Welcome to the new website!

First of all, I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year and are feeling refreshed and ready for the year ahead. 

Well, here we are at the start of 2026 and it’s a ‘New Year New You’ vibe for us, beginning with a new website! 

So, I will take a bit of time, here, to explain what’s happening. In the interest of transparency, I will just tell the story of how we got here, as briefly as I can (OK, Emma, keep it brief! :D )

Since the launch of Launceston Folk Club in 2023, lots has been happening, as many of you know. I have been involved in lots of projects and have collaborated with many and varied organisations. These have all come about in a completely organic way, often to simply help out and volunteer in any way that I can to support local organisations, venues, and musicians. 

By the end of 2025, this had reached a level, such that it was becoming unwieldy and I have increasingly been asked to get involved with things that step outside of the original Folk Club project scope. So, with limited resources available, I had a bit of a think about how to go about this in a more manageable way.

Firstly, I knew that I would need to streamline everything into one place with limited resources. Limited resources is code for – we have no capital and run everything on a shoestring, trying to keep quality high and costs down so that you get value for money and we don’t get burdened with having to take on admin heavy large funding contracts and the risk of taking on staff. 

Everything I have done in the community so far has been done on a pro bono basis which means I am a volunteer, as is anyone who has been involved with running and administrating events. However, as much as we have kept personnel costs so far to zero, there are some ongoing costs that need to be covered otherwise we simply cannot operate at all. These include insurances, venue hire/commission, PA and sound tech hire, website, domain, and email hosting, mailing list platform, licences, printing, ticketing platform fees, payment platform fees – yes, even when we do sell a ticket, a portion of that goes to third parties – and, of course, the performers themselves. There are always unexpected extras that appear from time to time as well, that we must allow for. 

Running regular events is really a full-time job and I already have a ‘day job’ training people to work in Mental Health services as peer support workers. There is always an event to promote and a constant slew of admin to carry out so the concept of a ‘day off’ is alien to me at this point. 

As many of you know, we also run Wreckers Radio in conjunction with Cornwall Folk Festival – again totally run by volunteers (big shout out to Roger without whom there would be no radio). Radio costs are on top of the other costs and, at the moment, are personally funded by those who are involved as well as Cornwall Folk Festival. More on that anon….

So, bringing everything into one place, it made sense to utilise Wreckers as a banner for all music related activity. Hence, the idea of Wreckers Music was born. 

From now on, all music related activity will essentially be a sub-project of Wreckers Music, which is itself a project of ALFCIC. 

Launceston Folk Club will continue to retain its own identity as the beloved venue it has become and of which we are very proud. Indeed, without Launceston Folk Club none of the other activities would have come about. Over the years I have had many people pose the idea of changing the name of Launceston Folk Club. There have been valid arguments both to the pros and cons of doing so and everyone who has commented on it has done so from a place where they really want to see the Folk Club survive and thrive and I am indebted to everyone who has been so supportive.

Some argue that the term ‘folk club’ works against us for various reasons. Some people feel it is outdated and may be restricting the reach of the events to those who identify as ‘folkies’ when many of the artists who come to the Folk Club do not fit neatly into a stereotypical view of what ‘folk music’ is (what is it btw – don’t answer that haha). 

Others suggest that changing the name to something more populist plays into the notion that ‘folk music’ is an outdated genre on its last legs better left to an older generation and another time. 

I totally get all this, and have grappled with it myself, knowing that there is a certain connotation around the term among people who haven’t experienced the vastness of what can be considered ‘folk music’ today. 

I have been mulling this over a lot since we had a lengthy public discussion in the Facebook group about 18 months ago now with some suggestions around simply calling it an acoustic club, indie folk, simply Launceston Live Music, which also come with their own connotations and exclusions.

I decided to keep Launceston Folk Club distinct, for a number of reasons, some of which I will discuss here. 

