Roughly the same situation here in Newtongrange; both clubs are bigger, but the overlap among the players is minute, me and one other.

Both have surely got to change. The folk club is stuck with a rigid singaround format (I tend to see this in Marxist terms as a spinoff of which hardly anybody under 40 is) and the A&F club only books guest acts with the standard Scottish dance band lineup (and I *know* people want a change from this, since every time I do a spot people come up to me after and say how refreshing it was to listen to a different and lighter kind of sound). Both are offputting for younger people, and both have a far older membership than you'd find in typical Scottish pub sessions.

It would really help if the folk end of the spectrum got over their pathological dread of the accordion and if the A&F clubs woke up to the fact that you can still do Scottish dances to a group with a guitar in it.

I enjoy winding up the (utterly clueless) MC at the A&F club by doing my spot on instruments he can't identify or pronounce the name of (not difficult as he hasn't even got my name right in four years). My next spot is going to be a set of strathspeys on the cumbus and the old fool is going to get both umlauts and the cedilla on the entry slip...

Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music.