Maddy Prior Interview
With Johnnie Craig in the run up to Irish tour.
"A lot of this set will be from Wintersmith,” Prior says in warm Lancastrian tones, “and the rest will be from our catalogue – which is very difficult to choose, because we have such a vast catalogue! Everyone has their favourite album, so we can’t please everyone, but we do try and pick songs we think people will know.”
“The ballads are the big thing with Steeleye,” she says. “Bob put tunes and arrangements to them and we’d all sit and work them out together”. The beguiling ‘Alison Gross’, from their marvelous 1973 album Parcel of Rogues, deals with an ugly evil witch who transforms the narrator, who spurned her affections, into a worm – fun, but dark stuff. “And we had one of those magic moments where the queen met us and praised us for what she said were (Prior adopts regal voice) ‘such jolly tunes!". And talking about their early years playing folk rock: “Some people weren’t going to like what we did anyway but we always ploughed our own furrow”, “We did things in a way we thought would allow people to hear the songs better – and it became our sound, for better or worse”.
Looking forward to the Irish gigs, Maddy says the band’s energy is high but there is a little frisson of the unknown, with young fiddle player Jessie May Smart recently replacing long-time Steeleye member Peter Knight, who left last year. Refreshing the line-up may be part of the reason why Steeleye are not only still recording, but finding new sources of inspiration. Prior agrees. “It’ll be interesting to see how it goes with the new member but we’ve always been quite a powerful band. The material from Wintersmith is quite heavy and we’re still doing a couple of those dark ballads. It’s powerful stuff. I suppose that’s the thing with us – there’s nothing sweet about Steeleye”.
