> Steeleye Span > Articles > Maddy Prior - Folk Roots 1988

PRIOR ENGAGEMENT

Simon Jones meets the dancing Miss P.

(from Folk Roots, 1988)

Brrrp, tones the bell on the door of Topic records. Wait … the sound of approaching footsteps and a creak from the door reveal Andy Cronshaw. “Ah,” he says in recognition of a hack and his task, “they’re over the road in the pub”. ‘They’ are Maddy Prior and June Tabor, a.k.a. The Silly Sisters, who are here in the big smoke, miles from their Cumbrian homes, to put the final touches to one of the most eagerly awaited British folk albums for quite some time. Said disc is the follow-up to the eponymous offering which went on to become a classic when it was first unwrapped a cool twelve years ago. I cross the tarmac and find the Sillies about to demolish a glass of Guinness apiece.

They inform me that life is hectic and that the train service between London and the Lakes is awful. They also think I should be trying the Guinness instead of the lager under my nose. We chat and then drink up. June Tabor goes back across the road to see Cronshaw, do some mixing and meet up with Paul James who’s arrived to overdub some frail woodwinds on a couple of tracks. Maddy and I set off up the road in search of Steeleye Span, who are also locked in the studio with the intention of showing the world a new slice of plastic later this year.

Steeleye Mk.2 - the Carthy/Hutchings version

Maddy Prior was born in Blackpool, but fresh from St. Albans when she took to the folk circuit with a banjo and Tim Hart. She was the smooth-voiced lady who, with her tales of murderers who topped people as they slept, yarns about drunken soldiers whose legs got hacked off, stories of impossible love over social barriers, and her dances to reeling fiddles, helped ease my teenage angst. All my mates owned albums by 10CC, Argent and - Lord forgive them - dinosaurs like Led Zeppelin. All of this progressive nonsense phased me not one bit - I stuck firmly and doggedly with Steeleye Span. One of young Jones’s first concerts was at the ABC Chester, two hours of magic as Maddy and the lads fired on all cylinders promoting a thing called Rocket Cottage. Heady times, perhaps a little innocent, but very precious.

That voice was the crucial factor; it could shriek, it could charm, it could growl and it could soothe, depending on the mood or setting. Maddy Prior owns one of the finest sets of tonsils this side of the Atlantic and she remains the yardstick by which many budding young hopeful folk females are measured.

Steeleye Mk.2 - the Carthy/Hutchings version

There is more than a hint of the gypsy about Maddy. Her musical wanderings have been many and ranging. Consider her merely in terms of ‘folk singer’ and you do her a great injustice. Sure she stems from and mostly works within a rootsy framework, but she has also burst beyond the boundaries set up for her by those who think of her purely in electric folk ideals. Recently she has (i) polished off the second Silly Sisters album and is taking to the road with the package yet again; (ii) recorded with Steeleye Span (the band of which she is the sole survivor) their umpteenth record, and jets all over the world gigging with them; (iii) released a record of early music and Christmas carols backed by a consort, The Carnival Band, who plan to involve her further in a celebration of Methodist music; (iv) had a popular club duo with husband Rick Kemp, ex of Steeleye, where she revives her past work and in many instances revalues it; (v) run full left of field when she turned up doing vocals on Japanese opera, as well as writing incidental music for Border, her home region ITV company; (vi) been a working mum.

Did I say earlier that this was a task? No, talking to Maddy Prior is a pleasure. She’s in positive form and the love of what she’s doing comes through; she gets a genuine kick from music, and would probably pack it in if she didn’t. She fills the glasses …

What does Maddy Prior 1988 wish that she had known in 1966?

“I wish I hadn’t been so frightened, but that’s a thing of age and what you are. Probably in twenty years time I’ll wish I wasn’t so frightened as I am now. Fear stops you doing things and I wish I’d done more than I did, mostly musical.”

That implies you started very young …

“Yes, straight from school. I started singing in folk clubs at 13 or 14, it was socially acceptable then to go to folk clubs, though I was far more interested in going dancing. I couldn’t understand why all these people got up and sang, but nobody danced. I thought they were mad. That was what I thought a good evening out was about, to bop frantically for four hours and come home exhausted.”

