The first Frome folk festival happened at the weekend and was enlivened by - among many other things - some curious stories about dysfunctional relationships between musicians and their instruments.
First there was Tom Kitching, of Pilgrim's Way and Albireo, who is reputed to own the loudest fiddle in the world. "It was made by a fellow called Colin Cross and has more wood in it to vibrate than usual," he told me. "Mainly he takes commissions from classical musicians but mine is a classical reject because it stood out too much.
"The bloke who had it struggled to keep it in check because if you're an orchestral player you want to be on the same kind of noise levels as everyone else and this is a big, brash beast. Luckily I believe that you should play a fiddle in the same way that you would drive a railway spike." To amplify his meaning he mimed bringing an enormous mallet smashing down on a something with an impressive overarm action.
"Also, I believe you should judge a fiddler in the same way that they score Robot Wars: using style, control, damage and aggression as your criteria. I haven't named the fiddle though. That would be wrong, in the same way that renaming body parts is just wrong. Having said that, my car's called Trebevor. Like 'Trevor' but with an extra BE. The, um, the registration begins TREB." Oddly after the alacrity of the spike-driving mime, he looked a bit embarrassed explaining this.
Then Brendan Powers and Tim Edey played a set in the Cheese and Grain hall on Sunday morning - which looked lovely decked out in bunting. And Edey mentioned that his guitar had once exploded. I wasn't sure whether I'd heard that correctly.
"Yes, really. It exploded,"he confirmed later, unfolding a little morality tale about the dangers of not being kind to the things that you love. "I was in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia and I'd abused the guitar quite badly over the years - it was my old, nylon string job. There was an amazing guitarist called JP Cormier there and I was playing a set of bluegrass reels. Suddenly the area below the bridge burst outwards and part of it embedded itself in my arm. It made me bleed! JP just looked at me and said 'Man. Your guitar exploded'."
And finally, lest one might wrongly come to believe that only men are capable of having abusive relationships with inanimate objects, it turned out that Miranda Sykes - one third of Show of Hands - was once indirectly responsible for a piano keyboard being superglued shut.
"I'd gone home for Christmas and thought I'd have a bit of a play on the piano in the front room," she explained as she launched her new album on Sunday afternoon. "I thought I'd have a go at Walking in the air, since it was that time of year. But the lid wouldn't open. At first I thought it must be locked. So I asked mum and dad if they had the key and they said it wasn't locked. When I had a closer look I realised that someone had gone to all the trouble of supergluing the thing shut. No one would own up at the time, it was all very curious. And then just recently - many years later - the subject came up again and my little sister just said 'Oh yeah. That was me'. It turns out she really doesn't like Walking in the air."
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Belinda O'Hooley and Heidi Tidow's new album, called The Fragile, is a sweet and multi-textured thing. Their roots are in folk but they write (nearly) all their own songs and it's poignant, stirring, sentimental, existential stuff with tumbling fiddles and crystalline harmonies that remind me a little of The Indigo Girls.
I'd meant to write about their previous album, Silent June, which was similarly intriguing, but made the scatterbrained mistake of leaving my copy in the CD player when I went round to someone's house and then didn't see it again for several months, by which time the moment had kind of passed...
I've apologised to them but feel I should do it again... So, um, sorry.
Anyhow, the new album cover's got a distinctive picture of a bird on it with a little old lady clinging to its back. Age, loss and the elderly crop up over and over again as subject matter. "The picture is a representation of Heidi's German grandmother," O'Hooley said over the telephone from Huddersfield, where they live. "There's a song on the album called Mein Deern which is about her final hours on this Earth.
"She had ambitions to be a performer and played the accordian. But she was a war nurse and ended up having a family instead. The bird represents Heidi: she's carried her grandmother on her dreams. Also I think Heidi looks a bit like a bird..."
Tidow was in the room at the Huddersfield end of this conversation and I got the impression that some of what was being said was as much for her benefit as mine.
