PRIOR COMMITMENTS
WHAT MADDY DID
By Vivien Goldman
© Sounds
31 Jan 1976
Including the lowdown on the Win-A-Nite-Of-Love With Steeleye, Shock, Horror.
"They always used to tell me that I sounded just like Joan Baez. It was great the first three times, but then I got to thinking, do I really sound like Joan Baez?...really. I started singing because I couldn't do anything else. It seemed to me that my obvious next step was to go to university. I had a teacher at school who persuaded me that I really ought to try, cos I'd been planning to get into Art School. Well I think he was a bit over enthusiastic, because I didn't get in anywhere, but looking back on it, it's just as well."
It's a certain Maddy Prior talking, and It's quite likely you'll know her voice even if you've never followed the career of top folk-rock band Steeleye Span, seeing as how they've just received their first gold record for the album 'All around My Hat'. "It's our first release to go gold, although the last three have all gone silver. I'm jolly pleased, because they don't feel real unless they gold, don't you think?" Insert at this point one hearty rib-tickling laugh, a speciality of the Prior repertoire, and continue.
It's unlikely that anybody reading this won't have heard of Maddy, on reflection, as the specific reason that brought us together last Thursday in the press office of Chrysalis Records, just around the corner from the torrid bustle of Oxford Street, heart of London's West End, was the fact that Maddy had just topped the SOUNDS readers poll as Best Female Vocalist.
Nothing like starting with the obvious, so:
How do you feel about topping the poll? Are you surprised? "Yes...I mean, I've been hanging around the polls for so long, now. I figure it's down to good attendance that I won this time! Also, the fact that 'All Around My Hat' was around at the right time."
Am I not right in saying that the album of the same name was your first to be produced by curly-topped superwomble Mike Batt?
"Yeah, normally we produce ourselves, except for one that we did with Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull) as production consultant. That was 'Now We Are Six'. Even then, Ian wasn't really producing. It was more a case of mixing, and generally working on what we'd already put down. What usually happens is that everyone looks after their Own little area, like I listen extra hard to the vocals and say what I think should happen with them, It was the record company that made us take Mike on - now I'm glad they did! I don't know whether we'd use Mike on our next album, just because he's very booked up already, and quite often when we learn a lot we like to do the next thing on our own. That's what happened with Ian, we went on to produce 'Commoner's Crown' ourselves, and I'm still very pleased with that."
"But basically, when we took Mike on we wanted someone we thought was a good producer rather than a Steeleye Span freak. For us he had a completely fresh approach, he really is a very good producer. He's got immense concentration, something I'm very short on, and he had great sensitivity to what was going on in the songs. There was one track where he just added a bit of brass at the end... I'd never have thought of that, It was brilliant. He had an overall scope, and that was so much better than everyone just working on their little bits, as it turned out."
Just to set the scene a little, so you don't feel left out, the situation is this: I am sitting across the table from Ms Prior, who is looking delectable in a nifty denim/brocade dress, the finest I ever done see, and what we shoved in our gobs during the interview was this, 1 bottle of red wine, 1 salad each, hers with chicken, mine without. Innumerable Marlboro cigarettes (mine).
There you have the physical context in which this intercourse took place - I always think the scene helps elaborate the mood, don't you? Before we settle down to the nitty-gritty of Maddy's life, opinions, and art, there was one little question which had been intriguing me. To wit, there was a gigantic hurly, burly of a fracas, whose tremors even reached our shores, surrounding events on the recent Steeleye Span tour of Australia. What was the real poop behind the rumour? Roughly, as we all know, it was something about Win-A-Nite-Of-Love with Steeleye Horror Shocker.
"We decided to run a competition, and the competition was that any girl who bought an album and answered a few simple questions. What's my second name, things like that, would win twelve hours with any member of the band after the gig. Which assumed, though it wasn't actually indicated, a Night Of Love as they called it. It was kind of a joke but Tony (Secunda, their manager whose idea it was) had an eye on what was going on I assume. But it kind of took him aback, I think, when it actually hit the front page. Someone told us later that it was between the cricket season and the shark season, so the front page was up for grabs, as it were. And it so happened, we were there, running through airports!... and then the reporters started saying things, like, 'I hear you're offered for the next concert', well of course I freaked! (hoots of laughter)."
"The outcome was that the papers did interviews with us and the Divine Light Mission, who were a bit short of publicity at the time and we all did very well out of it, The girl who won chose Bob, and after all the fuss we decided we really ought to have a party after the gig and she turned up with her boyfriend. The reporters all stood round with nothing to do, we all chatted a couple of hours and then she went home."
