they are. A list would mean they would know where to send their stuff. This keeps the playing field as uneven as it always was. I would argue more so, because big labels aren't signing anyone much these days, they're all in such trouble. The internet has flattened the market place, giving an advantage to those signed to small labels known to be folky already. This creates the cabal we've been talking about. (2) On the other hand, if the BBC's position is that the judges are susceptible to this kind of lobbying, I hope it wouldn't be impolite to suggest that it might consider choosing its judges more carefully. (3) Secrecy is inherently wrong. It makes the judges feel as if they've "made it" but it's not appropriate in the present political climate (see my earlier point about MPs and journalists), let alone in a democratic country. Let alone for some folk awards run in association with the BBC, which is partly funded by the taxpayer. (4) You can't argue that the internet has made everything available to everyone in the folk world. I've never come across a group of people less plugged in to the internet. Many of the top bands and artists aren't on Twitter, many of the PRs don't know how it works, and there's someone involved in managing both Bellowhead and Seth Lakeman who doesn't even have his phone number on his website! (5) There is such secrecy surrounding the folk awards that I know a judge who is convinced that he is supposed to be keeping his identity a secret - even though you say there is no such clause in the contract! I think it's the BBC Folk Awards's job to draw attention to the best of British folk, which means throwing itself open to all comers. I can see that you're giving it some thought but isn't it time the awards made some concessions to the 21st century? It might also have the knock-on effect of making the outcome of the awards less predictable and making the entire scene more interesting to non-folkies. Surely the point of it is to market folk, not preach to the converted? Thanks Emma
I've since put in a couple of calls asking whose decision it is not to publish the list of judges, as in "we have discussed this issue at great length", but after three days have heard nothing. I suppose my last email was a bit ranty.
If I hear anything from Smooth Operations I'll let you know.
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Richard Shindell is in the UK supporting Show of Hands for three weeks. They kicked off on Tuesday in Salisbury and I found myself pushing through the glass doors of the City Hall, where I was greeted in the rather odd-smelling foyer by Shindell, who was concerned about the sound-check.
I first heard his music over ten years ago while staying in the tall, grey stone Edinburgh home of a retired admiral from the British navy and his wife. The admiral played it over breakfast - he was probably the poshest folky I've ever met - and he had great taste in music. "I did a session on a Scottish radio station in 1998. He probably heard that," mused Shindell.
The two things that you always read about this American singer/songwriter are (1) that he lives in Argentina with his family and (2) he spent time living in a Zen Buddhist monastery and then a seminary in Manhattan, making him one of life's questing souls. His songs are illustrious thumbnail sketches, historical snapshots populated by vivid characters with serious internal lives, and wry, sometimes hilarious commentary on relationships - in one case, with a donkey called Clara. His live album, Courier, which I first heard over toast thirteen years ago, remains top of my personal pops: something I tried to avoid embarrassing him by saying but didn't entirely succeed with.
However, I asked him some stuff too. For instance, why Zen Buddhism? Was it just a phase he went through? "I still consider myself to be a Buddhist, though I was brought up Episcopalian," he said, making a conversational excursion to explain the origins of the Episcopalian church in the USwhen I looked a bit blank.
"I moved away from Christianity and went to the Buddhist monastery in upstate New York after graduating from college. My introduction to it was that I'd been taken there on a weekend trip by a professor of religion and it was a very powerful experience. But because of the way I was raised I still had a soft spot for my original faith - hence the return to the seminary later.
"There'd been many good things about the church. For instance, I learnt to sing there and in particular I learnt to sing harmony: I enjoyed that part of it. But from an intellectual point of view I moved away. We are not raising our children as Christians - we're raising them in an a-religious household.
"Sometimes, though, I wish that my children could have some of the experiences of being in church that were worthwhile. By that I mean the community of people gathering every Sunday, everyone facing in the same direction, praying to something they don't understand."
Very Zen...
He seemed surprised to be asked whether he'd known any other Buddhists at the time he made the change and had to think about it for a while before admitting that, no, he didn't think he had - which seems bold. "But I studied religion in college and before I was 18 I was reading DT Suzuki and Alan Watts. Then I studied philosophy - Thomas Merton, who wrote a book called Zen and the Birds of Appetite - and came to appreciate the practice of meditating, of trying to stop the inner chatter and the ego that comes with it."
The form of Buddhism he gravitated towards was Soto, which he described as "a little bit more fuzzy" than the more regimented Rinzai school "which is where the bad-assed Zen Buddhists go". But what the Zen and Episcopalian parts of his life have shared is a liberality that he described as "ecumenical".
