Last year, the current line-up of Steeleye Span, helmed by Maddy Prior and featuring a new generation including violinist Jessie May Smart and ex-Bellowheader Benji Kirkpatrick, performed the band’s debut album, Hark! The Village Wait, onstage.

See also: Martin Carthy – Beginner's Guide

Back in 1969, it was Prior and Tim Hart, Terry and Gay Woods, and former Fairport leader Ashley Hutchings getting it together in the country to see if they could make it as a band. They couldn’t, and split before performing a single note of their magical debut onstage. It took 52 years for that to happen, making the 2021 live set a welcome circling by the present of the past. Which is, in part, what the folk process is about.

Steeleye Span in 2018 (photo: Peter Silver)

Steeleye are not shy of celebrating their history. For the 50th anniversary in 2019, Martin Carthy, Peter Knight and John Kirkpatrick returned to the fold for one night at the Barbican in London, and now the band’s 1970s catalogue of albums on Chrysalis is being reissued in a remastered 12-album set, Good Times of Old England, which ranges from 1972’s Below the Salt, featuring the band’s first hit, ‘Gaudete’, through to 1980’s Sails of Silver, co-founder Tim Hart’s last work with the band.

In between you’ll find Now We Are Six, featuring the epic ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ and, of course, 1975’s top-ten smash, ‘All Around My Hat’ from the album of the same name, one of the few times in pop history a 19th-century broadside (‘A Nobleman’s Wedding’) featured on Top of the Pops. You can even find it on one of those cut-price TOTP cover-version albums they used to sell at Woolworths (Vol 49).

“Taking traditional music to the masses was the original idea of the band,” says Steeleye legend, Gigspanner frontman and demon fiddler Peter Knight. “And we had success quite early. It was a time where you could rent a cottage for three months and make an album – a very rare thing these days – with everyone passionately trying to give the music something they thought would be good for it.”

Knight joined the Steeleye crew for Please to See the King, alongside Martin Carthy on electric guitar. By the time of Below the Salt guitarist Bob Johnson and bassist Rick Kemp had joined Prior, Hart and Knight, with the rock dynamics of hefty bass and electric guitar fusing with Knight’s protean fiddle. For 1973’s Top 30-selling Parcel of Rogues, they toured 20,000-seater arenas in the US with Chrysalis labelmates Jethro Tull. “I remember us sat in the dressing room, going ‘OK, what are we gonna do?’,” recalls Knight. They decided to start with their encore – a riotous set of dance tunes. Cue American arena mayhem. “The audience went absolutely berserk, they loved it. Then we had a message from Ian Anderson the next day to say he didn’t want his audience dancing before he went on…”

However, outbreaks of dancing didn’t stop Anderson producing their 1974 set, Now We Are Six, featuring the heavy riffery of songs like ‘Edwin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, but it was 1975 and All Around My Hat that proved to be the band’s chart apogee. No British folk rock act comes anywhere near Steeleye for chart success with ancient ballads. And their producer Mike Batt was, in part, the reason. “He’s a very good orchestrator,” says Knight of The Wombles founder, “and when he worked with us he recognised ‘All Around My Hat’ was a hit immediately. He was great to work with. We had a lot of fun with him.”

The success of ‘All Around My Hat’ made Steeleye a household name, but follow-up, ‘Hard Times of Old England’ failed to chart, and Knight detects a sea change in the band’s work from here on. “After our musical success, did our musical endeavours change? Yes. We tried to find songs and arrange them in such a way that would have commercial appeal, to write songs we thought would be catchy. That was not a good idea, in retrospect, and I don’t think it did us any favours. It was the wrong way round. ‘All Around My Hat’ was very different – there was no sense of, ‘how do we make this commercial?’ It just happened to be commercial. That has integrity. When you start trying to write a hit you fall into the trap of trying to sound like something that is already a hit.”

Nevertheless, 1976’s Rocket Cottage sports some of the band’s most powerful cuts in the likes of ‘London’, ‘Sir James the Rose’ and a stunning, spectral ‘Fighting for Strangers’, another high point that benefited, says Knight, from Mike Batt’s skill with arrangements. “In a band, everybody’s chipping in, everyone has something to say, but Mike on that track had a bit more to say than everyone else...”

By 1977, the arrival of a new kind of urban folk form, punk rock, saw Steeleye fall from favour. Storm Force Ten had Martin Carthy returning to plug in his electric guitar alongside accordionist John Kirkpatrick on an overlooked set mixing trad songs with pieces by Brecht and Weill, but it marked the end of the road for the classic Steeleye. The 80s were largely wilderness years, with bassist Rick Kemp and drummer Nigel Pegrum leaving before the decade’s end. Even Prior dropped off the wagon for a while – with founding vocalist Gay Woods returning in the mid-1990s – but by the new century, a fresh impetus pushed them forward, and with the 2013 album Wintersmith, based on the Discworld books of super-fan Terry Pratchett, they even returned to the charts.

That album was Knight’s last work with the band, though he did tread the boards at the Barbican to mark their 50th anniversary. “It’s quite an important band in the world of folk,” he says of their legacy. “The whole idea was to take folk music into the mainstream.” That they certainly did. “There’s lots of Steeleye albums,” he adds, “but you’ll find tracks on each one that still stand up today.” And that’s something to tip your hat to.

Best Albums

Please to See the King

(B&C Records, 1971)

While their debut, Hark! The Village Wait, is hauntingly good, this follow-up, with Martin Carthy aboard, is hauntingly great. Standouts include ‘Boys of Bedlam’, ‘False Knight on the Road’ and ‘The Lark in the Morning’. 

Rocket Cottage

(Chrysalis Records, 1976)

So we’ve omitted the successful All Around My Hat from this list, but only because the likes of ‘London’, ‘Sir James the Rose’ and a fantastic ‘Fighting for Strangers’ make this album the true mid-70s folk-rock-pop classic.

Storm Force Ten

(Chrysalis Records, 1977)

This one did nothing at the time – a probable casualty of punk rock’s unruly rise – but with Martin Carthy once more back in the fold, and accordionist John Kirkpatrick, this is a daring and distinctive iteration, caught onstage on 1978’s Live at Last.

Wintersmith

(Park Records, 2013)

Knight and Kemp had both hopped back aboard the Span wagon for this conceptual work, while guests included John Spiers, Kathryn Tickell and Terry Pratchett himself on a journey into the depths of Discworld, helmed by Black Sabbath/Judas Priest/Killing Joke producer Chris Tsangarides.

Est’d 1969

(Park Records, 2019)

Span’s most recent studio set, and it ranks right up there with their finest. How often can you say that about a new release from an outfit this long in the tooth? Child Ballads abound – songs full of mystery, magic, cruelty and death. There’s even a cameo from Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, who lends his flute to ‘Old Matron’.

This guide originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today