"The artwork is by a lady called Kate Aughey, who has a blogfor her work. We were on tour with Chumbawumba when we first saw it in Portsmouth - and I think she's entered the work she did for us for the V&A illustration awards. We sent her the lyrics and the themes of the songs and she came up with all these ideas. She's really inspiring but not all that well known - I think we want to keep her for ourselves.
"Being elderly is definitely a theme, though. Heidi and I seem to be obsessed. I work with the elderly so I meet them more than I do any other group of people. I do musical reminiscences and visit lots of homes with my Bontempi organ. It's got a built-in drum machine so it makes everything sound a bit like Latin American dance tunes from the 1940s. South of the border, down Mexico way... Also I was very attached to my grandmother and Heidi was close to all her grandparents."
I asked O'Hooley about a song on the CD called A Daytrip which is about a trip to the coast for a lady called Vera and her husband, Albert, who prefers cheese and pickle sandwiches to ham, because ham involves a financial sacrifice and "he wasn't born to moan". This tickled me.
"That song came from some time we spent with Nic Jones and his wife, Julia. He said that his favourite songs were existentialist things that don't say much but just tell you something. It inspired us to write a song about something which is a bit everyday.
"Then we were talking to Martin Carthy one day and having a joke that I used to live in a place called Slaithwaite - which is pronounced 'Sla-wit' - and he reminded me of something I'd forgotten, which was that some Yorkshire people, when they they've liked something say 'It were real". Heidi's family says it all the time. So that's what Vera says about her daytrip at the end."
There's something considerably more lusty and provocative in the tale of Gentleman Jack, or Jack the Lass, about Anne Lister (1791-1840), diarist, Halifax landowner and lothario, who left detailed lists of her sexual conquests in a code that was subsequently broken, much to the distress of husbands and boyfriends for many miles in every direction.
O'Hooley and Tidow met six years ago on the folk scene. "First of all she stalked me," says O'Hooley, who at 40 is nine years older than Tidow (right)."Then I stalked her back again. She came to one of my gigs and I didn't know she was there. Then she emailed me to let me know that she'd liked the concert and invited me to one of hers. Then we just gripped each other.
"We were civilly partnered a couple of years ago in the registry office at Whitby. It was a quiet affair - we just invited our families - and then we had a reception at the Magpie cafe with fish and chips and champagne. It were brilliant."
Looking around online before I spoke to them I'd found a recent news story describing an attack that O'Hooley suffered in a bar. "Yes," she said, sounding a bit grim. "It's one of many times it's happened to both of us. People generally don't like to talk about homophobic incidents - they just want to forget about them and get on with their evening. But we've both been verbally abused more times than we can remember, usually by groups of men.
"This was the first time I've actually been hit, though, which is why I reported it to the police. They had CCTV in the bar but they didn't catch the incident on it. And even though we were with another couple who witnessed the whole thing - we'd all recognise my attacker if we saw him again - it doesn't look as if it will result in a prosecution.
"I must say, though, it was the first time I'd ever been in a police station and even though you often hear that people have a hard time in them, I was very impressed. The police woman was very sympathetic and actually seemed to get quite upset when I told her what had happened. She said that if we saw the man again we should get in touch."
The story appeared online because the two of them are involved in something called The L Project - "L" for lesbian - which launches a single on Saturday (Feb 11). Here's an explanatory video.
"There's a song being released on Saturday called It does get better, in order to raise money for a charity called Diversity Role Models. The charity goes into schools and discusses some issues surrounding homosexuality and homophobia with teenagers," O'Hooley explained
On a more cheerful note, she said that her favourite song on the the album is Calling Me. "Heidi sings it, Andy Cutting plays on it and it's about Heidi's yearning to have a child. We'd love to do that but there's, er... there's an intrinsic problem. We're considering the options and we talk about it all the time. We're really hoping to sort something out."
She joked that the only thing that could come between them were "if Fay Hield turned out to be gay".
That would be Dr Fay Hield, I think you'll find...
