Emma Hartley

BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards: bottom of the class

You would think that asking for and receiving the names of the judges of a set of BBC awards would be a straightforward matter. The corporation’s own awards guidelines, available on its website, demand transparency. So it was surprising that when I asked who chose the winners of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, thinking I’d write about them in my music blog, The Glamour Cave, I was told it was a secret.

It was a more unpleasant surprise that a follow-up Freedom of Information request was denied on the grounds that the award ceremony, in the view of the BBC’s FoI department, was protected as ‘journalism’. If an awards ceremony qualified as journalism, I was left wondering, then what could they possibly consider my blog to be? Did I want to know?

What began as idle curiosity became irritation and then anger.

The BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards are broken, this matters and here’s why.

The folk music scene in England and Wales at the beginning of 2013 is this country’s most undervalued cultural asset. To be a folky here, right now is to be jangling the keys to a cultural palace, something quietly demonstrated by the brisk, growing business that folk festivals have been doing for the past decade in the face of collapses elsewhere in the festival sector, more loudly by the clamour of superlative young talent jostling to fill these festival’s stages and also because it is the solution to the problem – musical, cultural and political – of Simon Cowell.

Far from seeing music as a plastic vehicle – a Ka, if you will – designed to have the juggernaut of someone else’s success (Cowell’s) crash into it, your average folk musician is a multi-instrumentalist who intends to make a life of it. And, boy, does it show when you hear them play.

For a better appreciation of this, go to YouTube and check out Bellowhead – who win cross-genre best live band awards the way some bands lose plectrums – Seth Lakeman, Show of Hands, The Unthanks, ahab, Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker, Jamie Smith’s Mabon and any one of a hundred other world-class English and Welsh folk outfits presently plying their trade on these shores.

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