Folk TALES

As the sole original member of 70s folk rockers Steeleye Span, Maddy Prior tells GARRY BUSHELL a surprise early hit launched a lifetime of music

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WHEN Maddy Prior told her mother "We're going electric," she replied "What are you going to do with the gas cooker dear?

Maddy’s smile lights up her face like the seaside illuminations in her Blackpool birthplace. The singer had been talking about her folk-rock band Steeleye Span, of course, rather than her new kitchen. But even she wasn't expecting them to appear on Top of the Pops three years later.

Steeleye Span’s ethereal rendition of Gaudete, a half-forgotten 16th-century Christmas carol, soared into the charts in December, 1973, surprising everyone including the band.

It was the first, and so far the only British chart hit sung entirely in Latin, and had flopped the year before. Their record label Chrysalis re-released it without consulting them. “I don’t know why they saw it as a single, we thought it was unlikely to be a hit; the recording engineer hated it,” Maddy tells me.

The folk-rockers went Top 10 two years later with All Around My Hat an early 19th-Century ditty. Then Chrysalis released Hard Times of Old England. “They thought it'd be relevant to the times it’s relevant all the time!” says Maddy, 78.