STEELEYE SPAN BAND BREAKDOWN
Compiled by Karl Dallas
© Melody Maker
14 April 1973
At this very moment, all over America, audiences and critics are racking their brains and exhausting their musical vocabulary trying to find a category to put Steeleye Span into.
Although the folk rock phenomenon of the Dylan-influenced Byrds and the bands that spun off from them, this blend of traditionally lyric and rock instrumentation is something comparatively unknown to them.
The matter is complicated by the fact that everyone knows that lovers of traditional folk music are serious, academic guys and horse-faced girls with lumpy bodies encased in scratchy tweeds of ambiguous shape.
And then this happy, funky rock band jigs on to the stage singing about milking girls and witches and handloom weavers and everyone gets so happy that all they want to do is to get up and jig about. Well, as an unparalleled gesture of transatlantic friendship I am prepared to enlighten our colonial cousins.
Steeleye Span are a rock band, and if you think of the way they are digging into our traditions as akin to the way in which Robbie Robertson and his fellow-members of the Band are doing the same thing for America in Songs like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "King Harvest Must Surely Come" then you won't go far wrong.
I say this after hearing their latest, finest album, "Parcel of Rogues" for if ever there was a rock record then this is one. The material may be British Irish or Scottish for the most part, as a matter of fact and some of the tracks may be folkier than others, whatever that may mean, but it is really as a rock disc that it must be judged. This is not merely a matter of the rock effects like fuzz and wah-wah which are used with great result all through the album.
It is a question of the attack of the band, which has a power that plugs right into the electric energy of our age and makes the archaic stories of many ballads performed sound as they came from yesterday's headlines.
Click on the links below to see how the following band members came to join Steeleye.
Tim Hart Peter Knight Rick Kemp Maddy Prior Bob Johnson