Mid-period Steeleye - Kemp, Prior, Hart, Johnson, Knight

After skipping and dancing through the folk scene of the late 1960s, Maddy Prior linked up with like-minded individuals and switched on the folk tradition. Post-Liege and Lief Fairport refugee Ashley Hutchings, Tim Hart - her folk club oppo - and Maddy joined Terry Woods (now a Pogue) and his wife Gay (now of Irish new-wave band, Operaracket) in forming the initial line-up of the most successful folk-rock band of them all, Steeleye Span. With the benefit of hindsight did she see the electrification of folk songs as something that had to happen or as a conscious move?

“Very conscious. I remember Peggy Seeger saying that she couldn’t understand why it hadn’t happened before. It was totally understandable because everyone in the folk scene was chomping at the bit to do something with electric music. You were limited by the fact that you were in small units in a small area. You couldn’t work with other musicians because it wasn’t financially viable. So when we formed the band we moved things into the colleges and that was different. Plus of course, there’s the fact that I fancied making a lot of noise.”

The story of how Maddy and several others succeeded by making ‘a lot of noise’ has been well documented here and elsewhere and this isn’t the time to delve into the life history of folk rock. Water passed under many bridges for her, projects came and went. At the end of last decade she made a singularly bold move when she cut all ties with her chosen area of work and set course on a solo career, producing some remarkable music; four albums full of her own songs which varied from the introspective ballad Mother and Child to the full-grown reggae rock of Half Listening. I wondered what stirred her to write?

“All sorts of things can trigger things in my mind, but I’m interested in ideas. I more often get a beginning and an end. But there must be an appealing idea.”

Many of your songs, while not feminist, are strongly feminine.

“Yes,” she considers, “That’s true. That was a very strong point in my writing. I do write that way, but not deliberately. I tend to write a lot in the first person, but as a character. If you can make a song work in the first person, then it should naturally apply to anybody. I write in the first person, but none of it is personal.”

The first two Maddy Prior albums appeared on Steeleye’s old label, Chrysalis, and had titles which reflected metamorphosing ideals; Woman in the Wings and Changing Winds. Much of that early material reflected the folksy side of things?

“The writing has changed since then,” she nods. “There is an element of folk influence in my writing and there are times when it goes off completely at a tangent, like Baggy Pants and I Told You So, anything but folky. When I started to write I thought I would have control, then when I began I was amazed. A bit of crafting and technique over the top, but if a song is worth anything then it comes from a place you know not of. These songs kept coming out in strange styles and through them I realised a lot of my roots in jazz and the Andrews Sisters. It helped me find more out about my own voice.”

Steeleye Span 1987

The members of the Maddy Prior Band, varied throughout the early 1980s and have included John O’Connor, who recently was the mastermind behind The Firm’s Startrekkin’, ex-Sniff And The Tears guitarist Mick Dyche, as well as Doug Morter of Albion fame, and Nigel Pegrum of Steeleye. One constant was Rick Kemp, with whom Maddy wrote ever more abrasive and melodic pop of an English style. The pinnacle of this ‘feel’ came with an album for the now defunct Making Waves organisation. Going for Glory. in 1983 was a hard-edged, driving disc that made for anything but cosy listening. The tales of modem relationships, glossy living and political satire are delivered with a punch and precision that are rarely captured. She had renamed her band The Answers and its silver deco cover showed just how far Madeleine Prior had moved since sneaking into folk clubs under age. Going for Glory. is a thoroughly modern slice of plastic. Why, it even had The Eurythmics on it.

Dave Stewart arranged and handled production on Deep in the Darkest Night, a track which saw Annie Lennox playing flute and singing backup vocals. RCA insisted they put the single out and for a while Maddy’s flag flew high. “That song is wonderful,” she says. “That’s one of those songs - one of the best. Rick surpassed himself when he wrote that…”

Some of the material she wrote when the Maddy Prior Band was in full spate turns up as part of the duo work she does with Rick. At the first viewing of Prior/Kemp, I remember being knocked back a couple of steps; basic guitar or bass and that voice is a potent combination. The fact that the material had been reduced to the bare bones meant that you could hear Maddy Prior using her vocals as an instrument. It cut to the core.

“We’re going out with that again, much the same material but with a couple of standards - It’s great, that back-to-basics feel and Rick loves it too. It’s an opportunity to work in a very real situation. But then I like variety, working with the band, going hell-for-leather and with June, which is much more controlled, With Rick things tend to be variable because he’s such a dynamic character. That makes life interesting.”