He has a serious way with words.
So how's Argentina doing these days? I read a really good book by an FT journalist called Jimmy Burns about the Falklands War from an Argentine perspective and got an inkling of the battering it's had. Shindell lives there because it's where his wife's from.
"Argentina's better than it was ten years ago," he nodded, "...in as far as the economy's recovered in some ways from the debacle of 2001, when there was a kind of economic landslide.
"It's interesting. What happened was analogous to what's happening in Greece right now, because one of the things that provoked the trouble was that they had an economic system in place in which one peso was worth one dollar and the two currencies didn't float.
"Pegging the peso to the dollar had the effect of making anything you produced in Argentina very expensive to export. The people who had money had incredible purchasing power as a result - it is known now as the era of 'deme dos' or 'give me two' because they had dollars to spend, loads of them. But it had a horrible effect on internal pricing.
"It was unsustainable and when the currencies were finally unpegged the peso went from being worth one dollar to only twenty five cents. Then the mudslide happened.
"Before that everybody was making money in pesos. But every time you bought something big you'd do it in dollars. Then all of a sudden you were making a quarter of what you'd been making before, but the mortgage was still in dollars - everyone was going to lose their houses.
"So what happened was that the government decided to denominate all of these loans in pesos... " which helped home-owning Argentinians. But Shindell makes his living, on the whole, by touring the States - which obviously earns him dollars. "It was incredible for us because in one day our mortgage was cut to a quarter of its previous value and we were able to pay it off!"
It is often said that fortune favours the brave: in this instance, those brave enough to move to a foreign country.
Indeed, an abiding impression of Shindell is that he's a magnet for good fortune - "I've not had to strive very hard" he said at one point, though that probably says more about his attitude to work than anything else - whose luck is generated partly by a talent that draws people to him. For instance, when a week's worth of UK tour was cancelled last year he found himself seeking a bolt hole and was introduced to Steve Knightley, of Show of Hands. Knightley knew his work and invited him to Devon for the week, which is how they became friends.
I was trying to avoid asking him questions about his songs, as it was clear from reading previous interviews that he doesn't much appreciate scrutiny of his motives. I think this is fair enough: what's the point of going to all the trouble of crafting something beautiful only to have some idiot come along, wanting to dismantle it in public? For similar reasons I'm not often moved to try and describe music in words: what's the point when you can insert a clip from YouTube?
However, he wrote a gripping song about a child soldier in the Confederate army - called Arrowhead (below) - that usually makes me cry when I hear it.
"I'm sorry," he said, unnecessarily, before sitting forward in his seat as if something important had occurred to him. "I'm afraid I have some bad news about that song though."
Oh?
"Have you heard of GE Smith? He plays with Bob Dylan's band? He's done a version of it, but he wrote an extra verse for the end. And he has a rather acute sense of military justice."
No! He didn't!
"Yes. I'm afraid he killed the boy. His final verse has my underage Confederate deserter sitting on a white horse with a noose around his neck before someone slaps the horse from behind."
I am oddly devastated by this, as I've spent a great deal of time empathising not only with the child in the song - "for god's sake, someone give that kid a gun!" - but also with his mother, to whom he's speaking in the lyric.
"I'm all in favour of the folk process... It's all fair. But I wrote to GE Smith, and asked him 'What were you thinking?' And he wrote back 'I just thought that boy had to die'." Shindell said this in a deep drawl, as if Smith were speaking through him.
He let this thought percolate for a while.
"So I sang it that way myself just once, to see how it felt. But it felt wrong... I'm happy that Smith liked the song deeply enough to get into the nuts and bolts of it though."
His songs have been covered by Joan Baez, for whom he wrote the heartbreaking Reunion Hill, and this was also recently reworked by Fairport Convention. I asked whether he was thinking of collaborating on anything with Show of Hands while he's here and he explained that he's in the middle of writing a song over the internet with Mary Gauthier, with whom he toured earlier in the year. It has a working title of Black Eyed Susan's Facing Back. "I've always been very insecure about working with other people, in case they come up with loads of ideas and I have nothing. This is my first time."
But the question also provoked a sudden rush of enthusiasm for The Cecil Sharp Project, which Knightley had apparently been playing him in the car on the way to the venue. This may have been by way of a consolation of some kind, as an attempt by Knightley to impress him with an excursion to a Knights Templar-related church went awry when it turned out to be shut.
