Salut! Live

I remember that gig...I was stunned that I wasn't allowed in the bar. I was used to being disapproved of...but not banned. It was a sing-a-round, as I remember?

— Maddy Prior (@MaddyPriorFolk) March 14, 2021

What happened next stands as one of the musical highlights of my life.

I have a dim recollection of browsing in the record shop at Cecil Sharp House, headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, and either hearing the staff play Steeleye's dramatically innovative album Please to See the King or just coming across the LP and buying it. That would take us to no earlier than March 1971 - crikey, 50 years ago this month - and it was only later that I heard and bought the debut album, Hark! The Village Wait, on which the short-lived band members Terry and Gay Woods had appeared.

But whenever it was that I became aware of Steeleye, they were to become a lifelong fixture.

Electric English folk, not folk-rock, I remember them insisting though most of us would still apply the latter definition. The sounds grew better and better and most of us had little problem with the stabs at chart success - Gaudete and All Around My Hat - or the novelty pieces like To Know Him Is To Love Him (with David Bowie on sax) or the a cappella Rave On.

Along the way there has been a stream of great albums and superb gigs, retirements and comebacks, Maddy dancing around the aisles of concert halls during the reels and jigs, money floating down from the ceiling in Hammersmith as a gift to everyone (I'll say no more) ... and Sails of Silver.

Which brings me (finally) to the reason I decided to write about Maddy again.

There is a lively Steeleye Span Facebook group where recently members have been discussing the merits or otherwise of that 1980 album, which marked a departure from the customary Span diet of traditional material and also the return of Peter Knight and Bob Johnson to a reformed band two years after it had broken up. It was a controversial piece of work and many fans were bitterly disappointed. 

Writing 41 years later, Paul Osborne began his Facebook thread: "Being new to Steeleye Span I’m currently going through all the albums chronologically. Up to now, every album has been great. Today I listened to Sails of Silver and have to admit that my heart sank."

The comment drew a lot of responses, from the view it was their "weakest album" to praise for individual songs, such as the combination of Marigold and Harvest Home, and even for the whole record.

I also remember being unimpressed on first encounter but did not begrudge the band its search for a more commercial sound.  "I remember friends of mine, aware of the band but not really folkies, liking it because it was a departure," I posted at Paul's thread. 

Wikipedia's notes quote Maddy herself as having mixed feelings. But the reference is slightly misleading since the comment it cites, without attribution but from a folk writer who signs himself "Nerd" at the Mudcat folk message board and is really Stephen D Winick, reads more fully: "Because we'd all kind of gone in different directions, all doing different things, with different ideas, that certainty that we'd had before, we'd lost.

"We were so in disarray, and we didn't have the material we were confident with. So [producer Gus Dudgeon] had a lot more input, and I think that's why it sounds very sweet and rounded and nothing offensive in it, you know.

"And that wasn't what we were known for, and it isn't what we do, what we're good at."

Still, Winick adds, she insisted it was not a bad album. "I actually think it's quite a jolly album. And very accessible."

But not to many. Sails of Silver - "surprisingly well-crafted yet largely overlooked" (Dave Sleger at allmusic.com), "unfamiliar material and slick production values contributing to the feeling this is not a Steeleye album at all" (Stephen Winick) - was not a commercial success.

At the same Facebook group mentioned above, a follow-up post from Derek Beauchamp linked to the full album and attracted a shorter but wholly positive feedback.   

You can buy the album at the Salut! Live Amazon link from this caption

In time, my own assessment became one of qualified approval.

This merges parts of my Facebook replies to Paul Osborne: "I also had doubts at the time of its release but seeing them live and performing its content eased those doubts. And I do think there is some really good material on the album. But still not a patch on classic Steeleye ... At the time I thought, ‘OK, as long as they don’t make a habit of it."        

Paul himself also had second thoughts, returning to the group to say: "In my last post I was critical of Sails of Silver. To be honest it has grown on me and there are some highlights on the album. I was hasty in my reaction."

IM SORRY.... but without the amazing &English Pentangle and Steeleye span our Scottish songs might have been lost to us. Cultural Union with Eng will exist beyond a daft Political archaic mess, good England will wish us the best because they love us. https://t.co/5zpwvFgPKp

— Sadenia Eddi Reader (@eddireader) January 15, 2021

Overall then, a useful if not exceptional addition to the repertoire of a band that played an important part the way folk music was played and in making it, if not exactly cool, OK for non-folkies to enjoy. And I still treasure those memories of seeing Tim (who died aged 61 in 2009) and Maddy at the Golden Cock.

My wife, Joelle, and I outside the Golden Cock in 2016. We met there in 1970 when she was an au pair girl newly arrived from France

Photo of a print that I spotted on the wall at the pub