And surely in that format you’re far more aware of your voice?

“Oh yes, but with Steeleye it’s a physical thing and I enjoy being moved by music, jumping up and down. Everyone refers to the dancing - …” When you talk to Maddy it’s hard to stay away from the subject of dancing.

How had she come across the Carnival Band?

“We did a radio show together. That was how it came about and they asked me if I would sing on some stuff, so along I went and found it extraordinarily high and fast. So I took a deep breath and galloped into it - Angels From the Realms of Glory and all that. A year or so later Andy Watts, the mainspring of the band, asked if I’d do some more and so away we went and recorded in Frenchay. That was nice and different, all early music, and the tour was jolly. It’s not at all what you’d expect from a consort. There were carols, party poppers and streamers, all sorts on those shows.

Mr and Mrs Kemp

She describes the album in warm, affectionate tones. A Tapestry of Carols came out on Saydisc in time for Christmas last year and shows yet another angle to the Prior voice, this time its timbre and tone, the ethereal feel that she gets handling religious music. Had the Carnival Band selected the material?

“They said we’d do all the normal ones, so I thought OK, came to look at the material and knew about four. It was their idea of ordinary, and a mediaeval player’s idea of ordinary isn’t mine, But I learned some wonderful songs. In fact there’s more stuff in the pipeline, We’re working on the anniversary of Wesley’s conversion. So it’s Charles’s hymns to celebrate John’s conversion. There’s some great material there. The power of those old melodies is tremendous, We’ve gone back to some early tunes and there’s one from 1790, a Wesley hymn with an American tune, and it’s incredible how American it sounds. You wouldn’t have thought they’d have their own style in 1790, but there you are, Amazing!”

Pretty much my reaction, Maddy, when 1 heard you’d been doing Japanese opera.

“Well, not exactly. It was Carmina Burana, which is mediaeval German documents written in Latin. It was arranged by this Japanese composer, Ayuo Takahashi, The music was awful to learn but the result was beautiful. Anyway he put it out as an album in Japan.”

I sigh and make a note of yet one more obscurity to track down for the collection.

The legends that have grown up around the first Silly Sisters record are many - What began as a good-natured bit of fun between two friends has become a first class example of a cult album, Maddy had just enjoyed massive success following the chart-topping All Around My Hat, and was all over the television on Steeleye’s Electric Folk series. A folk singer hadn’t really experienced a higher profile and wouldn’t until Shane MacGowan cackled his way into our lives. June Tabor pinnacled the folk ladder and so it was probably natural that the two of them would do something in tandem at some point. They gathered a stellar cast of folk players - Martin Carthy, Andy Irvine and Nic Jones among them - and actually got Chrysalis to fork out on an album of traditional music, The vinyl which resulted was splendid, the sort of effort that was destined to be copied in folk clubs the length of the land. Strangely it achieved cult proportions over the pond where Takoma issued the disc, and Australia listened eagerly too. They toured a somewhat chaotic but well-meaning band to promote it and despite the rough edges, that jaunt has gone down as one of the mid-’70s folk high spots. Had the Silly Sisters taken on a life of their own?

“We talked about getting it back together again five years ago. First time was good fun and there was no reason why we shouldn’t have a go, but June was in the restaurant business and she was so busy it never happened. So when she moved round the corner from me [they live but a few miles apart] it became more obvious that we’d do another album. ‘Oh hello, let’s sing this song…’ - it was literally like that, which is great because we can sing together, our versions of the songs are the same, and we have much the same view of material, though very different approaches. But that gives our work an added tension and interest.”

So the Silly Sisters are upon us once again, with one tour already under their belts and sessions in Topic’s basement studio promising that the second platter will be every bit as canny as its predecessor. In the short time I was in the location not only did Blowzabella’s reed master arrive, but so did news that Sìleas would be there the next morning to strum their harps. It should be as packed with great players as the first.

What sort of material was going to be on there?

“It’s still fairly traditional folk, but there are some written things, a Henry Purcell round is on it. Really a variety of things and styles from Arabian to raucous folk.”

And of course there’s the highly fashionable Andrew Cronshaw as producer.

“It’ll be the Silly Sisters though. Andy is a sensitive producer. He knows the feel we want, he’s such a good musician and he knows the best musicians around, so we get what suits each track. I think he’ll do a great job.”