"I'm not a very committed tourist - especially when I'm supposed to be working. I get into a rut of going from gig to gig and the surroundings become secondary. I had a day off in Florence, Italy, in early January 2009 and the strangest thing happened..." he said, as if he'd learnt his lesson with this taking-the-day-off thing.
"I decided to spend the day walking and as I set off in the morning I got 50 yards up this alley with a steep incline, heading for the hills, and found it barred by police tape. Ahead there was a tarpaulin with something lumpy underneath it and a foot sticking out. Someone had fallen down dead in that alley and I had to go around." That'll teach him.
Although, in fact, he's about to take a year off. "I'll stay in Argentina for most of it, study Spanish and Spanish guitar in a more deliberate way and attempt to challenge myself creatively. The reason, though, is that I have two teenagers and I feel like I need to be more on the case. They're getting older and aren't going to be in the house for that much longer."
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When Jim Causley left Mawkin:Causley last year, he probably didn't expect that his decision would lead David Delarre - whose Twitter handle is Folk Boy (second from right, below) - to run away to sea, inadvertently placing his virtue in mortal danger.
"We split up in August and had to cancel a tour that was due to start in October. The money from that would have seen me through to the spring... but I had an overdraft and credit card debts and I was offered this three and a half month gig on a cruise ship." He was telling me this over the telephone, a few weeks after it was over and he'd had time to recover his land-legs.
Well how was it? He laughed, perhaps a little too jovially. "Oh. You know. It was an eye-opener."
Er. Righty-o. How d'you mean? "Well, it was a tiny, tiny little boat, full of the uber rich. I think they'd paid between $2,500 and $25,000 each to be there for a week: the difference was all about what kind of cabin you wanted and how much 'free' champagne you thought you could drink. And it was just mental."
At this point I should say that I'm not going to mention the name of the cruise line, as I got the impression he hadn't quite decided whether he'd like to work for it again...
"I mean," he went on. "I'm a working class boy without a penny to my name and it was a real insight into how the ten per cent live. I was doing four shows a week of flamenco guitar to start off with and I had a few other duties: I was the assistant entertainment manager. The money was good but they worked us so hard.
"The policy of the company was 'social hosting', which means that it's your job to talk to people, make them feel comfortable and try and get them to invite you to dinner. I was also encouraged to host dinners for up to ten people at a time. You got free booze and there was six star food from a celebrity chef. But on the other hand, I got touched up by grannies quite a lot."
Good grief. I'm shocked, I said, trying to keep a straight face. "It wasn't cool. There was this one woman who was about 77, which is older than my granny. And she asked for a private concert in her room." Uh-oh. "And I had to because there was no such word as no, when it came to the guests.
"So I turned up to do my gig and when I walked in she just grabbed my a*** and hugged me and said 'Thank you, thank you for coming.' And then when I finished the gig and she said 'Come and sit down'. And then she fed me oysters and spent ten minutes grabbing my thighs. It was terrifying." And it was clear from the tone of his voice that he was undergoing some kind of post-traumatic experience.
"You get fired if you sleep with them. But you're supposed to make them feel as if they are the most special thing ever. It's really, unbelievably frightening."
Still, I expect you got the hang of it eventually and at least you got to see the Med a bit? "Yes, I've been in Venice sixteen times. It's gorgeous. We went up and down the Adriatic from the east coast of Italy and took in Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro. But I never got tired of Venice. It's absolutely amazing."
And has it been hard coming back to normality? "The sleeping style was hard to adjust back to because I got used to being in a tiny little cabin with some rocking - it was quite a small boat. So I couldn't sleep for about a week. And the quantity of alcohol was a bit intense on board. I mean, it was like being at a constant party for three and a half months, except you're not really a part of it because you're paid to be there. And everyone's pissed the whole time."
So what happened with Mawkin:Causley? "Well, we didn't want Jim to leave but he did. Our melodeon player, Goldsmith, announced in an email that he wanted to leave, because he had a girlfriend and wanted a more normal life. He's doing painting and decorating now. And then within two weeks of Jim reading the email he decided that he was going too.
"There had been a few alcohol-related problems. But we thought that on the whole it really worked. We're not looking for another singer because Jim might want to come back at some point and we thought that if we found someone else it might discourage him.
"So I've been doing singing lessons and I'm really enjoying that and getting into it a bit more. And then we're releasing a new record and going on tour next April. It's mainly an instrumental album but there are three songs on it too. It looks like I'll be doing two of them and we've got our fingers crossed that a couple of other people who've said they might be interested will join us as guest vocalists. They're both well known but I don't want them to read about it before they've definitely agreed."
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