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Tim

Tim Hart

To lots of Steeleye fans, no doubt, Tim Hart is the folkiest instrumentalist in the band, simply because though both his guitar and dulcimer have pick-ups, they actually look acoustic. Actually, like all the other fret-players, he started with rock. Those were back in the pre-Donovan days, when he and a group of his school friends started a group called the Ratfinks.

His real introduction to the burgeoning folk scene came at a St Albans pub called The Cock. It was there that he met the young man called Donovan "I started singing folk at The Cock. I'd already started getting fed up with the group and Don was a big influence on me, together with records by people like Dylan - of course - and Jesse Fuller and Peter, Paul and Mary, which were flying about then.

We used to have great times at The Cock, though it wasn't a proper club, just a bar where all the freaks used to gather, most of them underage. It's remarkable how many well-known singers started there, people like Wizz Jones for instance."

It was there that he met Maddy and soon they were singing round the folk clubs together, blending their voices in selections of material that began to owe less and less to the American and neo-American folk scenes, more and more to the English tradition. He also became something of a multi-instrumentalist, toting around several cases of instruments - though these days he concentrates on guitar and dulcimer.

By the time he and Maddy got talking to Ashley Hutchings at the Loughborough Folk Festival in 1969 they were one of the increasingly important traditional draws in the folk clubs, a list of artists headed (and still headed today, incidentally) by Martin Carthy. Ashley had planned to form a group out of the remnants of Sweeney's Men, Terry Woods and his wife and Gay, Johnny Moynihan which is interesting, since one of the reasons he ultimately left Steeleye was because he felt it was too Irish rather than English in tone.

The band, which was never named, rehearsed for about two weeks, then Johnny and Andy split and at Loughborough Ashley asked Tim and Maddy to take their places, no doubt as the result of a discussion on the potential of electrified folk they'd had with him and Bob Pegg.

The name, Steeleye Span, was taken from the hero of a song collected by Percy Grainger from Joseph Taylor.

For a long time, during the first two versions of the group, Tim and Maddy continued to fulfil folk club dates as Martin Carthy still does today, despite his membership of the Albion Country Band. In fact, the first Steeleye never performed in public except some unaccompanied songs they did on impulse at the Cambridge Folk Festival.

Tim and Maddy's determination to continue playing the clubs was another factor prompting Ashley's leaving the group and though, they no longer do them, it has to he acknowledged that the folk scene gives an artist roots which he can quickly lose when he becomes a rock concert artist.

Another important thing about the folk clubs is the feedback the audiences give the performers, which keeps them constantly on their toes. "When we were still playing club gigs we thought of taking around some amplification, based on our experiences with Steeleye," recalls Tim. "But once you start amplifying the instruments, you'd have to mike up the voices too, and straight away the audience starts getting remote from you."

Strangely, though they no longer play clubs, they managed to find the sort of feedback on the concert scene by their popularising of what is becoming known as jigging, the formless leaping up and down which is spreading across America on the heels of Steeleyes current tour like wildfire, becoming a dance craze to rival the twist and the hitchhiker. "Jigging is very important to us," says Tim, because it gives us an indication of how well we're going down, especially in a strange country like America. After all, people always used to dance to rock and roll, and if we can get that started again I think we'll have done something really important."