Involved in the Silly family is one musician who’d be the last you’d think of: Dan Ar Bras is a Breton guitarist of fierce reputation and fiery rock. His roots really lie in R&B, though he worked extensively with harp lord Alan Stivell throughout the last decade and was for a short time a Fairporter. His own albums of raucous Breton music had drifted to the heavy end of the spectrum. How on earth did he end up with the essentially British Silly Sisters?

“He was about as difficult to get hold of as was possible, but then we have a built-in awkwardness about us. Dan’s a lovely guitarist who’s great on ideas about music. He’s worked so long in Celtic styles with Stivell that he’s learned many approaches to music that not many musicians are familiar with. The man’s a master of free time playing. What the Silly Sisters do is largely Celtic so he fits in easily.”

He’s a rather loud rock picker as well.

“But that works for me you see. I can relate to the swings and rhythms in his playing, so there is a crossover point between him and me. He understands both sides. June is more used to free singing and an introspective approach, where as I’m more extrovert in the way I do things. But that works well together and both Dan and Huw [Warren. Silly keyboardist] cross bridges very well.”

If the portents are anything to go by, or the mixing that I heard Mr. Cronshaw experimenting with are any indication, then the second coming of the Silly Sisters is going to be one of the events of 1988.

From time to time the correspondence pages of this magazine have contained letters on the subject of Steeleye Span. “Where are they?” “Why don”t you cover them?” “Shame.” Just some of the cries of anguish. Our editor and letters person both offered reasons, but really Steeleye themselves hadn’t been all that active either, nothing much to cover but the odd gig. Since their reformation, they’d delivered only one album up until late 1986 when Back in Line appeared on Flutterby, a title which affirmed that Span were returned and determined once more.

The Silly Sisters

Do you mind that people see you as Steeleye Span. You are after all, the longest serving member?

“My contribution to the band is a fair amount, but I went through all this when I launched my solo career,” she considers. “Everyone sees themselves as being important, more so than they are at some point… but no, I don’t think I’m phased by that any more.”

Why had there been such a gap, years in fact , between Sails of Silver and Back in Line?

“It’s very hard when you re-form a band because we have ideas about what we want to do and some things don’t work out the way you think they will. We got confused a bit. lost direction. It was during that time Tim left. We were at a point of change, everyone had started to write a bit. That was what was happening on Sails of Silver, but we’d lost our connection with the tradition which was our spring, the point where we all come together. Otherwise we are very disparate in our attitudes and influences, gradually we’re re-establishing that.”

Way down on the other side of the world, our Australian cousins fared a little better for Steeleye product during the lean years. Chrysalis Australia issued an out-takes and rarities package, Recollections, with promo tracks, remixes and messages, as well as On Tour, a live collection from the Adelaide Opera show of 1982 which got a typical post-Sails gig onto vinyl. Maddy is less than impressed by all this down-under activity.

“That live album is bad … which is so disappointing because we heard some of it after the gig and thought it was quite nice.”

We Brits meantime had to make do with a series of cheapo repackage jobs, which at their best I suppose introduce Steeleye to a new audience, the aftermath of the roots explosion who may have seen the name in their elder brother’s singles collection and wondered what a band with such a strange name sounded like.

“They’re so boring, those compilations, aren’t they?” asks Maddy. But it appears that Chrysalis are about to deliver yet another to us. “Portfolio it’s called. A different selection from all the others, which concentrates very much on jigs and the big ballads, which is only one angle to what we do. A lot of young people I suppose won’t have picked up on our earlier stuff.”

Do they ask you for permission to do a compilation?

“Yes, Chrysalis do, but I’m sure we didn’t choose The Best of.” [This is a singularly perplexing selection in one of the grottiest covers you’ll find, now available as a CD]. “I’d never really looked at it before, but I’d say Best of was one person’s choice, a very strange selection to call the best. It concentrates on all the ’up front’ part of Span’s repertoire and so with this next one we’ve balanced it, working our way through what wasn’t on the other.”

1987 was looking good for Steeleye. Back in Line got good press, they were all penning substantial melodies and getting gigs here, there and everywhere. They’d come to terms with themselves as a five-piece, and were going great guns when Rick Kemp decided to leave. Not only had Maddy’s long-time musical partner Tim Hart left, but now her husband was getting off the Span merry-go-round to boot.