"So naturally what happened after all this kerfuffle was that it was a rotten gig, everything went wrong. There was buzz on the lights, a really BAD buzz, and being Australian they kept trying it out to see if it WAS buzz - and it was. Then someone decided to change a plug to see if it was that, and pulled out all the plugs in the middle of a number... we were screaming by the end of the gig. Isn't that just what always happens, you're doing well in one direction, then you plummet in another..."
So there you have the story behind the story. Returning to more abstract areas, Maddy and I started discussing 'The Band'. How long have you been going now?
"The band formed in '69 - that's when the name Steeleye Span first took off, anyway, but Tim (Hart) and myself are the only original members still in it. This band came together four years ago. Sure we get pissed-off with each other at times, but I think we get along comparatively well, you do get to know someone after working with them for four years, We have phases of getting on really well, especially after we've had a rest. Of course, we also have phases where someone becomes the baddy, it's a bit like working with any group of people. But six is a nice unit to work with, we also have Chris Coates who's our permanent roadie, so he's part of the situation, part of the band, he's there all the time. He's also the best diplomat I've ever met. And then there's the manager, if he comes along, it depends what kind of tour it is, and he's got an assistant, and there's the road crew, so by the end you've got a working unit of ten or twelve people, maybe more. So you never have to be alone."
"It's hard to say if there's a different feeling since, 'All Around My Hat' became a hit, because we haven't really done any work since then. But we were just about to finish the tour when the record broke and I noticed there was a different kind of audience at the concerts, younger more demonstrative. It was terrific, I mean, our audiences have always been good, and fairly demonstrative, but this younger crowd was a different proposition, which was great, because it really made you think. And I like gigging a lot anyway.
"For me, the performance side of our work is the best side of it really, It's really good from the musical side, and performance is a very physical outlet, activity, it's like playing squash or something, I still get nerves before going on-stage, all of that, but as time passes you get better.
"I've never been nervous about my actual singing, except at the Crystal Palace gig you saw. I'd had laryngitis, and the day before I couldn't even talk. I didn't have any idea whether I could sing until I got on-stage. The day before I started singing and it was absolutely dreadful - my voice was actually breaking up. I couldn't make it work at all. I couldn't drink to calm my nerves, so it was really a case of just throw it up into the air and see if it flies! But it turned out really well, and I think it was because I was so frightened, nervous. There's nothing like a good shot of adrenaline to keep you going, and that was a double dose!"
Double dose of whatever fiendish energy source it may have been meant that Steeleye Span saved the concert on that fine day at Crystal Palace. The weather scintillated, the lake before the stage glistened serenely and act after act (with the sole exception of John Cale) was dire. Steeleye came on, and everything took a turn for the better, as I'm sure everyone in attendance would agree. The gig was marked by aquatic frivolities, people in funny costumes tumbling in and out of the water, boats capsizing and righted again, and a general air of blissful disarray.
The highlight of the Steeleye set, or perhaps not a highlight, more a constant pleasure, was Maddy dancing, If my memory serves me well, there's been more than one song written on that very same subject. Which isn't surprising because she looks genuinely enchanting skipping about on-stage, like an Arthur Rackham fairy princess flitting here and there with long billowing skirts belling out wherever she may go. And just as important as the atmosphere she adds to the music with her dancing is the sheer enjoyment she generates up there, which spreads itself around to the audience in double quick time.
"I like dancing, I always have liked dancing. I learnt how to do a basic clog dance, and it was, pretty basic, through various people around, and at Cecil Sharp House (home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society), and I just picked up odds and sods on the way around. When I see real clog dancers, of course, they've all perfected it much more than I ever did. But then I've never been a particular technical person, the feel of the thing has always been what I go for, I don't go very deeply into things as a whole, I mean I've stayed with folk music for quite a few years now, one way or another, and don't forget that for years in the whole of the folk world, not only did you not dance, you didn't MOVE - if you moved, that was selling out! It was a kind of an academic world and one to which I'm not really suited as such, because I'm not an academic."
One way or another, that leads us back to the Maddy Prior Story, her life and times.
"I come from Blackpool and I moved down when I was 11, so I'm neither Northern or Southern. Now I live in North London and have done for about 7 years, in Muswell Hill. But after Blackpool, I went to St Albans, and that's why I have that curious non-allegiance to North or South."
