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Homegrown + English Folk Expo

Venue: Various
Town: Bury
Date: 16-18/10/14
Website: http://themet.biz/homegrown/

Although the Summer festival season has ended, there's always one more event on the calendar to which folk fans can look forward. And what an event the Homegrown weekend has started to become. The event is now in its third year and an already stellar bill continues to get better and better, with The Met attracting an established audience from the local area and beyond with a varied programme across three venues in the centre of town, often leaving the public spoilt for choice and reflecting the very best in English folk music. Thirteen different shows utilising the 2 performance spaces in The Met itself, plus the larger capacity Drill Hall and the recently opened Clarence pub, a staggering total of thirty acts scheduled for public performances across the Thursday and Friday evenings plus a full day on Saturday.

Hand in hand with the musical events is the English Folk Expo music industry gathering, which allows The Met and the musical performances across town to showcase the best and exciting new talents of the genre which go some way to spreading the word on what English music has to offer. Whilst being offered the full programme of events which make up the Homegrown part of the weekend, the delegates who attend the English Folk Expo can add a whole host of their own events which make the most of marketing the artists and the music. The main mover behind English Folk Expo is Terry O'Brien of Playpen Music Management & Agency who took some time at the end of the festival to chat about her tireless work to promote traditional English music - more of that can be found here.

Thursday Friday Saturday Interview Gallery

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LIFTING THE LID ON ENGLISH FOLK EXPO
(or 'Selling England By The Pound')

Regular visitors to The Met's Homegrown festival of fine English folk may well be aware of groups of music industry type individuals all lanyarded up, who flit in an out of music showcases and can often be found all around the venues, heads bowed secretively in deep discussion. Many may not realise or be aware that since its inception three years ago, the weekend has actually been a shared event where two worlds collide. Collide may not be the right world - implying some sort of crashing together, but certainly an environment in which two worlds come together, existing independently of each other yet sharing a common purpose.

The chance to find out more about the mysterious English Folk Expo, what it is, what it does and how it came to bring its collection of delegates to Bury to become involved with the music of the Homegrown festival came about on the Sunday after the festival ended. Terry O'Brien of Playpen Music Management Agency, and the main mover behind English Folk Expo, kindly sat down and gave her perspective. After discussing some personal highlights of the weekend, all to be found in the FATEA reviews and how one English Folk Expo delegate ended up with a sprained ankle after on the cobbles outside Bury's Drill Hall, Terry got down to giving n outline of what English Folk Expo is all about.

"It's very deliberately English Folk Expo because this is about English music. The reason we did this is because English music, wonderful as it is and with this great resurgence that we've had since 2000, it's not travelled. Celtic music travels all over the world quite easily but if you ask the average international promoter what traditional English music is and they'll look at you and go…"Celtic?" They weren't getting to hear it as a distinct form of music and as a result our artists weren't getting any work. They were getting work within England but as the whole scene has been getting stronger and stronger and more and more artists have come in, it's going to get to the point where no-one can make a living. We had to broaden the territory so this is primarily to do that."

She explained how models from abroad had set important precedents: "For years countries around the world have had their own roots showcases and they bring in promoters from round the world and showcase the best of what they've got and England hasn't had that and we've got one of the strongest scenes. So that was the impetus for doing this."

When we talk about English Folk Expo as a body or organisation, it basically boils down to Terry. "To be honest there were several people from the industry who've been talking about this for a while. It was probably about 7 or 8 years ago when I first brought the idea up with the Arts Council but at the time it just wasn't feasible; we didn't have the people in place within English folk music to make this happen but as Katy Spicer came into EFDSS it was clear that there was clear leadership there - somebody creative who would be interested in this kind of idea. EFDSS had a remit to help do some kind of conference. It was an unformed idea at the time I think but she knew she wanted to do it and we got talking about it and ended up asking David (Agnew) at The Met if he would be involved just because he's one of the best folk promoters in the country and he's got a small town with a lot of venues close to each other, 30 miles from Manchester Airport and a lot of things going for it. He's got the audience for folk music so we knew that if we did an event here and it was a public event which we all thought it should be, that he'd be able to get the audience in and we wouldn't be taking our delegates to empty venues."

The marriage of a public festival with an industry event was quite an appealing one and Terry talked about how The Met became involved with the idea: "The idea of having a public festival that the delegates could come to and see artists performing in real live concert situations was something that was inspired by Showcase Scotland who have been running their own showcase for 14 years and they do it as part of Celtic Connections, taking a weekend during Celtic Connections, focus their Scottish programming on that weekend and bring the delegates in for that weekend. So we had to essentially create a new festival for English folk music to be able to do this events so the two things went hand in hand. David said he'd do it so essentially he created Homegrown so we can do English Folk Expo. The idea of English Folk Expo came first but it couldn't exist without Homegrown."

Discussing how the two worlds of public event and an industry convention exist in practice, she explained that it's not always clear to people how things work: "I think it's confusing for the public in general but it's absolutely impossible for us to explain it to them. There's a little bit of a note in the public programme about the fact that there is this industry event going on. I think they get a bit confused when people are running in and out of gigs maybe thinking they haven't enjoyed it whereas they 're just rushing off to the next gig but there's no way around that really, but the delegates here are very used to these sort of things and used to going to these sort of events and how to use them."

As far as the delegation is concerned, they seem to be coming from far and wide having chatted to several across the weekend from North America and Europe - there was still a European Folk network meeting going on in a room as we were chatting. When it comes to bringing people together, Terry explained things very simply: "I'm the link! I spend all year on the phone inviting people. It is an invite only event, we don't just let anyone random who wants to come because there's a lot of fundraising which goes on around this as it's all very subsidised by funding - wonderful organisations like Arts Council England, EFDSS and PRSF, who believe that if they support this then the results will be what we want which is lots of bookings for all the artists all around the world and a really vibrant English folk scene that's supported by income for the artists that keeps them going and doing what they do."

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