When Maddy Prior told her mother “We were 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 16 century Christmas carol, soared into the charts in December, 1973, surprising everyone – including the band. For starters it was the first, and so far the only British chart hit sung entirely in Latin, and secondly it 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. “When we got on Top Of The Pops, we couldn’t believe our luck. It was the only music show on primetime TV back then. We wanted to sing, but they said we had to mime. So we walked about holding candles. “We were just laughing all the time. We thought it was incredibly funny.” Slade were on the same edition with their own Christmas perennial, Merry Xmas Everybody, and Wizzard weren’t far behind. “It was great because it wasn’t where we were heading, but it just sort of happened.”
The folk-rockers went Top Ten two years later with All Around My Hat – an early 19 Century ditty about a Cockney costermonger whose light-fingered beloved had been transported to Australia. 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.
Her voice is so soulful that a New York producer who heard their track playing asked, “Is that the new Etta James album?” But the only things Steeleye Span took from America were their Fender guitars. Fame came by accident. “We were always more interested in the music. We wanted it to be popular and not overly esoteric.” Maddy started singing aged nine with the Blackpool Co-op Choir. Then the family left Lancashire for St Albans, Hertfordshire. A huge culture shock. “The locals couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand them. This was 1959, before Coronation Street, and nobody had heard a Lancashire accent. I had to learn to speak southern.” At 13, she was hanging out at a teenagers’ club attached to folk pub The Cock. “I really got into folk, and trad jazz – anything you could dance to. Ska too. I used to listen to Prince Buster, I was a Mod, I had a Lambretta, in ’63 or ’64. I was still at school but I saw Georgie Fame at the Flamingo Club. So much was packed into a few years. So much energy.” Maddy, whose father Allan co-created TV’s Z-Cars, started performing in The Cock, where she befriended future folk star Donovan. “You could come up from the floor and have a go, and people weren’t judgemental. I liked that. It gave you a chance to start and gain confidence.”