* O'Hooley and Tidow start their 40 date tour, which includes the Cambridge and Warwick festivals, on Saturday in Taunton.
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I've had an email from the Information Commissioner about my request that the names of the judges of the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards be revealed, the request that the BBC's poorly named Freedom of Information office had already denied.
If you recall, the reason why the folk awards was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the BBC said, was because obligations under it vanish if the thing under scrutiny can be defined as art, journalism or literature. So the folk awards qualified as either art, journalism or literature. The BBC was a little hazy about which.
On the other hand, there was nothing much that was hazy about the eight page letter from the Information Commissioner, which was full of legal twists and turns: lots of people have challenged the way the FoI Act works in the last five years. But what it boiled down to to in the end was that the law defines the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards as - drum roll - journalism.
Specifically...
... the "second limb of the definition" being journalism.
Just think about that for a moment.
John Leonard's stated reasons for "employing judges anonymously" were that (1) they might get free CDs and (2) too many musicians would try and get in touch with the 150 or so judges (for what else is "lobbying" in the context of the folk awards but playing someone your music? There are no large record companies to offer financial inducements or lavish freebies, whatever Leonard might like to suggest) and that this would place undue pressure on them.
Both of these reasons are ultimately about concealing information. Firstly the names of the judges are concealed so that, secondly, music will be concealed from the judges.
I ask you: what does this have in common with journalism? However hostile one might feel to individual journalists or media outlets, journalism in a democratic society is not about concealment. It is about the opposite.
Something is very wrong here, for the BBC and the Information Commissioner to have arrived at a point where they are defending the concealment of information on the grounds of journalism.
I refer you to the concept of doublethink from George Orwell's novel 1984.
Sorry. Couldn't resist that :-) Some points.
(1) This state of affairs may be partly due to a confusion between journalism and the relatively new concept of "content", which is something else entirely.
(2) Other people will ask the same question of the BBC and the Information Commissioner in the future - in precisely the same way that I have not been the first to take it to them myself. (And thank you, by the way, to the person - let's call you Marjory - who got in touch to say that they'd already trodden this path, and accurately predicted the outcome so far. There may have been others - the data protection act prevents us from knowing.) Anyone reading this blog can pursue the matter in the same way I have and I know that some have considered it. This is because the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards is produced using public money and we have a right to know how it is spent. This money, incidentally, goes into the pockets of John Leonard and all employed by UBC Media Group, lest we forget. Our money.
(3)UBC Media Group is listed on the stock marketand check out the correlation between the stories running about the company on this blog and the drop in share price on this graph. Is that a coincidence? It's unlikely, since the story was picked up by Roy Greenslade, whose media column in The Guardian is read by analysts. It's lost more than 20 per cent of its share price since the beginning of December.
(4) I wonder whether Sony was aware of UBC Media Group's approach to preferment when it chose to bestow the Sony Awards on Smooth Operations? Was its decision "in spite of" or "because of"? I think I may ask.
(5) Unless the process of judging the folk awards ceremony is seen to be honest John Leonard, the BBC, Sony, Uncle Tom Cobbly and all might as well give away the awards within their gift to the musicians, agents and PR people who've made them most tempting offer. Because we don't currently know any different.
And yet despite all this, the Information Commissioner has left a chink of light. I asked why the folk awards are different, as far as the BBC was concerned, to the their Sports Personality of the Year award, which not only publishes the provenance of the judges but for whom they voted. And this was the Information Commissioner's reply
So come on the BBC, John Leonard, Smooth Operations and the board of UBC Media Group. Do us the courtesy.
* If you'd like to read this saga from the beginning you could starthere.
Happy belated new year! Apologies for the slight gap in the service but I've been trying to start some new projects while simultaneously fighting the urge to hibernate. However, today is the 365th day of the Glamour Cave blog and - 50,000 hits in - I've decided to mark the occasion by drawing attention to some music I really like.
