A London folk and country fan compares a British dinner party with a Thursday folk session, and finds out which one actually keeps people in the room
Thursday, 22 October 2026. A pub in Camden, back room, eleven fiddles, three guitars, one squeezebox and a man playing spoons with alarming intensity, 9.30pm.
The Opposite Of A Dinner Party
Every Thursday there is a folk session in the back room of a pub not far from Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which sits in Camden like a polite grandmother keeping an eye on all of us. Anyone can come. You sit in a circle, someone starts a tune and everybody who knows it joins in. Nobody is invited. Nobody leaves early. The washing up is pint glasses, and the barman does it.
Tonight, between tunes, I read the report on British dinner parties and why husbands mainly go to check for Sky Sports. It says the average British man attends a dinner party because the food is free, the drink is free and he might escape before the washing up. Departure planning begins during the starter. By ten forty, nine men in ten have left or are in the hallway discussing leaving.
I looked up from my phone at the folk session. It was ten forty. Nobody had left. A man in his seventies called Reg was halfway through a forty-verse ballad about a shipwreck off Whitby, and every single person in the room was leaning forward to find out who drowned.
Why Folk Keeps People In The Room
The dinner party in the report is a performance. People attend to network, check the television package or quietly assess each other’s salaries. The most dangerous phrase is you know what I think, usually followed by a man explaining the economy using the price of a pint. In a folk session, nobody cares what you think. They care whether you know the tune. If you do, you play. If you do not, you listen. If you start explaining the economy, a woman with a fiddle will look at you over her glasses until you stop.
The report says British men can talk about football for six hours and about contemporary art for three minutes. I would add: about folk music, they can talk for exactly as long as it takes someone to start the next tune. Then they shut up and tap their feet. It is the most effective social technology Britain has ever produced, and it costs nothing.
The Network Of Daves, Folk Edition
The report says British men network through three blokes called Dave, a pub landlord and someone who can fix a boiler. Tonight’s folk session contained two Daves. One plays the bodhran. One plays the concertina and also, it turns out, fixes boilers. I now have his number. My boiler, which has been broken since September, will be fixed on Saturday in exchange for me learning the harmony to The Bonny Labouring Boy. That is how the folk economy works. Nobody uses money. Everyone uses tunes.
Country And Folk Are Cousins
Country music grew partly from the songs British and Irish settlers carried to the Appalachians, ballads that were sung in English and Scottish villages for centuries before anyone heard them in Tennessee. Some of the songs in this back room tonight have American cousins that turn up on country records. It is the same family, separated at the dock, singing the same grief in different accents.
I have been working through the new country albums of 2026 this autumn, and you can hear that old folk DNA all over the best of them. A banjo line that could have come from a Somerset farmhouse. A murder ballad that would not be out of place in a Yorkshire pub at closing time. The sounds travelled to America and are now travelling back, and nobody needs Sky Sports to enjoy them.
The Washing Up, Folk Style
The dinner party report ends with the host loading her own dishwasher at eleven while the men stand in the hallway. Our session ended at eleven fifteen. Nobody stood in the hallway. Reg finished his shipwreck ballad. The fiddlers packed their cases. The man with the spoons put his spoons in his top pocket like a surgeon pocketing his instruments. Everybody took their own glass to the bar. The barman said thank you. That is the whole washing up. Folk musicians have solved the British dinner party problem, and they did it in the 1960s, and nobody wrote a report.
Walking Home
I walked home up Camden Road with the tunes still in my head and my guitar on my back. A couple came out of a house on Agar Grove, standing in the doorway saying right, well, we should probably, to a host who looked exhausted. I wanted to tell them about the folk session. I wanted to say: there is a room in Camden where people come every Thursday, stay all night, leave at the same time and carry their own glasses. Nobody checks the television. Nobody explains the economy. And at the end, a man called Dave fixes your boiler.
I did not say any of that. I just walked past, humming The Bonny Labouring Boy. The couple are probably still in the hallway.