The Judge RAVES!

Date: 28/02/14

Triple Play - Part I: Steeleye Span - "Wintersmith" (Park Records PRKCD132) (2013)

This is the first of what I intend to be a weekend triptych of reviews of recent albums...

Of course, what I intend and what actually happens may end up being two different things. But I'll try.

First off is the latest release from those veterans of folk-rock, Steeleye Span.

Now, I remember them from w-a-a-a-y back, their having impinged on my pre-teen lug'oles with their first hit, the finger-in-the-ear-to-stop-the-wax-from-shooting-out-on-the-high-notes a cappella rendering of the Latin hymn Gaudete, which marked my first conscious encounter with folk music, not to mention the somewhat bizarre accents adopted by some of its English exponents (everyone seemed to come from some part of rural Oxfordshire miraculously uninfested with the effects of the growth of primitive techologies such as 'radio').

It was pleasing enough, however, and I ended up with three singles from that era in my collection: that one; their collaboration with that inveterate show-off Peter Sellers on New York Girls; and their adaptation of the Scottish ballad Thomas The Rhymer. But not, note, the hit which I always find myself referring to as All Around Mike Batt; my tastes had moved elsewhere by that time, and it just seemed a bit silly and slightly fake to me.

No LPs, either. At least, not until now. So what changed?

Simply that Wintersmith marks the band's collaboration with one of my favourite authors. Wintersmith is one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld™ books featuring the apprentice witch Tiffany Aching. This particular sub-series is categorised as 'young adult' fiction (an appalling piece of marketing-speak which - as ever - obscures more than it enlightens). For this reason, this is the part of the Discworld™ into which Yer Judge has never actually ventured: I can't help but get the feeling that reading them would be a bit like spying on a playground; not the sort of thing which a man of advanced middle-age should be attempting in the sort of paranoiac society in which we now live. Reports would doubtless be made to The Authorities™, and there might be a memory stick somewhere in Cheltenham recording the fact.

Anyway...

Wintersmith is not the first album to draw its inspiration and being from Discworld™, however. Some twenty years ago, the multi-instrumentalist Dave Greenslade brought out a CD of pieces spurred on by the main sequence of the series as it stood at that time. The quality was a little uneven, but not even the somewhat ham-tongued readings of Tony Robinson could drag it down very far.

As with Greenslade, Terry Pratchett has been a fan of Steeleye Span for a great many years; for almost as long as they've been going, in fact. And when he found out that lead singer Maddy Prior was a big fan of his work, it was inevitable that this collaboration was going to happen.

Enough preamble, what of the music?

(A brief note about the composer credits: each track is attributed to Steeleye Span and Pratchett - although how much input the writer had to each track is a moot point; this may be one of them there legal thingies - along with one specific member of the band in each case).

After a short overture (called Overture), which prefigures a couple of the later tracks, we're right into the thick of it with the forceful Dark Morris Song. The Dark Morris features in one of the main Discworld™ novels, Lords And Ladies, where it is counterposed to the 'traditional' type of Morris which is there to welcome in the Spring. "Dance the Dark Morris, you will find / Summer turns to wintertime", sings Maddy Prior, and the scene is duly set.

The title track follows, which - in its musical and lyrical style - is reminiscent of both 70s folk-rock and some of the heavier rock of the same period, edging even towards a certain heavy-metal vibe, in an invocation of - and plea to - fire to keep the Wintersmith at bay.

The Northumbrian pipes of guest musician Kathryn Tickell lead off You, a declaration of love on the part of the titular demiurge towards the teenage witch-apparent. The instrumental arrangement could have come out of Clannad in their 'rock-star' phase (and that's not necessarily a criticism), but the vocals seem to be a little too near the sucrose for the context of the story.

Maddy Prior returns to take the lead on The Good Witch, and shows that her voice - forceful and almost masculine on The Dark Morris Song - can also still sing in a more gentle register without falling headlong into the saccharine. At this point we hear the author himself, reading what are certainly his own words describing what a good witch should be, and how she should avoid slipping into the be-warted, cackling cliché of far too much literature, warning against the danger of "your mind drifting away from its anchor", a chilling enough thought in itself, but given an added frisson by association with Pratchett's own struggles with a form of Alzheimer's Disease. Indeed, there is a certain hesitancy in his delivery which - no doubt utterly inadvertently - brings an added force to the words.

We then get A Band Of Teachers, a tale of itinerant pedagogues who apparently go around in a 9/8 dance time. The song contains a most pleasing chorus, and a laugh-out-loud line referring to "Geography teachers, got lost in the wood". The instrumental break features an understated sax solo which creates a nice feel.

