Not for our ain folk?

Published on Wednesday 2 December 2009 19:07

WITH the Mercury and the Booker already behind us, the Costa contenders just unveiled, next year's Grammy nominees announced in LA last night and the Oscars hoving into view, we're well into the autumn/winter awards season.

• Lau (and John McCusker) are the only Scots nominated for the Radio 2 folk awards next year. Picture: Complimentary

Not to be outdone nowadays, the folk scene embarked on its own round of gong-giving last weekend, at the 2009 Scots Trad Music Awards, the second to be sponsored and televised by Gaelic channel BBC Alba. A moveable feast staged this time in Dumfries, it was packed out by nearly a thousand musicians, supporters, industry professionals and grassroots fans, confounding scruffy folky stereotypes in their very best bib and tucker.

Last night, too, the acts nominated for the 2010 Radio 2 Folk Awards were announced on the station's weekly flagship folk programme, The Mike Harding Show, ahead of the prize-giving beanfeast in London on 1 February.

With the Radio 2 contest now a decade old, and the Scots Trad Awards having followed in 2003, it seems an apposite moment to assess their usefulness, and the extent to which they've achieved their founding goals.

At the broadest or most basic level, any set of awards worth its salt should get people talking, whether in favour or disagreement, in both the media and the wider populace. "First and foremost, it's a marketing event," says the Scots Trad Music Awards' director Simon Thoumire. "When I think awards I think Oscars, BAFTAs; I think a big glitzy night on the telly, and one of my original aims, in terms of using the awards to raise folk music's media profile, was to create an event like that, which the press and the general public could easily relate to. And while the Gaelic channel might still only have a limited audience, this year we also had Irish radio there, and a Chinese TV news team, which between them will reach literally millions of people."

John Leonard, producer of both The Mike Harding Show and the Radio 2 Folk Awards, echoes this primary objective. "The key thing any awards do is raise awareness of the artform," he says. "While I totally agree with the argument that it's kind of impossible or meaningless to measure Julie Fowlis against Martin Carthy, say, and declare that one's the best singer, nonetheless it's an effective way of bringing wider attention an area of music that often struggles attract it, in terms of mainstream exposure.

"Having these awards under the Radio 2 banner gives us a lot of clout, not least in-house at the BBC: winning acts will often end up being playlisted, or featured on shows like Steve Wright and Chris Evans, whereas before it was only Mike who'd play them. We get good newspaper press, too, in the likes of the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Mail – we were even in OK! once.

"So between that and 13 or 14 million Radio 2 listeners, we're reaching a lot of people who otherwise might have no contact with folk music – and who knows how many of them might end up in a back room at Celtic Connections one day, listening to bothy ballads, all because they heard that song on the radio driving home from work?"

There's no denying the susceptibility of either audiences or music-industry decision-makers to any semblance of official or objective endorsement attached to an act, as embodied by those magic words "winner of". According to fiddler Aidan O'Rourke of Lau, current holders of the Radio 2 Best Group title, and nominated twice in next year's vote: "Our audiences are up about 30 per cent since we won; that's about a third extra people who wouldn't have been there before."

Nor is there any question that both the Scots Trad Awards and the Radio 2 Awards consistently excite widespread and lively debate among their own constituency north of the Border. Once past the general consensus that on balance they do more good than harm, however – the profile-raising argument is a strong one – some major grumbles soon emerge.

The loudest and most consistent of these is that the Radio 2 Folk Awards consistently fail to reflect the quality and international success of today's Scottish folk music, being dominated year after year by English acts. After past occasional breakthroughs by exceptions including Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis and Kris Drever, the latest round of nominations does less than ever to dispel such perceptions.

Among four nominees across nine main categories – ie 36 in total – just six are for non-English contenders, in fact representing a mere three non-English acts: Ireland's Cara Dillon is up for Folk Singer of the Year, Best Album and Best Traditional Track, while Lau (Best Group/Best Live Act) and fiddler John McCusker (Musician of the Year) are the sole Scottish hopefuls.

Unlike the Scots Trad Music Awards, whose winners are decided by an online and postal public vote, the Radio 2 nominees and victors are determined by a large judging pool of around 170 folk music professionals – promoters, agents, journalists, festival organisers, record label heads, etc – all of whom agree not to vote for acts with whom they're commercially involved.

"Looking over the Radio 2 winners down the years," says Celtic Connections director Donald Shaw, "it seems very obvious from a Scottish perspective that the people voting primarily share a pretty hard-core English folk outlook, and primarily southern English at that, presumably because that's where most of them are."

Part of the problem does lie in the voting system itself. If, as many would argue, there are more potential Scottish than English contenders in each award category – as represented for instance, by their presence in the Celtic Connections programme – then the Scots' vote will be spread more thinly no matter how big the voting pool.

"That is definitely a difficulty with the system we use," Leonard acknowledges. "And I have to hold my hands up and say I don't know what's happened this time around, in terms of the English/non-English balance: we'll have to study the voting and see how we might address it – because the Scottish scene is so vibrant, and we do really want the awards to be fair; I'd hate to see it disregarded there as irrelevant, or perceived as being basically the English Folk Awards."

Unfortunately, a quick canvas around various movers and shakers on the Scottish folk scene seems to confirm such perceptions as already entrenched.

"I'm invited to vote, but I don't bother any more," says Ian Green of leading folk label Greentrax Records, speaking for many when he described the Radio 2 titles as being "passed around among the same small predictable bunch of people, virtually all of them English, year after year".

"You're kind of reluctant to say it, because you just get pegged as the classic whingeing Scot, and also you don't want to take anything away from the winners, but I'd say it's how a lot of people feel," agrees Donald Shaw.

Not that the Scots Trad Awards public vote is seen as any perfect solution, given how subject it is to the power of a well-organised online network. "Lobbying your own actual fan-base is fair enough," says Aidan O'Rourke – with Lau having won Live Act of the Year in Dumfries, though professedly without lobbying.

"But it's often really obvious from who's nominated and who wins that their parents, for instance, have access to some massive mailing-list through their work or something; or you can see the Western Isles block vote at work, or the Shetland block vote or whatever, so it's often pretty unrepresentative of what's actually going on.

"I'm all for the promotional element, and it makes for a really great night, but I do worry that the results might actually undermine the credibility of the awards as a whole."