First up is an album called Northern Cross by Albireo, which contains two people associated with Pilgrim's Way: fiddle player Tom Kitching and Peter Crowther, who plays bass with them occasionally. Albireo has been around for a decade and is a superior kind of dance band - though Northern Cross appears to be their first album. You can have a listen to some of it here.
Things I like about this album include the names of it and the band, partly because they enhance a theory I'm incubating about geekiness. Originally they met to rehearse at a pub called The Swan with Two Necks, in Stockport, and there is a constellation called Cygnus, or "the swan" - also known as the Northern Cross - which has a bright binary star called Albireo on its beak. This pleases me. (I'm also pretty sure from goings-on on Twitter that there's another band called Albireo in Japan, although Japanese isn't my best language.)
Pure geekery aside, the music is described on the website as being "from three continents and four centuries". It has a gemütlich quality that conjures a better future and specifically one in which I would be playing the album in an environment that has more and better homely qualities than The Glamour Cave. Perhaps it just produces optimism. (I should explain, as well as being the name of this blog, "The Glamour Cave" is also the partly ironic name of my home in Bethnal Green, where I've been since 1997. So although I like to moan about it occasionally I really have no one to blame but myself if it's not up to scratch. In its defence the place has some structural limitations and I rent it. A lot of people love it. My mother, however, really doesn't and wishes I lived somewhere with central heating.)
Northern Cross has a sense of urgency throughout that's to do with the band's ceilidh background and blends traditional instrumentation with a freshness of arrangement that makes me think of one of those houses on Grand Designs with thatch on the roof but a knocked-through interior and modern furniture. Best of both worlds. I can imagine playing it in the car, or in the background eating dinner with friends. It just calms the brainwaves and produces cheerfulness and although I've only been listening to it for a couple of months it feels like I've known Albireo for longer.
It was produced at Talking Cat by Jon Loomes and Forbes Legato. Nuff said :-)
The EP's cover is black and white and looks, rather archly, like something from the 1970s folk revival.
It kicks off with a flourish that belongs in a spaghetti western, followed up by an opening line that goes Twas in the year of 1620 that the first Earl of Berk-shire... Which is to say that it manages in an admirably short span to produce the exposition: we're a folk outfit, mainly. And we've got a sense of humour.
They go on to prove it by doing four tracks that are all quite different from each other, including a stunning version of Teardrop by Massive Attack and a pounding Dashing White Sergeant that suggests serious crowd-pleasing potential at festivals. Greg McDonald has an enjoyably distinctive voice that seems geared for story-telling, Phil Beer and Steve Knightley will be producing their forthcoming album and I hope to see them live in 2012.
The third outfit to which I would like to draw your attention is Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, who I saw for the first time at the first Bethnal Green folk day last summer. Here's a taste.
Ben had been in touch on Twitter about several other, unrelated things, so it was with a slight sense of disorientation that I realised how flipping good these two are - as well as how young. I took away a copy of their album, which is called One Light is Gone, only to have it swiped by a friend, which tells you everything you need to know about it really.
Josienne has a faithful and growing band of online admirers already. There's a clarity to her voice that might be connected to the fact that she apparently doesn't touch alcohol. But whether it is or not, the two of them have an immense store of talent which is mainly devoted at the moment to reflective original songs and cover versions. Here they are doing a Gillian Welch cover in someone's front room.
I hope that convinces you that they deserve a wider audience.
Anyway... to change the subject slightly. The other thing I've been paying a lot of attention to since the new year is not folk. I now have my own copy of the documentary Some Kind of Monster by Metallica, which has made a big impression on me. OK. It's about a hard rock band and therefore will not be completely to the taste of everyone who reads this blog. But it's also a brilliant documentary about a band attempting to resolve some internal difficulties.
Hands up. I've got a thing for Lars Ulrich: drummer, bi-lingual viking and metal warlord. But if you haven't seen it and you get a chance to, you should. Despite having serious Spinal Tap potential - because superficially what's not funny about the biggest heavy metal band on the planet collectively submitting to psychotherapy - it somehow ends up being the Anti Spinal Tap and you don't even have to like their music for it to work its astonishing charm.