“For me it was a big wrench. I miss his personality and his style of bass. But he wanted to do other things and go his own way. So Steeleye rolls on regardless of any of us, really. Chris [Staines] is with us now. We did have Mark [Williamson], but Chris is a great player who has no preconceived ideas about the music, which is good. That leaves Bob [Johnson], Pete [Knight] and me to work on the material, which is a nice balance.”

Maddy Prior and Tim Hart, late 1960s

During the last tour Span did, it seemed to me that the band was very much nailing its colours to the electric folk door.

“Yes, I would say so. I’ve always thought it’s an awful term, but people think in pigeon-holes and I may not like it, but it’s a reality. We do work best with an area of traditional music moved into something else. We’re not good necessarily at straight trad - that’s not our forte. Steeleye have that love of the tradition, but we’re not about reactivating it.”

When you reformed the group, there was much talk about writing traditional ideas in a modern way.

“That’s a much harder job to do than we really sussed. Those are very hard songs to write. When they come up they’re fine but we’re not as obsessed as we were with that direction.”

So what sort of stuff will be on the album that you’re recording at the moment?

“We’re doing some traditional and some written material. Pete’s done a lovely canon, only he’s done it for three violins, which should be clever. But we’re not using an outside producer. It’s another self-production job.”

During their heyday Steeleye had a reputation for dressing up. Tim Hart especially used to have glittered shirts, sequinned flares, and while the rest may have worn less off-the-wall creations, Maddy admits she used to change three or four times during a gig. Span may not have been able to match the tartan hordes of the Rollers or the extremes of Bowie, but they had image. Only Horslips, as I recall, used to roll up in outlandish costumes to match Prior and company. Does she ever cringe at their stack heels and wide lapels in old photos?

“No we enjoyed it. I love dressing up. I’m just hacked off that I can’t do it now. But I used to love being outlandish as long as it didn’t get in the way of the music. It all adds to the show. But I suppose there are certain things you can’t go back and try, like the Lyke Wake Dirge.” [Probably one of the most remembered pieces of Steeleye musical theatre]. “We had a bash at that recently, but it didn’t work. God, you should have been there the first time we did that. Steeleye walked out on that stage at Bristol in those tatter costumes that I’d spent weeks sticking on, and you could have heard a pin drop. With a spotlight on each of us we looked huge. It scared everybody shitless.”

Show has always been a part of Steeleye’s make up. If it wasn’t tatters costumes it was revived mummer’s plays. And still to this day, though they are honed down to their music and dances, Span gigs have a high percentage of showmanship about them.

Very often too they’ll be referred to along with Fairport and many others as first generation, for since then outfits like the Pogues, Oysterband, Men They Couldn’t Hang, Malcolm’s Interview and Run Rig have come along and moved electric music and folk roots into new avenues and channels. Does she find the comparison of old and new a little tiring?

“Yes, we’re all doing pretty much the same things. It’s just that Steeleye have been doing it longer, apart from Terry Woods. Everything changes and has to move on, because each generation views things differently. I can remember listening to The Spinners at St. Albans folk club and thinking they were amazing. I’d never heard anything like it before. They had that girl Jacqui with them then. They went on just the same, but people started calling them invalid, which wasn’t true, they were still doing good work. Different things are viewed from new perspectives, it’s life.”

Throughout all this, the Steeleye family seems to have remained separate from the general folk/rock axis.

“Yes, I’ve never quite sussed that. It’s true, not aloof but certainly distinct to the folk rock conglomerate. All those people leaving and joining other bands, all part of a large family. I think basically what we’re talking about is that none of us have ever joined Fairport.” She laughs long and merrily …

Maddy Prior has been schemer, survivor, leader, writer, minstrel and chameleon. She will never sit still. Her enjoyment of the music she creates shines through the 30-plus albums she has helped craft during her time in the musical scheme. This year she will be as busy as ever, probably more than ever and those distinctly English tones that seemed to call to me, all those years back, will continue to chill, enthrall and turn heads. She is no longer a woman in the wings.

Acknowledgements

Transcription to HTML by N.H.J.Long, June 2002.

Feature © Simon Jones / Folk Roots, 1988.

Presented here for historical interest only. No commercial exploitation, in either printed or electronic form, is permitted.