STEELEYE:
A Great Leap Forward
By Karl Dallas
© Melody Maker
13 Mar 1971
It would be nothing less than a tragedy if Steeleye Span's new album were written off as merely another one for the folkies to dig electric sounds. Because it is much, much more than that. OK, the material is all folk-derived, but what does that mean? So is at least 50 per cent of the best rock, from Chuck Berry to the Band, in one way or another. In fact, the angular melodies they use remind me more of the modal improvisations of Paul Butterfield's East-West than of the sort of simplistic folk tunes we have learned to associate with folk groups like the Weavers and the Spinners.
Even if I weren't an unrepentant old folkie myself, I do believe I would still be digging these tunes for the sheer unexpectedness of the ways their melodies turn and twist, giving me much more of that much-vaunted , sound of surprise than I hear in most modern-day jazz outside the true avant garde. OK, Peter Knight plays fiddle and even wraps his fingers round a jig or two, but thanks to Flock and Family and Sea Train and Doug Kershaw, the fiddle isn't entirely unknown to rock anymore, and the number of early blues records that had fiddle alongside the guitar and cornet is something that has been carefully hidden from a world which has learned to think in frozen musical Categories.
What the hell am I apologizing for, anyway? I have no need to explain that they are really doing nothing foreign to rock when, in all honesty, what I really believe is that with this album they have taken popular music through one of its great leaps. Forward, after which nothing will ever really be the same. Like "The Weavers at Carnegle Hall," Like "Bringing it All Back Home," Like "Sergeant Pepper," Like "Music from Big Pink," Like "Unhalfbricking." Milestones all, and if "Please to See the King" doesn't have as big an influence as all of these, on both sides of the Atlantic, pop music will be the poorer, the victim once more of those locked compartments that divide us from ourselves.
What is it that makes this so different from all the other electric folk albums, and so important for the progress of rock generally? Take the absence of drums, and the way Tyger Hutchings has laid the rhythmic. Bass with a solid, simple bass line that lies there like a rock, at the very core of things, keeping the whole thing together. It is more than the mere absence of drums, of course, that makes Steeleye's rhythmic approach unique. It is only after a while that you realize that they have achieved what Fairport Convention are only now daring to attempt; a breakaway from the hidebound lead-guitar-rhythm guitar format, resulting in a band of equals, where no one solos and no one backs, but everyone plays with everyone else.
It is remarkable to realize that although Martin Carthy is obviously still coping with the transition from acoustic guitar to Fender Stratocaster, he is already using the instrument in a way that is not only unique, but also completely appropriate. Not only does he use it as an electric instrument, not an amplified acoustic, but what he plays on it fits into the context of the music as a whole.
Vocally, the band is one of the most exciting sounds I have heard since the strained attack of Lennon and McCartney ushered in the radical break with the degenerate-classical styles of all white pop singers before them, with the possible exception of Presley. Like Presley, the Everlys and Carl Perkins, the Beatles style was based on white American country, though the material was black in origin. What made the Beatles so remarkable was the fact that this was laid over a basis of Scouse pop culture and vocal intonation.
Steeleye, and notably Maddy Prior and Martin Carthy, give us British roots with much less of an overlay, and that has grown from the folk club traditions of the past decade rather than from American country music. One of these days someone is going to do a careful stylistic study of the way songs are sung in British clubs, as compared with the way they are sung in tradition, and if it is done scientifically enough it will become obvious that since the earliest days of the revival there has grown up a distinct "folk club style" which is related to but quite distinct from the style of tradition.
Listen to Peter Bellamy sing a Harry Cox or Sam Lamer song, or better still hear Ewan MacColl sing a Betsy Miller song, to discover the difference. Thanks to the self-imposed isolation of most folk clubs, this style has not had the impact on British rock that the singing of, say, Doug Dillard and Joe Macdonald has had in America, though it has a great deal more to contribute.
Let's face it, most British rock singers are pretty undistinguished, unless they are superlative mimics like Joe Cocker and Elton John, or vocal eccentrics like Roger Chapman, but the vocal sound of Steeleye (and all of them sing at times, including Tyger) is unique to rock without being rootless, for this is the way the best of the folk club singers perform when they join together. This is truly one of those albums where you need, to coin a cliché, to open your mind and let its sounds into what it ought to sound like, whether it's folk or rock or electric folk or jolly red herring. It's a great monster of a record and I love it.