Steeleye3

Steeleye Span Part 3

Steeleye Span
Twenty-Seven Years on the Bus
by Steve Winick

Part 3

As the seventies progressed, Steeleye Span's stage show began to evolve considerably. The increasing popularity of the Prior, Hart, Johnson, Kemp and Pegrum lineup meant that they were filling halls, and Pegrum's presence made it feel much more like a rock group. Prior and Hart began to think of ways to produce the drama of a rock and roll show out of folk elements, something they had wanted to tackle since their folk-club days. "One of the most effective openings I think we ever did was with the mummers outfits," she recounts. "We did the 'Lyke-Wake Dirge.' We had these great tall hats all with ribbons, all black, there were ribbons stuck all over them. They looked amazing! It was so impressive when we walked on stage. It absolutely stunned everybody." Other folk-drama elements that the band brought on stage included a mummer's play and rapper and longsword dances. "I think the tradition is very colorful visually," Prior continues. "It's got incredible color and vitality and energy in the whole range of the customs, so I used to use a lot of that. And I enjoyed that aspect of the visual crossover, because it's all there as part of our tradition."

To some extent, Prior sees this infusion of drama as a return to the original intent of traditional songs which had been thoroughly missed by the revival. "The one thing about the folk song revival," she explains with gentle regret, "was that it was rather colorless, and deliberately so. You were considered a channel through which this music would flow. But [traditional singers] didn't think of themselves as channels! Far from it! They wanted you to understand that this was a serious story they were telling you. And that was one of the releases for me of Steeleye. I could feel that emotional response and the dramatic response."

There was still another unusual and dramatic feature of the Steeleye live show in this period: the encores. After the set was over, the band would hastily change clothes, the men would slick their hair back and Prior would don a blonde wig and "a really tarty outfit." The band would then perform old rock and roll standards like "To Know Him Is to Love Him" and "Rave On." While Prior feels the encores were funny, she thinks the group did get carried away. "Every now and again, people would say, 'That's a really good idea. Why don't you do it as a single?' which of course was an absolutely disastrous idea! And we put them on albums, and nobody would understand why they were there, 'cause they didn't make any sense. And we got carried away with the idea that people liked them, and we thought, 'Perhaps it could be successful, perhaps we could be a pop band' and all that rubbish."

Though they could never be a pop band, this lineup was to bring Steeleye to its apex of popularity, with three highly successful albums. Their strong showing on the charts gave them the clout to ask big name stars to join them in the studio. Now We Are Six (1974), the album that announced Pegrum's presence, was produced by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull and featured a guest appearance by David Bowie. Kemp knew Bowie from his rock and roll experiences in Hull, and when a sax player was needed they rang him up. The following album, Commoners Crown (1975), includes a ukulele played by none other than actor, comedian and Goon Peter Sellers. Johnson was enough of a Goons fan to know that Sellers played the ukulele, and when they felt a uke was called for, they got up the nerve to ask him in. Prior recalls that Sellers was quite nervous. "He'd never been asked to play ukulele before," she explains.

These two albums include Some of Johnson's best work in arranging the old ballads. "Thomas the Rhymer" from Now We Are Six is one of the most memorable tracks on the album, though it seems rather heavyhanded today. "Little Sir Hugh" and "Long Lankin" from Commoners Crown are among the most chilling of Steeleye's songs. Johnson explains that in arranging these and other "big ballads," the idea was "to illustrate the story musically, rather than just find the melody for the ballad and sing it from the beginning to the end." "Thomas the Rhymer" uses several different melodies, as well as a chorus that Johnson made from two lines of the original ballad, to tell the story of true Thomas's trip to elfland and back. "Little Sir Hugh" uses a similar approach to tell a stark and gory tale of murder with a chorus from beyond the grave.

Commoners Crown was arguably the best album this version of Steeleye produced, largely because of Johnson's songs. But their next album, anchored by one of Prior's arrangements, became by far their most popular. Anyone who listens closely to the lyrics of Steeleye's biggest hit is bound to be confused; the song blatantly contradicts itself. Prior began with a traditional song called "All Around My Hat," which had a good chorus but boring verses. She retained only the title and the chorus, and added the verses from another folksong, entitled "Farewell He." The resulting pastiche has a chorus in which the narrator proclaims her loyalty to her absent lover and verses in which she vows to dump him! "It doesn't make any sense," Prior admits, "but that's not what the song became about. It became a celebration of energy in the end."

Backed by an insistent shuffle rhythm and fronted by Prior's lusty vocals, the song is as catchy as they come. Some of the group's followers felt that the use of uptempo rock rhythms and nonsensical words was a step down from the group's previous focus on musical and lyrical complexity, especially as many of the instruments, like Nigel Pegrum's flute, are absolutely buried behind the rhythm section. Others, like Martin Carthy, felt that the shuffle rhythm should have been left to B.B. King. But for the most part, British audiences loved it, and it ascended the charts all the way to number five. Prior stands by it to this day. "I think that the song works," she says simply. "That's one of the few folk songs that have gone back to the people. They know that song." Indeed, recently Status Quo recorded a version of Prior's arrangement, and invited her to sing harmony on it.

