Maddy Prior on Wintersmith, Peter Knight's departure and why being in Steeleye Span is hard

"We haven't learned anything about how to deal with being in a band. 

We've learned nothing. We've never been sensible, that's just never been part of our make-up. A lot of the time there are stresses that are quite unnecessary."

"Terry (Pratchett) has listened to our music from way back," said Maddy Prior. "He was introduced to Boys of Bedlam as a young man and when you read his books you recognise references to our work. He quotes lines from our songs and you sort of recognise them. So he uses 'you love not where you live' which is a song that we do... But he also knows a lot of other material."

I was asking what it was that, in essence, Steeleye Span and Terry Pratchett have in common because after reading Wintersmith - the book on which the band's latest album is based - it struck me that it was more than just an appreciation of each other's work (which has been apparent since Pratchett chose Thomas the Rhymer as his track to keep on Desert Island Discs and Prior says she has read 10-15 of his books). It's as if the sensibility of each is from the same wellspring: something essentially English, historically truthful but also fantastical. They inhabit the same psychic landscape.

Reading Wintersmith, I was particularly moved by Pratchett's witches: complicated, hard-working, under-appreciated women, somewhere between wise and clever (on the whole), with senses of humour but also the knowledge that they might fall off the edge of society at any time. He anatomises the social high wire act of these characters with aching, heartbreaking clarity while also keeping it the right side of sentimental through the usual English device of making a joke out of the whole thing. 

I've also been struck that Pratchett's deep empathy with those characters may go a little further than is entirely usual, in the sense that in public appearances he has often chosen to look as much like one of them as it is reasonable for a man to do.

That's not just me, is it?

Prior began speaking about the history of witchcraft and the patriarchal landscape that real-life so-called "witches" made their way through, recommending a book on the subject that I can see on Amazon is also one of Hilary Mantel's favourites. (Guess what I'm buying myself for Christmas.) "I find it very interesting the way that Terry has presented the witches: they play the game of being scary but... It was a change in social circumstances that led to this myth.

"There had always been wise women and women who knew about herbs and medicine. But suddenly communities were separated form the land and from each other and all the old communal ways of being were ended. One of the ways that remained of surviving was by threatening people if they didn't help you. So it's very interesting to know that during the witch trials you had to prove that you'd done something to a woman to make her put a spell on you: in order to get her convicted you had to explain how you had threatened her. It was a very complicated social manoeuvre and Terry looks at that in a kind of inverted way. 

"The great thing about his books, though, is that there is never total evil, just people getting the wrong end of the stick. He's not so much a feminist as a humanist.

"I'm lucky in that I've never had to deal with really bad situations in life, in which people have no empathy for each other. But I know that it happens and that when it does, it can be... Terry's explanation for all this is that the perpetrators have something missing: it's not deliberate evil in that sense."

Sounds like he's coming at the issue of psychopathy from a very kindly perspective, which is reassuring but not necessarily the response that psychopaths evoke when you meet them. What saves Pratchett's worldview from tweeness is the shadows around the edges, into which people - the witches - will fall when things go wrong. He writes about "cackling" as the gateway to insanity, the thing that witches start to do when they're on their own if things are going badly for them and down which road you find "poisoned spinning wheels and gingerbread cottages". The first time I read that, I shuddered involuntarily, my childhood dread of becoming lost in the Great North Woods or somesuch, plunging to the surface.

So why is Peter Knight leaving the band at the end of the Wintersmith tour?

"I'm not quite sure," said Prior. "Maybe it's time to have a break and do other things. Gigspanner is his baby and that's what he wants to do. It's a bit late on for returns but I would never say it's out of the question."

There was a slight pause. 

"Actually, though, we've only just found out and it's been a very stressful tour as a result. When someone is leaving it changes the dynamics of the band. What we'll do next I'm not sure. He's left before though."

Really?

"Yes. In the 70s. Peter and Bob left and Martin (Carthy) and John (Kirkpatrick) joined. Then a year or so slid by and we reformed with Pete and Bob again. You get something in each musical situation that you're in that you don't get anywhere else and sometimes you miss that. Pete will never get what he gets from Steeleye anywhere else - it's a different dynamic. 

