45 minutes with... Maddy Prior

It's stabilised!

- Interview: Nick Dalton

After all this time the band seems to have a regular lineup...

Well, there was the 70s lineup, too, that was stable and established us, where our style was developed after the third album: Peter Knight, Tim Hart, Bob Johnson, Rick Kemp and myself. Now there's me, Julian Littman and Andrew “Spud” Sinclair on guitars, Roger Carey on bass and Liam Genockey on drums. And we have four violinists who can step in, but we have settled on Athena Octavia.

And that lineup has a new album, Conflict.

Late last year we had a compilation, Green Man, on which the current band played several new tracks, but this is our first full album since EST'D 1969 six years ago. It's slightly different but different in the vein of what we've done – which is to go somewhere different! It's within our remit. We all have this idea of what we are. We try to expand it while essentially keep what is Steeleye. We've done a shanty, Blow, Boys, Blow, but in a very different way – our engineer said rather than doing a nice vocal, why don't you do something like Tom Waits. I said, well, I'll give it a go. So that's me, not really singing!

And then there's the wild, guitar-led Genocide.

That's one of Rick Kemp's songs. He wrote another song on the album,