In 1969, Ashley Hutchings was keen to leave Fairport Convention, the group he had founded with Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol and others. Fairport had just made Liege and Lief, an album of traditional songs performed by a rock band, which is regarded 25 years later as “seminal” in it’s fusion of two diverse musical styles. Hutchings knew little of traditional folk music until he began researching the songs on Liege and Lief at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance & Song Society, when he became aware of the unique value of the EFDSS as a resource with details of thousands of traditional folk songs. Previously favouring American Music (Bob Dylan, etc.), Hutchings was instantly hooked on traditional music, but it became clear that the majority of Fairport regarded Liege and Lief as a one-off project, and were not prepared to commit themselves to further pursue that direction in the immediate future despite the acclaim which greeted the album—vocalist Sandy Denny, who had known about traditional material for several years, particularly preferred to pursue her own original songs rather than follow the traditional route. As a result, Hutchings left the band, after a discussion with Hart & Prior in which he found them kindred spirits, as Hart recalled: “At Keele Folk Festival, we all sat around and got annoyed by the fact that electric input to folk music was coming from the rock side rather than from the folk side. We had a long discussion one night, Dave & Toni Arthur and Maddy & I and Ashley, then Maddy & I gave Ashley a lift back to London and we got talking further. At the time, Ashley was trying to form a band with Sweeney’s Men, and we were good friends of theirs and knew they were about to split up. As Sweeney’s Men collapsed, Andy Irvine and Johnny Moynihan left to go solo, and that left Terry and Gay Woods, who joined with Ashley and Maddy & I, and decided to form a band. It was a fairly sort of vague thing, really.” That “vague thing” became Steeleye Span, and between 1969 and 1978, the group released eleven albums, several of which reached the UK chart; Hart & Prior were the only members of the band to feature on all eleven. Some of these albums have been reissued on CD by BGO records. In the early 1970s, Hart & Prior were given the opportunity to make another LP, Summer Solstice, as a duo while still fronting Steeleye: “We were more than happy—it wasn’t a restriction, it was a chance to make a record with a proper record company. Maddy & I were still working as a duo at that time and had a live repertoire to which we were adding new material all the time, so we just recorded our current repertoire, but we did it in 8 track or 16 track studio then, which was quite an advantage—we were able to do overdubs and put strings on it and all sorts of exotic things, and cover up our mistakes. There are lots of mistakes on those first two albums—when Maddy & I got our words tangled, the producer said ‘Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, what’s the next track?’, so we carried on.” From: https://mainlynorfolk.info/steeleye.span/records/timhart.html