I hate this word when it's not used right. But it's genuinely awesome.
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Standing outside St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City last week, the crowd seemed a bit unusual - or rather there was a greater concentration of unusual-ness in one place than is strictly normal. There was a man with a plait in his beard, another wearing a fur coat. There were Goth girls and girls in corsetry-as-daywear. Some fellas wore one-of-a-kind hats, others had dyed eyebrows. Many of the women had unusually intensely coloured hair. They had a quality that made me imagine a Neil Gaiman book-signing, although it took a while to figure out why. I felt faintly nervous, enjoyed the spectacle, listened to the conversation going on around me. Then I relaxed. This crowd I recognised: the geeks were out and they were out in force for The Mediaeval Baebes.
I reckon that if there had been time to ask, a straw poll of audience members would have revealed an above-average number of smart phones, days spent working with technology or applying it creatively, people with hobbies about which they were passionate and a higher-than-usual collective IQ.
This is a hunch.
For my world is increasingly populated by geeks, which is something welcome. The same dynamic that means that single women acquire gay friends because of the bond of childlessness, leads me as I get older increasingly to enjoy sincere enthusiasts (aka geeks) and to appreciate the side-effects of enthusiasm in any given area of life, which include success and fun. And this is despite having originally been encouraged by a society that celebrates effortless superiority to believe that there was something suspicious about enthusiasm.
These days I see geekdom as a cast of mind involving intelligence and a lack of excitement about the mainstream - but beyond that it takes many forms. (My companion at the Christmas Mediaeval Baebes gig - the last of their 2011 tour - pointed out that a straightforward early music crowd looks very similar, though perhaps a bit less S&M-y.) The unifying characteristics of geekdom might be described as a lack of inhibition about liking the things that one likes - gaming, role-playing, perhaps one's job or musical pursuits, the period of history (or whatever) you like to fantasise about, politics - and a level of concentration on and knowledge about this stuff that can easily tip over into creativity, obsession or both. I've sometimes wondered whether there is an area of the autism spectrum that might account for it - a point at which empathy is mainly restricted to those with whom you share your enthusiasms - but between Christmas and New Year is a bad time to try and get hold of the professionals who'd be able to discuss that theory knowledgeably. Maybe later...
I am also developing a theory that geeks, in fact, rule the world.
Anyway. Here is a picture of the band that brought together that audience and this train of thought.
Although, to be honest this is not exactly the band that I saw last week. I believe someone's joined the group since the pic was taken and since The Mediaeval Baebes started between 15 and 20 years ago there have, according to Wikipedia, been 27 members in total, swapping in and out. What I like about this image, though, is the fact that it's air-brushed, as if the band exists in theory - perhaps inside a fantasy computer game or a novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley - as well as in reality, as six or seven people with independent, relatively normal lives.
The gig started with Bev, decked out as a vestal virgin with flowers in her hair, walking down the aisle of the beautiful church - St Sepulchre is the musicians' church in the City in the same way that St Bride's is the journalists' church - which was decorated for Christmas, carrying her fiddle and singing She Moved Through the Fair. She was eventually joined by six other maidens - though I use the term advisedly - with long hair and costumes fastened under the bust a la popular representations of Morgan Le Fay. And though it never got that folky again the scene was set for a certain level of theatricality.
What followed was a kind of theme park whirl around musical genres - with the emphasis on early music - that was a bit Hammer Horror camp, a bit Robin of Sherwoodand a bit Witches of Eastwick. But retro.Crucially, though, it also managed to pull off the clever trick of becoming its own genre by throwing in a slightly shy wink to soft porn in which every smiling glance between Baebes appeared to be a meaningful glance and every pipe placed between the lips was apparently laden with significance. Tonguing: oh yes. It was knowing entertainment, medieval stylee mediated by Cadfael, Ridley Scott and anyone who ever wrote a song, gave an interview or performed an entertainment about women labelled "witches" for being bewitching (although if witches really existed, as with criminals, surely only those bad at witchcraft would get caught?) It was none the worse for that, just derivative in a highly unusual and therefore enjoyable way.
