Steeleye Span, The Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, England (April 27, 2008)
Some acts you just have to see as a matter of principal. Whether they'll actually be any good is a side issue. I'm not a particularly rabid Beatles fan, but when Paul McCartney exits this world I'll be glad I've seen him. Bob Dylan's a cantankerous little bugger live, but I'm glad I paid my money to watch him sit on the far left of the stage playing piano and stoically ignoring the audience at the Finsbury Park Fleadh.
Steeleye Span may not have had the seismic world-changing effect that Messrs McCartney and Zimmerman did, but in our little musical corner of English trad they were pretty groundbreaking and influential. With a fairly credible version of the band (known for its ever changing line-up) currently touring and recording, and rustlings in the folk press of a renaissance, it seemed a good time to tick them off my must-see list.
Steeleye Span, bless them, would be very easy to do a hack job on. This is a band of aging middle-class hippies doing much the same thing that they have been doing since 1969 to an audience of their contemporaries. Maddy Prior swishes around the stage doing little dances like a drunken auntie. The tame stage banter is all about their bad backs and what they were doing in 1976. They are never going to be revered like reformed rivals Pentangle.
But that doesn't really matter. Steeleye Span are what they are and do what they do, and the crucial thing is that they're still doing it well. The five-piece line-up of Prior, Peter Knight, Rick Kemp, Liam Genockey and Ken Nicol had everything you want from the Span -- hard, crunching guitar from Nicol, searing fiddle from Knight, Prior singing in powerful voice. The more recent material held its own well against classics like "Blackleg Miner" and "Lovely Over the Water," and there were some impressive composed songs (as well as a few overly schmaltzy ones) to match the trad. arrs. Admittedly I could have done without Kemp and Nicol's weak vocal contributions -- when you have a singer like Prior there is no need.
Prior and Kemp's daughter Rose was in the audience, and as a semi-experimental, Tom Waits-inspired musician (try her own site), I couldn't help but wonder what she made of it all. One track in particular made me think that she might approve -- a radical reworking of Steeleye classic "Boys of Bedlam" with Prior singing, wailing and moaning over Knight's plucked fiddle strings, capturing the creepy madness of the lyrics. It was frankly astonishing. Plenty of old folk-rock bands (cough, Fairport, cough) have turned into bloated, tired reflections of their once zealous pasts, and Steeleye can't be entirely excluded from this. But their "Boys of Bedlam" alone is enough to confirm that Steeleye Span still have the restless invention that made them such pioneers in the first place.