"There has always been a drive in Steeleye that has made it a very powerful band. There is a huge amount of energy, a huge sound that is extremely distinctive that comes from those of us who have been in the band the longest. But it's always been a difficult band to be in."

How do you mean?

"There is a lot of tension: strong personalities and huge dynamics. Never a day goes by that we don't have a row. You would think that after all this time we would get on. But no. Pete is just finding it too much at the moment. 

"But that's actually what makes it a very interesting band. We haven't learned anything about how to deal with being in a band. We've learned nothing. We've never been sensible, that's just never been part of our make-up. A lot of the time there are stresses that are quite unnecessary.

"I look at all these young people navigating their way between bands on the scene these days and think how good they are at that and wonder how they do it?

"But the other side of our equation is that we laugh a lot. Our energy comes out in different directons: very positive and very, very negative. But it's springing out in all directions at the moment. It's amazing that we've lasted this long really.

"I really have no idea what we will do with Peter gone. He's very distinctive: it would be like trying to replace me. It's a voice that nobody else has, a voice in which he has spent 45 years learning how to speak. If somebody else were coming in, it would be difficult."

Still, at the Barbican gig on Monday, Spiers & Boden joined Steeleye on stage for a stunning evening that was notable partly for the look of unadulterated pleasure on the duo's faces and the way they were hanging around at the side of the stage, clearly hoping to be invited to join in All Around My Hat. Well you would, wouldn't you?

As they left the stage again the question: "You wouldn't like to join the band, would you?" floated after them. But I guess that since Spiers & Boden are packing in their double act apparently to devote more energy to Bellowhead, it's hard to see how they'd make time for another folk behemoth...

So what advice would she give her younger self? When I spoke to Peter Knight a few months ago - he broke the news about the Wintersmith project - he spoke with some regret about the lack of business acumen they'd had in the 70s...

"We were never shrewd people and that's the nature of the business. We had fantastic times touring the US, they were great days. We fought and raged and laughed our way around and I wouldn't have missed it. And this is what our lives have been. Why would I change it? The easiest place in the world is the grave and yet we spend our lives trying to make things easy.

"Sometimes this is lovely work. But my experience has been that as soon as you put a lot of energy in, it stops being easy. The more you invest in something the harder it gets and by the end nothing in my life will have been invested in to the same extent as Steeleye, simply in time alone."

A couple of people sent questions about spin-off projects. The first was whether there will be a follow-up to Three for Joy and then there was another, from someone on Twitter calling themselves Fractal Geek, asking how you got into "obscure but fab, odd-tempo east European stuff"? 

"Well, Hannah, Giles and I will be touring with Three for Joy next year, starting in April, and we'll probably record something as well. Hannah is such a little treasure and she and Giles are such a delight to work with. This is what I mean about not getting the same energy with any band..."

"We are looking at yodelling at the moment: I'm trying to get some skills: I've never had any skills particularly."

This seems like an odd thing to say for someone who's in a band that was partly responsible for producing an entire generation of musicians, although given the number of young multi-instrumentalists playing folk these days, I can see where she's coming from.

"Hannah and Giles are both very skilled in lots of different areas. It's difficult to yodel well: to actually control it is quite difficult. But Hannah learned it on an exchange in Finland at Sibelius academy. She's a sponge for learning things and I'm picking up stuff that drops off as she rides by."

And the east European stuff?

"June Tabor and I sang Bulgarian material. It was the first thing we learned together, I think because an album came out on Topic in the 60s and it kind of became a part of our canon. But again, I think it's Hannah who's really nailed this stuff. She goes to ethno-music camps that are often in Slovenia and teaches them English music and in return she learns yodelling and overtone singing."

You're obviously impressed by and fond of Hannah and Giles. What do you think the outlook is for youngsters on the folk scene?

"Traditional music is massive these days, isn't it? All these players: there are so many of them. It's just like it was in the 60s but there are so many of them and they are so much more skilful and they all grew up on it. Hannah's parents went to festivals and took her with them and her mum was in a dance team, which is how she became aware of clogging. I didn't come to all this until I was 17 and there was nobody else doing it. We had to find it ourselves.

"What the youngsters need is a massive audience, whereas what they've got is the same audience we had and quite often exactly the same people. When I was young, people used to say to us 'Why don't you get a proper job?' Whereas these days it seems to have somehow become the proper job, the one where if you play your cards right you can make good money.

