Steeleye Span – Rave On

 

I'm guessing it's Peter Knight doing most of the vocal gymastics, oh-wha-ah-a'who'a' whoopa, on this on the grounds that, some 40 and more years ago, I remember him saying, while introducing a song, that he was a great admirer of Prof. Stanley Unwin, whose quirkilarity in the usilarouousness of the Englistic lingusistocity was in those days by some thought to be the most hightilomonious achievementimum of erodicious although it might by now look as subversive as it did then.

Buddy Holly, we also understood in those days, was the Mozart of pop song writers. I'm not quite so sure about that as I once was but the point is that Steeleye Span were prepared to try to be 'quirky', for better or worse, of which this is an example, and it only represents them in The Rock Show because I'm very short on 'rock' records that I genuinely like to fill such a show and have shifted 'folk rock' into it and programmed this after one of Buddy's less sentimental efforts.

Rave On by Steeleye Span puts on a great show of folky vocals, as if some local yokels in a Thomas Hardy novel had done it ahead of their time.

There is plenty of more representative, more genuinely folky, Steeleye Span than this and not many bands came up with more evocative album titles than Hark! the Village Wait, Ten Man Mop, Please to See the King and Parcel of Rogues.

It almost seems as if the success of having an extraordinary hit with a Latin hymn in Gaudete and then completely 'selling out' by having an album produced by such an inauthentic purveyor of pop music as David Bowie should have done for them. Success ruined a lot of artists, possibly most of those that achieved any measure of it, but you might find that Steeleye, made up of whoever they can find, recovered from such glamour and stuck to what they did best.

As long as Maddy Prior is doing the front stage, top line part, they still can but, just looking at their website, she is the only one left from the 70's so it's really 'Maddy & Friends'.