Firstly, for me, ‘Folk’ relates to real people and real things produced by real people – of the people, by the people, for the people. It speaks of community and belonging. The Folk Club has become a place where people can come and feel part of something, whether at one of the concert events or at the monthly folk and songwriters’ events. These folk club events provide different types of spaces where people can come and be entertained and uplifted or they can contribute, and those contributions are equally valued. 

Secondly, the Folk Club was modelled on the local folk club that I grew up near and played at – Hitchin Folk Club. That place was a critical part of my development and a lifeline for me during difficult times in my life and Maureen Jones who has run it for over 60 years, created an environment that I can only aspire to emulate as best I can as time goes on. Hitchin continues to be a thriving folk club that people the world over long to perform at and audiences flock to. This is where I derived the main act/s from the wider folk circuit and a support artist drawn from local musicians, model. Hitchin (and there are other similar style folk clubs in the UK) continues to prove that a folk club can survive and thrive, even in the current climate. 

Thirdly, it has become apparent to me over the past 2 and a half years that ‘Folk music’ is alive and well. It is far from a dying art and there are generations coming up behind us who identify themselves as Folk Musicians and are proud to do so. There are young people delving back into the rich heritage of traditional folk music and re-interpreting it as well as creating traditional sounding music of their own, as well as stalwarts of the folk circuit who produce sounds that veer into what could be thought of as blues, jazz, Americana, rock, punk, and pop. Suffice to say that it has always evolved with the times (recall when the likes of Fairport Convention and Bob Dylan broke out the electric guitars and drum kits and called it folk, long before I was even born, and called it folk rock, much to the chagrin of their contemporaries) and many of the performers who have played at the folk club may not sound like traditional folkies but very much consider themselves rooted in folk traditions. 

So, what does this all mean for you? 

You will still get to enjoy Launceston Folk Club in exactly the way you always have. On top of that, we can now start to accept requests to run events that fall outside the ‘Folk’ umbrella and those will come under Wreckers Live Music.

If you have signed up to receive news and emails about Launceston Folk Club, you will still receive those in the same way, though it may come from a different email address. If you want to receive news about events other than Folk Club events, you can also opt to receive those, but you will be asked about that first – we have to make sure we only send you what you have asked for to be compliant with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules.

This all aligns well with the aims of Wreckers Radio which is to ‘support independent musicians and grassroots venues West of the Exe’, regardless of their allegiances to a particular genre.

Membership – we have operated a reduced rate for the annual membership (£10 per year) since the outset, partly because we haven’t yet been able to offer additional member benefits aside from the reduced ticket prices. We will continue to offer this rate, with reduced price tickets for Folk Club members, and we will add another membership level as we work through the year, which will be a Wreckers Music wide membership, offering reduced price tickets to all events and other benefits including a member’s area on the website. All membership fees go back into the organisation and towards pro bono work that meet the aims of ALFCIC (our umbrella organisation). 

The Future…..

It is right to acknowledge that it is a difficult time for live music, as it is, economically, for many of us regardless of the sector we sit in. Grassroots music has its own challenges in a time where ‘going out’ feels like a luxury for many and there has been a significant decline in live events attendance since covid. Indeed, live events have taken a massive hit for many reasons, including the rise in live streaming and being able to access music on demand 24/7. 

So, why do it? We continue to run live events for the very simple, yet important reason, that it is good for us as humans. From an ALFCIC perspective, we know that bringing people together in community, supporting and encouraging people to pursue their passions and find purpose, has both preventative and restorative effects on our emotional, mental, physical, social, and spiritual health. In short, it is vital that we can keep these things going, especially while times are hard, despite it being the most difficult time, economically, to do so.

The best way to do this is to work together with other people and organisations and I have been working hard to build relationships and collaborations with others where we can share our skills and resources. Sometimes this looks like exchanging promotion of events with other organisations, and at other times it is simply helping out by offering unique skills that others don’t have, and vice versa, to keep everyone’s costs down.

So, I will continue to update you via this blog and the email newsletters. You can sign up to the newsletter by entering your email into the ‘sign up to mailing list’ box on the homepage.

In the meantime, I wish you all the very best for 2026 and hope to see many of you throughout the coming year!