WITH the 25th Leigh Folk Festival being planned for next year, PAUL NIZINSKYJ spoke to creative director Paul Collier about how the event has changed over the last quarter century.

WHEN the first Leigh Folk Festival took place, John Major was prime minister and Elton John and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were topping the charts.

It was a very different time and the folk festival was no less different itself. It started as a one-day event with much greater emphasis on traditional folk and dance than today’s more varied offering over four days.

This growth was recently threatened with the possibility of the festival being axed. Treasurer Ian Flack, said in August, he feared this year’s festival could have been the last.

He spoke after a £2,000 financial loss, caused by the removal of council funding, and the bill for rebranding the event and rebuilding its website.

With dates being announced for next year’s festival last week, he said he had a renewed optimism funding would be found somewhere, somehow, even joking the group would rob a bank to get it.

Creative director Paul Collier, 56, was not worried either and said he was busy coming up with ideas for how to make the 25th anniversary of the festival a little bit more special.

He said: “It’s something of a landmark and, although it’s early days, we’re hoping to put on something of a splash if we can raise the funds for it. But you’ll have to watch this space to find out what that will be.”

Paul has been involved from day one, first as a performer and, for the past 15 years, as one of the chief organisers of the festival.

He said: “It started as a one-day event back when there was a sortof National Music Day, which Mick Jagger and arts minister Tim Renton came up with.

“Everything from busking on street corners to Glastonbury was going on and, in Leigh, we decided via the folk clubs and various organisations we should do something as well.

“It was quite a small-scale day of folk music and morris dancing in Leigh Library Gardens. It’s much broader now than it was then. It was a niche folk event when it started and was about 70 per cent morris dancing with music as a bit of a sideshow.”

From there, the festival continued to grow into a larger event and began to make the shift towards music, and more diverse music, once Paul joined the team.

He said: “I’ve always been interested in diversity of music anyway and so are a lot of my team.

“Folk music is a bit of a slippery term which means different things to different people, but most of the acts we have on now are acoustic or have some sort of folk element to what they do.

“It means, because it’s a free event, we don’t just get the core folk audience, we get general festival- goers and general musiclovers as well.

“Increasingly, I think we’ve got it right, but we just take things as we go really.”

This success is seen in the fact the event, which nowhas multiple stages all over the town each year, draws not only locals and Essex folk, but people from all over the country and even the world, meaning folk music is heard by people who may not otherwise experience it.

Paul said: “We’ve had people come from Belgium and even the Middle East to enjoy the festival and acts from the US quite often perform – as well as a Senegalese choral player, a Bulgarian choir and a group from Ukraine this year.

“It’s all happened through word of mouth and, while we don’t have the financial resources of any of those big festivals and can’t expect to put on the sort of acts they do, we are reaching the people who appreciate what we’re doing.

“I think we’ve gotawinning formula now, so I don’t want to deviate too much from what we are already doing.

“There’s a new demographic coming all the time and a lot of people with no idea what folk music and culture is all about – and we do reach those people.”