The album All Around My Hat (1976) was also a success, reaching number seven on the charts. If it made Steeleye Span a household name, it nevertheless changed their lives only a little. "It wasn't like we came out of nowhere," Prior states. "We were never rock stars, but we'd been filling halls for quite a long time by then." Like all of Steeleye's previous albums, it included supernatural ballads, love songs, a capella harmony vocals and a set of quite unusual fiddle tunes from Peter Knight. One of Steeleye's great underrated tracks is on this album, a ballad called "Dance with Me." It is a version of the old Scandinavian ballad of Sir Olaf, and it blends supernatural intrigue, lust and murder with great jazzy fiddling from Knight. Other standout songs include "Blackjack Davy," "The Wife of Usher's Well," and the a capella robbers' song "Cadgwith Anthem."

Unfortunately, the rigorous touring and recording schedule began to take its toll on the band at this point. By 1975, they had released eight albums in a little over five years, and had spent almost every moment of their lives rehearsing, playing, recording or working on material for the band. They were, in Prior's words, "pushing too hard, too fast." Rocket Cottage (1977), their follow-up to All Around My Hat, could have been the album that cemented their popularity and brought folk songs to a new level of popularity. Instead it was a disappointment. "You can tell how desperate we were," Prior tells me, discussing the band's decision to stick an unrehearsed and unlisted version of "Camptown Racetrack" on Rocket Cottage. "I can't think what we were thinking of with that." Many of the songs seem half- realized, cursorily arranged; a far cry from "Little Sir Hugh" or even "King Henry." The fans felt the same way, and the album languished below the top forty.

Once again, the time had obviously come for Steeleye to change. By 1977, Prior says, "We were working, we were rehearsing, we were recording. It was non-stop. We were tired and exhausted and fed up with each other, and wanted to do other things. But we were locked into this very tight working situation." In 1976, Prior had gone into the studio with June Tabor to record the Silly Sisters album as a side project. She was also interested in solo work, and Kemp wanted to work on his own music as well. Still, Steeleye lingered on until Johnson and Knight finally called it a day in early 1977.

Once again, conventional wisdom fails where band break-ups are concerned. Most chroniclers have said it was their desire to work on the concept album The King of Elfland's Daughter (1977) that caused Knight and Johnson to quit Steeleye. They insist it wasn't so. "Pretty well everyone was [thinking of] leaving at that point," Knight says. "It's just that Bob and I happened to leave, and it was easy just to say, well, Bob and I had left to do the The King of Elfland's Daughter, which actually wasn't the case at all." Years later, a source at Chrysalis confessed that Knight and Johnson were only allowed to record the fantasy rock opera to keep them happy so that they would remain in Steeleye Span; consequently the company made no real effort to market or sell it. The ploy failed, however, and Johnson and Knight left the band.

Their departure immediately caused a problem. All parties agreed that the band had to break up ("In those days, you wouldn't think to take a year off," Prior says). But in the meantime there were contractual obligations for several tours and two more albums. Prior saved the day by inviting Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick to join. The new Steeleye Span, made up of Prior, Kemp, Pegrum, Carthy and Kirkpatrick, existed from May 1977 until March 1978, performing three tours and recording two albums. Carthy and Prior both remember it as an exhilarating time. For Carthy, it was the first time he was in a band that was, in his words, "a money-making machine." "It was wildly different from anything I'd ever attempted before, but it was really enjoyable," he enthuses, adding that he needed to practice the electric guitar three to four hours a night, even during tours. "It was a fabulously interesting band, an exciting band," he raves.

Without Johnson's long supernatural ballads and Knight's Irish fiddle tunes, the group looked in new directions for material. Kirkpatrick brought in an encyclopedic knowledge of English folk music, folk song, and morris dance. Kemp began writing songs on historical themes, including "The Victory" and the epic "Montrose." Prior had always wanted to perform Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill songs, but never thought Steeleye was the proper place for that. With Carthy's encouragement, she changed her mind. The result was a new repertoire of material as strong as anything the band had done since Commoners Crown. The studio album, Storm Force Ten (1977) and most especially the final album, Live at Last (1978), document some of the exciting innovations this incarnation of Steeleye accomplished before throwing in the towel.

Finally, in March 1978, the unthinkable happened: Steeleye Span broke up. Carthy and Kirkpatrick went off to work together, eventually to form Brass Monkey. Kemp and Prior, who were married by then, went to work on solo careers, as did Hart. Pegrum joined a band called The Barren Knights. Steeleye was gone for good...or so it seemed.

On to Part 4