"The audience in the US is massive, just colossal. Almost every state is the same size on its own that the UK is." The trouble is finding a way of reaching it, though.

I talked a bit about how the UK's highest profile marketing platform - the BBC folk awards - somehow doesn't seem to see itself as a marketing platform and is, in my opinion, letting the youngsters in the industry down quite badly. The secrecy surrounding the judging process is only the start of it, as I suspect knowing the average age of the judges would reveal the nature of the problem, allowing it to be fixed. (Expect more on this soon, since Fergus Dudley turned out to be saying the things he said last year simply to get me off his back. Nothing has changed.)

"I know what you're saying. I'm not denying that the folk mafia has become a bit... What you need is young producers. There are some in their 30s and 40s. I'm thinking of Bellowhead. But they're really playing to the same crowd that we've always played to. It's the middle men they need, to find a new market for them. It is a problem.

"It's the same in Scotland. They have a massive number of players. But it's almost that nobody English is going up there any more and nobody Scottish is coming down here. That border has become very strong. I live nine miles from the border and I think it's an independence thing. I don't quite know what has happened: perhaps that country's resentment has just come to fruition?"

It's been a pleasure, Maddy.

* You can buy the beautiful Wintersmith album, here. And Terry Pratchett's quietly brilliant book here, where there is also a Terry Pratchett blog.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Steeleye Span goes wassailing at The Barbican

There they went a-wassailing. Steeleye Span were, indeed, six at the Barbican on Monday - except when they were joined on stage by John Spiers and Martin Carthy. Dodgy picture alert (Maddy Prior was at the back trying to look inconspicuous during an instrumental and the battery on my camera ran out before I had a chance to take anything with the zoom. Sorry 'bout that.)

They played the whole of Now we are Six, starting with 700 Elves, dedicated Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to Professor Brian Cox because "there's a lot he could learn from this song" and then introduced the "and friends" part of the evening...

At that point things got temporarily a little less festive - though there were three people in the front row wearing tinsel halos who may well have disagreed. The Strawbs sang something with a chorus that repeated "May you rot" over and over again, which seemed a bit bah humbug under the circumstances. They also used a line that I've heard referred to (by Peter Knight at a Gigspanner gig) as the Broughton/Dempsey disclaimer - after Joe Broughton and Kevin Dempsey - offering the audience the opportunity to return their CD by post if they didn't like it "and we'll send you one that we don't like". Ordinarily I find it funny but on this occasion it mainly made me wonder about its provenance. I first heard it from Joe Broughton at an Urban Folk Quartet gig and, sure enough, he laid claim to it later by email, adding that he sometimes had to stop using lines when they became too widely passed around. However he couldn't recall specific examples, as he was "very hungover on an Austrian tour". Prost... I guess jokes are like songs and the folk process also applies.

The second half was great, especially for the delicate The Two Constant Lovers, in beautiful five or six part harmony, with a bathetic intro by Knight describing the lovely woman on the cliff edge looking out to sea as if she were about to leap. "Then in the fourth verse she does."

John Spiers and Martin Carthy joined the band on stage for the Padstow Mayday song recalling, for me from my days as a baby reporter, the controversy that singing that song on any day apart from Mayday causes in the town. John Buckingham of the Padstow museum said, though, that these days they feel benevolent towards the Steeleye version, partly on account of it almost having become a tradition in its own right. "As long as Steeleye Span don't produce an 'obby 'oss and start dancing around the stage they'll be safe," he said. Mind you, they like a bit of controversy in Padstow. This is the place, after all, that celebrates Darkie Day while often claiming that its origins lie in a shipwreck involving a slaver on the shore nearby.

Then there was Bedlam Boys - what an odd song that is, lyrically - and The Lark in the Morning before Carthy and Spiers trooped off - even though Rick Kemp said it might have been more appropriate for Carthy to have remained as it was he who'd brought them Cold Haily Windy Night in the first place.

Later on, when Spiers - a good 25 years younger than everyone else on the stage - returned with Carthy for the finale he looked so electrified by being that close to Maddy Prior while she was singing All Around My Hat (followed by a seasonal Gaudete) that he almost forgot to come in.