"When I was at school, I was never very good at the technical side of singing, so they always used to be threatening to not let me in the school choir, that kind of thing. (By the way, that's an encouragement for any budding songstresses who've just been told to clear out of the choir for the umpteenth time!) What that meant was that I was actually rather sloppy, and a bit rebellious, never used to turn up for practice, never learnt the things I was supposed to learn, that sort of stuff. They wanted me to do all the right things at the right time, and I wasn't very good at that. I just crept in under the wire most of the time, with a lot of mouthing and blagging, and I've been carrying on ever since!"
What a little joker! But seriously for moment, Maddy let's have a quick ponder about this folk-rock thing, that's actually had a book and an album devoted to charting its progression already, ('The Electric Muse') it's not even over yet. I had a cherished theory that I'd been cherishing busily for - oh, years about the folk-rock scene having originated in North London. Now this highly elaborate and circumlocutious theory, revolving around friend's brothers having been to grammar school with Richard Thompson, that kind of thing, was blasted out of existence so precisely by Maddy in about three sentences that I'm ashamed to repeat it here. So instead I'll offer you a couple of observations on the genre under discussion.
"It's more a British movement than a local one, because there are bands around the country that have been trying to do rock and folk. To some extent I think they've been dogged by financial difficulties because it's very expensive to run a band and very cheap to run a folk unit. You've got to learn that one is different from the other and you can't work the folk audiences as a rock band, so you have to move into a rock band field to make it financially viable. A lot of bands got caught between the two things. We were lucky because we started so long ago, there was a lot more money around. People were forthcoming with the money."
"When I started singing everyone sang the blues, bluegrass, and that sort of thing. It was all Lightnin, Hopkins and John Hooker, Leadbelly was almost passé (laughs). I was less than 17, and very influenced by what was going on.
"I found that my voice was suited to Joan Baez material obviously I was going to be better at singing Joan Baez than I was at singing Leadbelly, that's fairly self evident, but it hadn't occurred to me at the time!...then someone said why don't you try singing English songs instead of American, actually they said you're **!?** dreadful at singing American songs, you'd better sing English ones. It was this couple, an American folk duo called Sandy and Jeannie that I was acting as a roadie for at the time - they've split up now."
"They had lots of tapes no-one else had they were connoisseurs of folk and country. It was the English music that was unusual at the time, they got it from diverse sources, some rather irregular, I listened to the tapes, and thought that's a bit boring but I'll learn it just to keep 'em happy. Then after a while I realised they were actually quite nice songs, but all the tapes there are of old people singing, with voices that are nearly gone. And while it's very interesting listening to that if you know what you're listening for, if you're 17 and don't know what you're listening for, it can be extremely boring, as to me it was at first.
"Then I thought to me self, well, it's a bit elite so I'll have a go, so I had a go! So I learnt them, and then decided that I really rather liked them, and they were rather fascinating tunes, especially if you tried to learn them properly. You'd learn them as you thought you heard them, and I'd think, well I've got that one down pat, I'd go away and sing it for two or three weeks, come back and listen to the song again, and it wouldn't be anything like what I'd been singing! Because I'd been flattening the modal scale a lot, as was pointed out several times by different people - well, 'You're getting it wrong' was basically how they put it!
And that's how Maddy got involved with traditional folk. It was at that time that she became involved with Tim Hart, an association that carries on today in Steeleye Span. I was curious to know exactly what made Maddy and Tim go Electric. "It wasn't the money that made me change, it was the frustration and boredom of always doing the same circuit and doing the same thing. Also wanting to work with other musicians, cos with me not being able to play an instrument, we were limited to one musician, Tim, and two voices. And the permutations of such a combination are fairly endless but after four years, they become less endless."
Which just about brings us up to the Inevitable: What Next?
"Well. 1976 so far is a bit of an empty year. We may be going to Russia, which would be fantastic. I'm really a touring freak the lads prefer to be at home with their families, but I prefer to be away. I get rather bored off the road, music and touring is what absorbs me."
"And I've done an album with my friend June Tabor, the traditional singer. It's on Chrysalis, and it won't be out till March. It's an acoustic album with Martin Carthy, Nic Jones, Danny Thompson, and some other people. Keith Morris has done the cover, which is fantastic, and it's got a great title. ****** (I'm not allowed to tell so it'll be a surprise - Vivien.)"
"Here's a huge theory for why Steeleye Span does what it does. We want to take folk music back to the people, so that's why I got such a big, kick when someone told me that the Tottenham crowd sang , All Around John Pratt - that really is reversing the roles. I remember Sandy (of Sandy and Jeannie) saying that it would be ironic if an American turned an English person on to English music, which is what happened, So it's nice to think that an English tune has gone back into the language instead of an American tune. Usually now you have to filter things back to English people through the American media."
© Sounds