The American lady in the next seat spent some of the interval expounding on the complexity of the time signatures in which they were singing their songs in Latin and early English - I hadn't recognised any of them, though they were pretty - and telling me how successful The Mediaeval Baebes are at something she described as "RenFair" in the US. This turned out to be a kind of transatlantic battle re-enactment scene ("renaissence fairs") for people who enjoy dressing up and pretending, but don't much like violence. Think Kentwell Hall but with fairies and dodgy accents.
On this occasion, I don't think it was the often a capella music that had packed the church out, although it was delightfully produced and packaged, but the way in which the show appeals to people who like their entertainment reassuringly niche. It made me wonder whether this was the target area at which John Dagnall of Park Records was vaguely aiming when he made Moonshee.
Whereas the first half was all about floaty maidens with circlets, beautiful hair and slender arms picked out attractively by backlighting, the second half briefly became The Middle Eastern Baebes, which reminded me a bit of the incidental music of Gladiator and probably produced a collective belly dancing fantasy in the audience. It then returned to a nice bit of chanting about the circle of life in time to send us out to the pub feeling all winter solstice-y.
I discovered afterwards that there is a Mediaeval Baebes musical all tee'd up and ready to go, which has been put together by a German actor called Micha Bergese, who is probably most famous for playing the dashing werewolf (below, right) in A Company of Wolves.
They're looking for some financial backing, which is proving an uphill struggle at the moment. But there may well be some geeks/enthusiasts out there who'd jump at the opportunity to be involved and I suspect anyway that if the thing were done right it could turn out to be a money-spinner, since musical theatre is - I'm theorising again - geekdom at its broadest.
If you're interested to find out more you could contact the show's producer, Julia Hannan. Otherwise I believe they'll be touring again in the New Year. Get in touch with your inner geek...
* If you enjoyed this post you may also be interested in this, about Dylan Carson, who was Kurt Cobain's best friend.
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There they went a-wassailing. Steeleye Span were, indeed, six at the Barbican on Monday - except when they were joined on stage by John Spiers and Martin Carthy. Dodgy picture alert (Maddy Prior was at the back trying to look inconspicuous during an instrumental and the battery on my camera ran out before I had a chance to take anything with the zoom. Sorry 'bout that.)
They played the whole of Now we are Six, starting with 700 Elves, dedicated Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to Professor Brian Cox because "there's a lot he could learn from this song" and then introduced the "and friends" part of the evening...
At that point things got temporarily a little less festive - though there were three people in the front row wearing tinsel halos who may well have disagreed. The Strawbs sang something with a chorus that repeated "May you rot" over and over again, which seemed a bit bah humbug under the circumstances. They also used a line that I've heard referred to (by Peter Knight at a Gigspanner gig) as the Broughton/Dempsey disclaimer - after Joe Broughton and Kevin Dempsey - offering the audience the opportunity to return their CD by post if they didn't like it "and we'll send you one that we don't like". Ordinarily I find it funny but on this occasion it mainly made me wonder about its provenance. I first heard it from Joe Broughton at an Urban Folk Quartet gig and, sure enough, he laid claim to it later by email, adding that he sometimes had to stop using lines when they became too widely passed around. However he couldn't recall specific examples, as he was "very hungover on an Austrian tour". Prost... I guess jokes are like songs and the folk process also applies.
The second half was great, especially for the delicate The Two Constant Lovers, in beautiful five or six part harmony, with a bathetic intro by Knight describing the lovely woman on the cliff edge looking out to sea as if she were about to leap. "Then in the fourth verse she does."
