Stickies stick to their favourites

The nominations for the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2012 (aka The Stickies) have been announced. You can read the details here - but if you do you will be confronted by a photo of Mike Harding and Donovan. You have been warned!


So, music fans, what do you reckon? Some great musicians are nominated, but it's a shame that they seem to be pretty much the same musicians (bar a change or three) that were nominated last year. And the year before. And the year before...


Amazingly, Jon Boden is nominated as Folk Singer of the Year, in the Best Duo (with John Spiers) category and in best group with Bellowhead, and he pops up again with his bellowing big band with a nom for best live act! Now, Mr Boden's a busy boy and all that, but even so this does seem to be rather excessive. 

Bellowhead

And it's not as though he's been neglected by The Stickies in the past. In fact, Jon won the Folk Singer of the Year award as recently as 2010, when Bellowhead collected the best live act doorstop - which they also won in 2008. And in 2007, when they were also Best "non-live" Group … which is an award they won again in the 2011 awards. 


In all, Bellowhead has won seven Stickies in the last six years. OK, already, we get the message - the 
mysterious cabal which puts these awards together with all the transparency of a lead-lined concrete wall thinks Bellowhead is rather good. 


Awards serve several purposes, but surely the main one – beyond the esoteric concept of rewarding the "best", as though music is a sporting competition that can be judged by such parameters – is to help propel and promote musicians who might otherwise struggle to get the recognition they deserve. Bellowhead  have recognition coming out of their many, many ears. They are already selling out venues on tour after tour, and it really matters little to anyone whether they've won seven awards or eight, nine or ten. Giving them another armful could actually be considered harmful to the folk scene as a whole, suggesting domination by the big band and stagnation from everyone else, which is certainly not the case.


Bellowhead aren't the only Radio 2 favourites. Elsewhere in the awards, The Unthanks get four cracks at various categories, as does June Tabor (with or without Oysterband). Martin Simpson gets three noms. He's great ... but he's won six Stickies since 2002. Isn't it about time to give someone else a chance?


Home Service (dubbed The Home Service by a confused BBC website - no, that's your tradename, Auntie!) also gets two nominations: as Best Group and Best Live Act. Now the rejuvenated Home Service is a great band, but aren't those two categories actually the same thing? It seems so, as three of the four nominees in the Best Group category also get a nod in the Best Live Act category.


Meanwhile, there's still no recognition for anyone in the folk world outside the performing elite: no awards to the folk clubs, the theatre venues or the festivals that keep the live scene alive.

Sticky - an award yesterday

As usual, the Stickies are a wasted opportunity ... as opposed to an opportunity to get wasted, which is what they usually boil down to for the happy band of insiders and hangers-on who get invited to the presentation ceremony where the free booze reportedly flows like, er, free booze...


Well now we're all invited – at a price. For the first time, in 2012 the awards ceremony will not be in London but rather in the Beeb's new home of Salford, most appropriately at The Lowry theatre. Where better to hand out models of matchstick men? Tickets cost you a tenner (it's already a sell out). Take your own bottle, as the bar prices are crippling.