We then have a couple of minutes or so of high jigs, high jinks, or even high "jings, crivens and help-ma-boab" celebrating The Wee Free Men, the anarchistic pixies (or, rather, 'Pictsies') renowned for their qualities of fighting, drinking and thieving who are not actually based on a stereotype of the Scots, oh deary me no..."No king, no queen, no master / We'll not be fooled again".

Hiver is a song seeing life from an alien perspective, wondering at how humans manage to make sense of the huge, spinning, endless everything-ness of life by turning it into a narrative and, thereby, drawing the sting from it. Kathryn Tickell's pipes make another appearance in a song which - at least in its ambience - reminds me a little of Fox's Silk Milk from over half my lifetime ago.

We then get heavy with Fire & Ice, in which the queen and king of nature (the 'fire' and 'ice' of the title) emphasise the necessity of balance between the elements for life to thrive. Maddy Prior plays the queen and Rick Kemp (I presume, as he has the extra writing credit on this one) the king, with the anthemic chorus almost - but not quite - playing the ace. There is once again a feeling in my mind that this track could - in terms of its arrangement - have been produced at any time between about 1973 and 1977.

The Making Of A Man is, according to his little note in the booklet, Terry Pratchett's favourite track on the album, perhaps his favourite Steeleye track of all. It certainly starts well enough with an a cappella section accompanied by handclapping and sticks putting into music that well-known observation about how much of each chemical element is in the human body, and what else you could do with it if it were not so profitlessly occupied. Unfortunately, the instruments then come in to produce something which sounds disconcertingly like something you might have heard on a BBC radio programme aimed at the tinies of about forty years ago. Or maybe one of those terrible modern devotional songs that such as The Settlers used to perpetrate at about that time. Sorry, Sir Pterry, but I have to disagree with you on this as I do with your assessment of Harry Harrison's Bill, The Galactic Hero as being the funniest SF novel you ever read.

Crown Of Ice returns us to the main protagonists of the story, where the Wintersmith tempts young Tiffany with the promise of making her his queen. Again, although this is quite a strong song, the whole thing still sounds like Steeleye Span have not advanced much in terms of their musical language since the Chrysalis days, with the vocals (possibly Kemp again) redolent of one of the rock-ier singer/songwriters of that time.

The counterpoint to the Wintersmith's beseeching is delivered by Tiffany in the next track, the slow, sad waltz of First Dance, in which she recognises that - although initially beguiled - such a union between human and supernatural entity could never be, and it would be best to end it "with a loving but frozen kiss".

Having had The Dark Morris Song, we now have The Dark Morris Tune. This is not an instrumental version of the earlier track, but a very organic and primitive-spirited slow dance tune where the standard instrumentation is augmented not just by Tickell once again, but smacking sticks and stomping bass drum overlaid with skirling violins (from Peter Knight, who marks his farewell from the band with this recording) and some understatedly effective rock electric guitar and bass.

The Summer Lady is, perhaps, the most traditional-sounding song here (traditional-sounding in its lyrics and tune, that is; not in its instrumentation as such), a joyous invocation of the coming of better days, with Julian Littman providing not only (I presume) an enthusiastic vocal, but also some flowing and lively guitar.

The penultimate track, Ancient Eyes was briefly previewed at the opening of this album. It goes - literally - to the roots of Discworld™, describing (without naming him/her/it) Great A'Tuin, the world-turtle upon whom stand the four elephants upon whom stand the Disc itself. The piece is as slow and ponderous as its subject, with what appears to be an uncredited string quartet (or, more likely, a multi-tracked Peter Knight) providing a suitably dense arrangement.

The last track, We Shall Wear Midnight, consists of a remarkable concept, wherein Tiffany Aching directly addresses her creator, pleading with him to provide her with some sort of existence after he has gone. The lyrics are deeply moving, especially with the knowledge of the novelist's own increasing fraility. The fairly sparse arrangement, overlaid with a vocal duet between Prior and one of the male singers in the second half of each verse, works superbly to underpin the gentle yearning of the sentiments, where the character begs the writer to write her some sort of ending other than that where she has "lived by the pen" and will "die by the sword" when Pratchett lays down his final word on her. One day, both she and the man who imagined her will both wear midnight, and this sad thought concludes the album in a most satisfactory and poignant way.

To sum up then (one has to sum up - it's the rules, don'tcha know?); is this a good album? Yes, it is. Is it a great one? No, not really. Musically, it seems that the last thirty-five years have left scarcely a mark on Steeleye Span in their passing. That having been said, the album is well performed (Prior's voice, despite the passing of time and the slight lowering of key, is as distinctive and powerful as ever) and well produced and might be seen as a worthy tribute to the works of a great writer, as from one legend to another.

Wintersmith can be ordered directly from Park Records.

File under: Music