> Steeleye Span > Songs > The Bosnian Hornpipes

The Bosnian Hornpipes

[trad. arr. Hart / Prior / Knight / Johnson / Kemp]

Steeleye Span recorded this tune a cappella for the last album with their “classic” line-up, Rocket Cottage (and it is one of their finest). The Australian-only compilation Recollections includes this track with an introduction by Peter Knight:

The next song isn’t a song at all. It’s ... a song, but it hasn’t got any words, because we all made the words up as we went along whis was tremendously exciting. This song is a sort of, eh, mathematical bit of musical nonsense. It’s quite good fun, it’s a hornpipe. Well it’s a hornpipe rhythm anyway. It’s not a traditional tune, it’s one that’s been written. It was written by a music stand actually that was fed into a computer, that links to the music stand. And this is how it turned out. It passes through several of the normal cadences, eh, utilising all the obvious harmonies that tadpoles can think of... Well I rather like tadpoles, they’re rather nice. It’s called The Bosnian Hornpipes, nothing at all to do with the joke about bees, they’re very very big, much bigger than the ordinary bee. It’s called The Bosnian Hornpipes or The Bosnian Hornpipes.”