Personnel:
Maddy Prior: vocals, five-string banjo, step dancing
Tim Hart: vocals, electric guitar, electric dulcimer, fiddle, five-string banjo, harmonium
Ashley Hutchings: bass guitar
Gay Woods: vocals, concertina, autoharp, bodhran, step dancing
Terry Woods: vocals, electric guitar, concertina, mandola, five-string banjo, mandolin
Guest musicians:
Gerry Conway: drums (tracks 2-3, 5-8)
Dave Mattacks: drums (tracks 4, 10-12)
Produced at Sound Techniques, London, 1970 by Sandy Roberton and Steeleye Span
UK release date: June 1970
Highest chart places: UK: did not chart, US: did not chart
Running time: 38:55
We had ructions in the studio. It wasn’t a happy album. It was a wonder we finished it.
Ashley Hutchings,Singing From The Floor, JP Bean, 2014
Bands ‘getting it together in the country’ was quite fashionably du jour in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hutchings’ previous band, Fairport Convention, had done it when they descended on Farley Chamberlayne in Hampshire for theLiege& Lief album. Traffic would convene at a remote cottage in the hamlet of Aston Tirrold in Berkshire, and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant spent time at the Bron-Yr-Aur cottage in Snowdonia working up material forLed Zeppelin III. The newly-formed Steeleye Span did similar, but instead of it being a harmonious, creative melting pot in an idyllic rural setting, their stay at a cottage in the small Wiltshire village of Winterborne Stoke was fraught, with seething domestic tensions.
The band then spent one week recording the album at Sound Techniques Studio in Chelsea, London. A former dairy, the studio opened in 1965 and soon became the setting for a number of recording artists on the burgeoning folk rock scene, including the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Pentangle, as well as straight-ahead rock acts like Elton John, Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd. Steeleye Span’s first five albums would all be recorded here.
The album, like the two that came after it, was co-produced by the band’s newly-appointed manager, Sandy Roberton. He had been a key figure in the British blues boom in the mid-1960s before turning his attention to the burgeoning folk scene. As Jerry Gilbert noted in a December 1975Sounds retrospective:
It would be easy to underplay or dismiss Roberton’s role in the formative years of Steeleye. As a young, eclectic folk producer, he looked like the obvious successor to Joe Boyd as folk/rock producer supremo when the latter went back to the States, and the fact that his promise was never really fu
