Steeleye Span

St George's Bristol

Maddy Prior is quite an elderly lady, but she looks just as you'd want an old hippy to look: gently dancing around the stage; purple velvet jacket; waving a fan during the instrumental numbers and a huge rainbow colour streamer in the final jig. She herself admits that Steel Eye Span are now a little like Trigger's Broom -- is it still the same band when the line up has changed so many times? When the new line-up go into Gaudete or All Around My Hat, you feel some of the essence of the 60s blows through St Georges. They do the whole of Below The Salt (hence the unseasonal Latin) in the first half, and a mostly trad collection in the second. We only have to go through two of the Terry Pratchett songs, one of which I even quite like.

It was, in short, a thoroughly folkie night. 

They do the charming Little Sir Hugh, about the boy who is murdered by a sinister rich woman when he goes to retrieve his ball from her garden. This is one of the versions where the lady's ethno-religious identity is fortunately not mentioned. It's still pretty dark ("Out came the thick thick blood, out came the thin /Out came the bonny heart's blood till there was none within.) The "mother make my bed" part seems to have wandered in from Lord Randal. Maddy say's they once performed it in front of the Queen in the Albert Hall. "What jolly tunes!" Brenda is supposed to have said. Well, actually, yes.

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