And that's the thing about Steeleye Span. They've been around for over four decades now and watching them recalls nearly a lifetime of memories for most of their audience: an entire lifetime for the younger members. It's hard to disentangle what's theirs and what's your own. It just ended up feeling like ours and I can't think of anything more apposite at this bittersweet time of year.

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Manufactured Moonshee rising

I went to a rather odd event at Cecil Sharp House the other night. It was an album launch for a band called Moonshee and it came with some enticing bells and whistles.

The first half of the gig had Ashley Hutchings and his son, Blair Dunlop, steadfastly refusing to admit that they were related to each other, while Dunlop demonstrated convincingly that he's got the musical wherewithall to make it in the industry no matter who his dad is. A couple of years more stagecraft under his belt and he'll be flying, I reckon. It's a bit weird that he's already played Cropredy, though, as I only heard his voice this year (didn't see him) and assumed he was an established singer-songwriter. But it turns out he's 19.

Then there was Ruth Angell, who appeared to be a friend of Dunlop's, and has a beautiful voice and a way with magical realism. She introduced one of her own songs by describing how she'd been sitting in a cafe in Paris when she'd noticed that there was a tea chest with metal edges on the pavement nearby. Instead of calling the bomb squad, she watched as a little man - "very small indeed" - climbed out of a panel in the side, chopped up some bread for the birds on a bread board, fed them and then crawled back into his tea chest. She said all this with a completely straight face, which suggests talent.

The messing with reality was good practice for what happened next, though.

The second half was all Moonshee, who'd been hanging around in the foyer looking simultaneously slightly overdressed and underdressed. There are four beautiful girls - two blonde, two brunette - and two cheeky looking, older, Asian guys, who play traditional Asian instruments.  

The British/Asian folk fusion was well-judged if a bit samey, in terms of tone and tempo. It was folky enough for my taste and I'd quite happily listen to it in the car: it created an ambience.  But there was also something odd about it, that I couldn't put my finger on at first.

The band wasn't really looking at each other and appeared to be concentrating very hard: the girls at least. The guy on percussion was enjoying himself and kept looking around for some eye contact with his fellow band members, but eye-contact was there none.

Plus there was no banter and what talking there was, was weirdly stilted. Then the singer, who had a northern Irish lilt, introduced their eponymous song by saying: "Apparently a Moonshee is a storyteller, someone who removes barriers between cultures. So quite a fitting name for this band." And the penny dropped.

No sense of ownership of their own band name, the appearance of being worried about forgetting something they'd rehearsed over and over, very little on-stage chemistry.

Manufactured band!

"This band is the brain-child of John Dagnell," the singer admitted at the end, inviting a round of applause from the slightly disconcerted audience. Dagnell works at Park Records, which mainly does Steeleye Span. And sure enough, it turned out that the musicians had auditioned to be in the band, except the guys, who were session musicians. And the songs - largely traditional - were arranged by Paul Gibbon, who's been around the block a few times. I've got Jethro Tull written next to his name in my notebook.

Speaking to the two blonde, female band members afterwards they were charmingly enthusiastic but they described Cecil Sharp House as a "folk club", which isn't exactly untrue but it's untrue enough to suggest an unfamiliarity with what it does.

Dagnell said he'd been working on the project for ten years - which means that some of the band would barely have been out of junior school when he started - and that the difference between Moonshee and The Imagined Village was that Moonshee "are more commercial".

I wouldn't argue with that. I suppose the most surprising thing about this project is that no one's tried it sooner (*braces self for slew of emails explaining that someone has*) What I'm wondering, though, is whether Park Records has the money and the social media marketing skills to launch a commercial, manufactured band? One of the things Peter Knight said when I interviewed him the other week was that Park Records may not have a proper website but there's always a human being on the end of the phone when you call. And frankly, if they'd got a handle on the social media side of things I would have expected a much bigger turn out for the album launch.

Dagnell also seemed uncertain whether it was OK to admit that Moonshee was put together by him, insisting at one point that the Australian lady guitarist, who was using a music stand, was one of the moving musical forces behind the band, before appearing to change his mind about that. He also denied that he had any ambition to be the Simon Cowell of the folk world. Had to ask.