John Spiers and Martin Carthy joined the band on stage for the Padstow Mayday song recalling, for me from my days as a baby reporter, the controversy that singing that song on any day apart from Mayday causes in the town. John Buckingham of the Padstow museum said, though, that these days they feel benevolent towards the Steeleye version, partly on account of it almost having become a tradition in its own right. "As long as Steeleye Span don't produce an'obby 'oss and start dancing around the stage they'll be safe," he said. Mind you, they like a bit of controversy in Padstow. This is the place, after all, that celebrates Darkie Daywhile often claimingthat its origins lie in a shipwreck involving a slaver on the shore nearby.
Then there was Bedlam Boys - what an odd song that is, lyrically - and The Lark in the Morning beforeCarthy and Spiers trooped off - even though Rick Kemp said it might have been more appropriate for Carthy to have remained as it was hewho'd brought them Cold Haily Windy Night in the first place.
Later on, when Spiers - a good 25 years younger than everyone else on the stage - returned with Carthy for the finale he looked so electrified by being that close to Maddy Prior while she was singing All Around My Hat (followed by a seasonal Gaudete) that he almost forgot to come in.
And that's the thing about Steeleye Span. They've been around for over four decades now and watching them recalls nearly a lifetime of memories for most of their audience: an entire lifetime for the younger members. It's hard to disentangle what's theirs and what's your own. It just ended up feeling like ours and I can't think of anything more apposite at this bittersweet time of year.
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I received a letter from Rachel Hallett in the BBC's Freedom of Information department late on Friday. This attachment came with it (it's in four pieces).
In reply I sent this.
A few minutes later I received this from Rachel Hallett.
So, in essence, the list of the names of the judges is a secret and this is not the first attempt that has been made to retrieve it from the BBC, Smooth Operations and UBC Media. Also someone somewhere believes (1) that the way Smooth Operations organises the awards legally qualifies as "art" and (2) that not releasing the names of the judges serves the best interests of someone.
I would like to know who that is please?
This secrecy does nothing to enhance confidence in either the process or the outcome of the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards. In fact, it does the opposite. It also appears to be the opposite of how the BBC's own rules say an awards ceremony paid for by the licence fee and taxpayers' money should be conducted.
What on earth is going on?
I ask John Leonard at Smooth Operations, Fergus Dudley, whose responsibility it is to make sure that the awards are properly conducted, and the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, whether this is the correct use of the Freedom of Information act?
So far John Leonard has said that releasing the names of the judges may result in the judges wrongly using their positions to get free CDs. To which I ask: how does marketing usually work in his experience? Is he saying that Mike Harding pays for every CD he plays on his Radio Two folk show, which is produced by Smooth Operations? And has no one at Smooth Operations heard of Sound Cloud?
His second point was that releasing the names of the judges would make them subject to lobbying by "big business".
The two companies he went on to mention in this context were Topic and Proper. But nine out of thirteen of last year's winners work for one or the other, so how's that working out?
When I originally asked for a list of the judges of the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards it was because I thought it might make an interesting blog post and that lovers of folk music might be curious to see something from backstage at the most powerful marketing tool on the folk scene at the moment.
However, the intransigence of all concerned is making me wonder whether there may, after all, be more here than meets the eye? It always struck me that there's a lot of moaning about them by people you'd expect to be enthusiastic about a folk fest. And now I begin to understand why...
I would have thought that for the integrity of his awards ceremony John Leonard would like to prove that it's all above board by giving us more clues about how these decisions are made and perhaps opening it up to people who don't know any of the judges personally by publishing their names? This would allow bands who don't have a manager or PR with friends among the folk awards judges - and let's face it, since the judges' identities are a secret, knowing who they are would properly make you an insider - to send a free download to someone who might be interested? The awards would almost certainly become of wider interest as a result.
Releasing the names of the folk awards judges would be doing folk music a service.
I will, of course, submit the request to the information commissioner.
But in the mean time, over to you John Leonard.
* Previous blogs on this subject, with the first one at the top
