Steeleye Span
There’s a lot more to the band than All Around My Hat.
We talk to frontwoman Maddy Prior as the folk-rock veterans wrap up a lengthy tour to celebrate a half-century as a band.
Fifty almost completely uninterrupted years of Steeleye Span is quite an achievement. Is there a secret? No. We never thought it would last this long. It wasn’t even a question. When we began, bands never hung around for more than a few years. So we kind of made it up as we went along. The bottom line is that you must be passionate about the music.
Apart from a hiatus between 1978 and 1980, did the band ever come close to breaking up? Yes. It almost disintegrated in about 2013, and then we perked up again. The music is really what matters, regardless of who’s in the band. Back in the 1970s that sort of thing was much more important. And we got out of having to make two albums a year, which helped relieve the pressure.
The anniversary album Est’d 1969 was very well received. Acknowledging the past and yet keeping things in the here and now must have been a challenge? I think it really helped that we got in some younger players that don’t really know much about folk music at all. And it worked because they approach the songs without any awareness of tradition.
A hit single can be a blessing and a curse. Which of those categories does the band’s 1975 revision of the traditional song All Around My Hat fall into? It’s a hard one to sing, but it’s definitely been a blessing. Without it we might not have survived for this long, and I love the fact that it got me onto Top Of The Pops.
During the 1990s you guested with Status Quo on their own version of All Around My Hat, and even toured with them. Is that friendship still ongoing? Absolutely. I’m still in contact with Francis [Rossi]. What a great bloke he is.
Are Steeleye Span often confused with Steely Dan? Oh yes, though it used to happen much more back in the day. Not so much now, because Steely Dan aren’t known so well as they used to be, but back in the 1970s it happened all the time.
The tour ends in London on December 17.