9 June : Hark! The Village Wait

Forgive the language, but one of the joys of this project is when I put on an album and stop what I’m doing and think fuck! that’s good. It happened with this record, and the thing is, it’s one that I already own but haven’t listened to for some time.

In keeping with the emerging theme that it was the jazz and folk worlds that delivered the goods, the first album by Steeleye Span is a cracker.

The core line up here was Tim Hart, Maddy Prior, Gay Woods, Terry Woods and Ashley Hutchings and, electric instruments notwithstanding, it is much closer to ‘the tradition’ than their later sound. I like that later sound, but prefer this.

This is the only album with this line up, and that’s a shame as one of its glories is the dual lead vocals of Gay Woods and Maddy Prior, shown to particularly good effect on killer versions of Dark-Eyed Sailor and a wondrous My Johnny Was A Shoemaker. The whole album has a clarity and a freshness that had nothing to do with prevailing musical fashions in the pop or rock worlds of 1970. Whether it’s energy comes from the personal difficulties that led to the breakup of this line up has to be an unknown, but the fact is that they bottled magic on this one.

I listened on cd, but the album is on Spotify and YouTube