Having said all this, it's a very commercial sounding album and kind of lovely with it: a million miles better than anything you'd get on The X Factor. And I expect the live experience will gel as they get more practice with audiences and, you know, enjoying themselves. So I wish them all the best and would like to see them play at a festival next summer, after they've had a chance to get used to being together (it was only their second gig). I'll be very curious to see what happens next.

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Peter Knight on wombles, jazz and Terry Pratchett

"It's a bit embarrassing... but all my Wombles are in America," was how Mike Batt had raised the issue. "He was producing one of Steeleye Span's albums," said Peter Knight. "And he was looking for someone to be the Wombles on Top of the Pops. We all jumped at the opportunity: Nigel (Pegrum), Rick (Kemp). I can't remember whether Bob (Johnson) was involved. I think I was Great Uncle Bulgaria."

Interviewing Peter Knight was a big deal for me. Poring over the cover of All Around My Hat at the wibbly wobbly pictures of Steeleye Span while listening to Black Jack Davy, Cadgwith Anthem and The Wife of Ushers Well is one of my very earliest memories (although the Wombles are in there too somewhere). I think I used to think that if I stared at it hard enough I might discover a hidden message on that gold-disc of an album, just for me. And there I was, sitting overlooking the canal at the Electric theatre in Guildford last Thursday, having a coffee with the original fiddle player in my life.

In the intervening years I've met several people who might qualify as my heroes: curiosity about them was one of the motivations for choosing journalism if I'm honest. Joan Collins and Peter Mandelson turned out to be almost unbelievably rude; Ted Kennedy had surprisingly ill-cared-for shoes giving him a leathery spin on Achilles heels or feet of clay; Michael Praed was just as pretty 20 years later as when he played Robin Hood to a soundtrack of Clannad; and Germaine Greer I still feel quite starry about even after spending a drunken evening with her at a tiny poetry festival. Since I'm now technically a grown-up, I know these experiences were mainly unrelated to the original reasons why I admired these people. But somehow the germ of hero-dom never goes away. And it can be knicker-twistingly, lump-inducingly potent.

Which is why, when I got a message from Debbie Walker, Peter Knight's partner, asking whether I'd like to talk to him about the new album I said something exactly like "YES PLEASE!" and immediately felt very uncool.

Peter and Debbie are getting married this week, at a small gathering at Kingsand in Cornwall. "A couple of pints with some family," is how he describes their plans. It's his third time around and her second, so they have a wealth of experience to bring to the project. There is a kind of serendipity that travels with them, though, which I started to feel when I was listening to the new Gigspanner album, Doors at Eight, and which has continued throughout my dealings with the couple. They just seem very happy in themselves and even the sad tunes on the record have a kind of sweetness to them.

"The ageing process has something to do with my calmness these days," said Knight. "I don't have anything to prove to anyone. When I was younger I was a bit cocky. But there was a turning point in the 1980s when I played with a sax player called Trevor Watts and we started to improvise. I've not always been into jazz - but you can't help what turns you on in life (across the board) and I now find jazz very intriguing. The music just led us to this shimmering high note after a complicated, interweaving, dissonant piece of material and I just got so excited I wanted to stay there forever.

"I know that sort of music will never be on Top of the Pops. But it's good for my soul and good for my relationship with music. And it's a reminder that we've got to follow our own muse, be honest about what we like and what we don't like: not to try and please the audience. You can't please everyone so you have to try and please yourself.

"I love improvising from nothing. I love taking my violin out of the case and letting the music unfold from the first sound that you make: developing it into something valuable but of no value. What you're doing is something that children do. If you sit a child in front of a piano, they'll bang out a few notes and smile.

"The three of us," himself, Roger Flack on guitar and Vincent Salzfaas on percussion, aka Gigspanner, "are very pleased to be playing music together. We look forward to the gigs. Recently I did an American tour that went straight into an Australian tour, and the day after we flew back there was a Gigspanner gig in West Sussex. Driving to the gig I thought I must be mad. But as soon as I heard Roger's first chord I remembered why I had suggested it." A gigspanner, in case you were wondering, is a bottle opener.

I'm glad he said all that because trying to describe their music is hard: there's a folky, jazzy, worldy, improvisational expressionism there and I particularly like the songs, which have a folkier feel than many of the tunes. The lingering impression, though, is that Knight has evolved into something akin to folk's Stefan Grapelli - and when I say that I saw Grapelli play with Yehudi Menuhin once at the Brecon Jazz Festival you may get a sense of what I'm implying. Moreover, the modesty that goes with it was a relief because asking around before the interview, one of the words used by a colleague to describe Knight - with affection - was "lunatic".

