Sunday, 1 July 2012
(Below the Salt, Parcel of Rogues, Now We Are Six, Commoners Crown, All Around My Hat)
Well, here’s the third strand of Hughesy’s rediscovery of English folk-rock I was interested in way back in the dim distant past. As with many of these things, we’re in hit and miss territory here, and Steeleye’s fourth album (Below the Salt, the first of the Chrysalis connection) was the first of their material I knowingly ran across. Of the three, Fairport Convention was, predictably the starting point, and the Shirley & Dolly Collins (as reviewed here) was something that had impinged on the consciousness without being listened to at the time.
The figure that runs through all three is Ashley Hutchings, originally the bass player with Fairport and subsequently married to Shirley Collins and, in between, founder of Steeleye Span. To Hutchings, who’d played a major role in putting the Liege and Lief Fairport material together, things came down to a matter of traditional versus original material, and with Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick contributing original material in the lead up to Full House, Hutchings went off looking for an environment where he could pursue an all traditional agenda. There may, as Fairport cofounder Simon Nicol suggested in an interview on the band’s website, have been some ongoing issues from the road accident that preceded Liege and Lief, but a glance at the track listings for the first three Steeleye albums suggests an almost totally traditional agenda.
That environment came in the form of Steeleye Span, with an initial lineup of Hutchings, London folk club duo Tim Hart and Maddy Prior and husband and wife Terry and Gay Woods. That lineup didn’t last, and after recording Hark! The Village Wait in 1970 split without performing live, largely due to tensions between the two couples. Terry and Gay left, veteran folkie Martin Carthy and fiddler Peter Knight came on board and off they went on the concert circuit, recording Please to See the King and Ten Man Mop, or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again along the way.
A change of management saw a push towards a more commercial sound, and that, in a nutshell, was the signal for Hutchings and Carthy to depart for more purist pastures (Hutchings in league with Shirley Collins) and their replacements (guitarist Bob Johnson and bass player Rick Kemp) brought more mainstream rock and blues influences to a band in the process of changing record companies as well.
Which brings us to Below the Salt, the first of ten albums recorded for Chrysalis, and the template for much of what followed. While the material was entirely traditional, the arrangements were steadily drifting towards the rock end of the spectrum with nudge nudge tales of milkmaids and gentle swains disappearing in search of lost cattle, a couple of lively jigs and reels and the odd familiar title (in this case John Barleycorn) among songs about sailors, foresters, shepherds and close encounters of the sorcerous jiggy jiggy kind (King Henry).
Maddy Prior took the majority of the vocal leads, Tim Hart made an impressive foil in the vocal department, Knight’s fiddle and Johnson’s guitar worked neatly in not-quite traditional but close enough to satisfy everyone but the most diehard purists tandem and the result was a template that worked well enough. Below the Salt sold better than the previous efforts (at least that’s my recollection) and delivered an unlikely seasonal hit in the form of Gaudete around Christmas 1973. That a cappella rendition of a medieval Finnish tune sung in Latin wasn’t quite the same as the album track, and only climbed as far as #14 in the UK Singles Chart, but was enough to indicate the presence of a degree of commercial viability.