STEELEYE:
You can't hold on to people if they're restless.
By Eric Winter
©New Musical Express
11 Dec 1971
Hard on behind Tyger Hutchings' departure from Steeleye Span the band is to lose Martin Carthy at Christmas. So, when they play 'London college of Printing', Elephant and Castle next Thursday (16), just who will be performing?
Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, of cause, and Peter Knight and Martin Carthy, who will still be with the line-up for a short while longer. "But there's just a chance," Tim Hart told me, "that we'll have our new bass player Rick Kemp sitting in with us on the gigs between now and Christmas." Rick, who played with Mick Chapman, will definitely join Steeleye, it was announced last week. Bob Johnson, who plays guitar, mandolin tenor banjo, and who was once half a duo with Peter Knight, will be Steeleye's other member. "Maddy and I," said Tim, "have already worked out half a dozen numbers with Peter and Rick. So there's only Bob to work in."
The half-dozen songs are from Tim and Maddy's duo repertoire. There have been persistent rumours that both would split, causing a total breakdown of the Span line-up. Tim firmly denies the suggestion. "Maybe," he said, "The confusion's arisen because Maddy and I have decided not to work as a duo for a while. We've been doing so much with the band we haven't had time to develop, as we'd like to. You get stale. While we're resting as a duo, we'll look at new repertoire, and we certainly intend to resume as a duo at a later stage. Some of our best duo repertoire is going into the band, where it'll be worked in and arranged."
"Martin's departure, like Tyger's, is quite amicable. We'll miss him, but it won't stop us doing the sort of trad songs we've always done; Bob Johnson will be quite able to take the melody lines, and the rest of us have always put in the harmonies. I can't see any great changes in our approach when Bob replaces Martin."
"It's actually very difficult to say exactly what the new band will be doing, because we've so far had just one day's rehearsal together. We begin to work seriously at the beginning of January. Our next British tour" (scheduled to begin late January) "will be a sort of testing ground. We'd like to get it right before we go out on the road. We have a spring tour fixed for the USA, but the dates are a bit flexible, and we don't want to go until we're really ready and sure the new sound works"
That new sound will almost certainly include some contemporary material: "We're been knocked out by some of the songs of Rab Noakes, especially 'Somebody Counts on Me.' But we'll chat up Lindisfarne before we go too far. They're to do some Noakes material, and we don't want to end up doing the same songs. We like Rab's songs, because they're very good songs. And as yet, nobody's bothered especially to take them up."
"There's no settled policy for the new line-up. Obviously we'll be doing a lot of trad numbers, but we'll probably know what shape they're going to take when Steeleye Mark Three gets down to serious rehearsal in the New Year." Tim thinks the new band will be an exciting thing to work with. "I'm very happy with the new set-up," he said, "I think it will be very satisfying to work with. You can't hold on to people if they're restless. Martin wants to do more solo club work and tyger has his own plans…though they're a bit vague at the moment."
Tyger intends, Tim tells me, to form a new band, but it won't include his wife, Shirley Collins, though they'll obviously work together at times. Several people have recently swum into the Hutchings orbit; Royston Wood of the defunct Young Tradition; Richard Thompson, ex-Fairport man; and John Kirkpatrick, a brilliant squeezebox player, and so far a loner on the scene. "It's quite possible that any or all of these could be in Tyger's new set-up," Tim speculated.
A swansong LP of Steeleye Mark Two is just about to be issued on the Pegasus label and I've listened to some impressive test pressings. It carries, among other tracks, "Gower Wassail" and "Marrowbones," both firm favourites in Span's stage performances. On the album, both are expanded quite a bit, but they're basically that established Steeleye sound that has so much to say about the music than torrents of descriptive prose.