Pity Them What See Him Suffer
In the seventies I used to really like Steeleye Span.
I probably got into them around the time of Gaudete and they used to be on TV a lot. While they weren’t my first introduction to folk music they were a formative influence as I started to listen more.
My stand out memories from the time would probably be Thomas the Rhymer and Alison Gross but I also remember when Now We Are Six and Commoners Crown got a lot of attention on the hipper radio shows as they were released.
In time I went off them, although my favourite single track of theirs is the Mike Batt produced “Fighting For Strangers” which was way, way ahead of its time in what it set out to do (link below).
After a while I stopped listening to them, as you do, although occasionally dipping into compilations and stuff. And some of their old TV appearances which appear on YouTube are pretty embarassing now so there was a kind of tacit aversion therapy underway.
But for some reason I started listening to their very earliest records on Spotify over the weekend and realised again why they had made such an impact when they did when they were still raw before their sound was locked in and they became famous.
I’m not fond of their later sound which became a bit too produced and structured for my taste but the early stuff is well worth a revisit.
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