"That was certainly the case back in the early days of Steeleye, when we were touring America with Warners," he said after a short attempt to guess who'd said that about him. "It was really good fun, being in a band, touring the world. But the American trips cost us £40,000 a tour. We thought all the meals and the cars were being paid for by the record company but all the bills went against our tab. We'd often meet other musicians on the road in America: you'd find them at the hotel, sitting by the swimming pool. And we'd tell each other stories about different degrees of getting ripped off.

"Park Records, who we're with these days, might be a bit scrappy with no proper website but at least you can call human beings up who work there and have a laugh." Paging all folky website developers...

I suppose that Steeleye Span must be one of only a handful of folk bands to have experienced the whole major-label, rock-star thing. "I guess so. It was always a bit of a mystery why Steeleye was so successful though. We were a novelty but we were never sure what the scale of the success was down to. I thought perhaps it was timing, because so little success seems to be down to whether the music's any good. We still get royalties: they're dwindling, but that's to be expected. It's enough to buy a couple of bottles of wine when the cheques come in."

So what's next for Steeleye Span? "We're talking about recording an album based on three books by Terry Pratchett called Wintersmith. He's a fan of the band and we played at his 60th birthday a couple of years ago, somewhere around Salisbury. It would be a way of saying thank you to him for being a fantasy writer, from a band that does a lot of fantasy itself. You know: elves and goblins, that kind of thing."

Perhaps since Pratchett is not a well man - he makes no secret about his Alzheimer's - they should crack on with it? "You can't even think that," said Knight, looking slightly shocked. "Though his illness wouldn't necessarily make a difference to the project..."

Would you describe him as a friend? "I don't know whether that would be accurate. I've had a few conversations with him: he presented us with an award once at the folk awards and sat at our table. We talked about the specifics of the written word and playing music, and which could provoke the more precise feelings. My thoughts on the subject are that I want to be in the right frame of mind when I'm playing, so that the frame of mind comes across. I believe that if I'm in the right space to play the music it transfers to people, but not in a specific way."

So has anyone ever written a book about Steeleye Span that you liked? He laughed warily. "Books about bands are a dodgy old business. People who write history, rewrite history. I mean, I've heard Rick telling stories in the dressing room about events I was present for and he was vastly out, in terms of getting it right. We could each write a book about the band and would have different accounts of the same stuff. Ashley Hutchings wrote a book about Steeleye, didn't he? But I don't need to read it because I was there."

An inquiry about whether he misses Tim Hart, the fellow founder-member of the band who succumbed to lung cancer on Christmas Eve 2009 made me wonder whether from time to time his honesty might get him into trouble? "No, I don't miss him," he said simply. "I was sad that he died and I missed his voice when he left Steeleye. I don't not miss him for any particular reason. But as you get older it's part of the process: people start dying whom you've known for a large part of your life. I think 'That's Tim. He's a goner' and that's it. We conflicted a bit in the early days of Steeleye. But we made our peace with each other, went out for a few meals and talked about the old days. We parted on good terms."

He's just agreed to be the patron of  the Fiddle Festival of Great Britain. "The first one is on the last weekend in June next year. It's the first time I've been asked to do something like that and accepted - before I've always had enough to do and didn't want to take on some responsibility that I wouldn't be able to fulfil. But," and he had to consult Debbie about the details, "it's somewhere in Oxfordshire and it's run by someone we like called Sian Phillips. There'll be teaching and concerts." You can follow the organiser on Twitter at @sianfiddle.

Then he had to go and try out a new fiddle for the gig that evening because his old one, distressingly, has begun to fall apart. "We've moved to France and it was in a barn I was working in. I was leaving it in there and it's started coming unglued. I didn't notice until I went to change the strings last night and found the neck is coming away from the body. Resetting the neck is such an expensive repair it's not even worth fixing. But it makes a beautiful sound, which is why it's heart-breaking."

And my original fiddle-player went off to prepare for the gig. Original and best.

* Gigspanner album-buying and gig-listing here.

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