"A Parcel of Steeleye Span: Their First Five Chrysalis Albums 1972-1975" (3.5*)

Well, here’s the third strand of Hughesy’s rediscovery of English folk-rock I was interested in way back in the dim distant past. As with many of these things, we’re in hit and miss territory here, and Steeleye’s fourth album (Below the Salt, the first of the Chrysalis connection) was the first of their material I knowingly ran across.

Of the three, Fairport Convention was, predictably the starting point, and the Shirley & Dolly Collins (as reviewed here) was something that had impinged on the consciousness without being listened to at the time.

The figure that runs through all three, of course, is Ashley Hutchings, originally the bass player with Fairport and subsequently married to Shirley Collins and, in between, founder of Steeleye Span.

To Hutchings, who’d played a major role in putting the Liege and Lief Fairport material together, things came down to a matter of traditional versus original material, and with Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick contributing original material in the lead up to Full House, Hutchings went off looking for an environment where he could pursue an all traditional agenda. There may, as Fairport cofounder Simon Nicol suggested in an interview on the band’s website, have been some ongoing issues from the road accident that preceded Liege and Lief, but a glance at the track listings for the first three albums recorded by his new project suggests an almost totally traditional agenda.

That environment came in the form of Steeleye Span, with an initial lineup of Hutchings, London folk club duo Tim Hart and Maddy Prior and husband and wife Terry and Gay Woods. That lineup didn’t last, and after recording Hark! The Village Wait in 1970 split without performing live, largely due to tensions between the two couples. Terry and Gay left, veteran folkie Martin Carthy and fiddler Peter Knight came on board and off they went on the concert circuit, recording Please to See the King and Ten Man Mop, or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again along the way.

A change of management saw a push towards a more commercial sound, and that, in a nutshell, was the signal for Hutchings and Carthy to depart for more purist pastures (Hutchings in league with Shirley Collins) and their replacements (guitarist Bob Johnson and bass player Rick Kemp) brought more mainstream rock and blues influences to a band in the process of changing record companies as well.

Which brings us to Below the Salt, the first of ten albums recorded for Chrysalis, and the template for much of what followed. While the material was entirely traditional, the arrangements were steadily drifting towards the rock end of the spectrum with nudge nudge tales of milkmaids and gentle swains disappearing in search of lost cattle, a couple of lively jigs and reels and the odd familiar title (in this case John Barleycorn) among songs about sailors, foresters, shepherds and close encounters of the sorcerous jiggy jiggy kind (King Henry).

Maddy Prior took the majority of the vocal leads, Tim Hart made an impressive foil in the vocal department, Knight’s fiddle and Johnson’s guitar worked neatly in not-quite traditional but close enough to satisfy everyone but the most diehard purists tandem and the result was a template that worked well enough. Below the Salt sold better than the previous efforts (at least that’s my recollection) and delivered an unlikely seasonal hit in the form of Gaudete around Christmas 1973. That a cappella rendition of a medieval Finnish tune sung in Latin wasn’t quite the same as the album track, and only climbed as far as #14 in the UK Singles Chart, but was enough to indicate the presence of a degree of commercial viability.

If you’re not inclined to fork out the $25.99 for the five album package, the alternative for those who want a bit of this in their collection without going the whole hog lies in the fifth Steeleye Span album, Parcel of Rogues. If you need an indication of its place in the Steeleye Span catalogue, Hughesy would point you towards the Parcel of bit reappearing in the title of the current collection, and again in Another Parcel of Steeleye Span (Chrysalis albums #6-#10).

It’s more or less the same template as used on Below the Salt with the sound rocked up a notch right from the first notes of One Misty Moisty Morning. Bright, sharp and played with prog rock precision, Alison Gross worked the recurring witchcraft theme, and while Tim Hart’s lament for three brothers in The Bold Poachers slows things down a notch the nudge nudge bit rears its head again in The Ups and Downs, with a visit to the apple grove to tie up the girl’s garter. Fol de rol diddle ol-dey indeed.

The jigs and reels quotient is filled by Robbery With Violins, there’s a bit of the rural wizardry in The Wee Wee Man and the Industrial Revolution rears its ugly head in The Weaver and the Factory Maid before the album’s one-two highlight in the Jacobite era  Rogues In A Nation (that’s where the Parcel bit comes from) and Cam Ye O'er Frae France. Hares on the Mountain winds things up rather charmingly, and, as previously stated, if you’re not up for the $25.99 for the six albums but want some Steeleye in the playlist, the album will set you back $16.90 on iTunes.

Parcel of Rogues might have been the musical high point as fat as Hughesy’s concerned, but the commercial success path was headed firmly upwards, with Steeleye holding down a regular opening gig for Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson got to sit in the producer’s chair for Now We Are Six) and a recording formula that worked pretty well. They’d also recruited a regular drummer (Nigel Pegrum, ex-Gnidrolog, Small Faces and Uriah Heep) and with a six piece outfit recording album #6, Now We Are Six was always going to be an appropriate title.

Unfortunately, for me, this was where the wheels started to fall off. While the sound was a continuation of elements that had gone before, and there were a couple of tracks that matched the preceding albums (Thomas the Rhymer for starters), nursery rhymes sung by The St. Eeleye School Choir, and To Know Him Is to Love Him, complete with David Bowie on saxophone were definitely tracks I could have happily done without after an initial listen just to see what they were like.

Oh, and Bowie’s sax work definitely indicates his day job was absolutely safe.

The downwards trend continued with Commoners Crown, which worked well enough apart from the presence of Peter Sellers on electric ukelele and Goon Show voices for New York Girls and the Mike Batt (The Wombles) production All Around My Hat.  As happens so often, however, mileages vary when it comes to Hughesy’s ratings and commercial success.

While the album sailed as high as #7 in the British album charts and the title track, released as a single, hit #5, repeated listens in the course of putting this together suggests that Steeleye Span material that hits the Top 1500 Most Played in my iTunes will be from the earlier, more interesting, stage of the band’s evolution.

The problem, as far as I can see, is that while there’s plenty of traditional material out there, and only so many folk fans who’ll buy multiple renditions of the same material by different singers. Sure, you could have Maddy Prior working the same seam of traditional material as Sandy Denny and, say, Anne Briggs or Shirley Collins and have a small coterie of devotees dutifully buying everything but once you head towards the mass market and someone else has done that one it’s increasingly a case of hands off unless you can throw something different (like Peter Sellars on electric ukulele) into the mix.

On top of that, when you’re increasingly headed towards a rock audience, you’re going to rework the on stage repertoire accordingly, which may account for the presence of To Know Him Is To Love Him, though an examination of a few set lists from American shows reveals a distinct lack of the old Teddy Bears single.

Still, for the price and the quantity of material here I’m glad I wandered down this particular road of reminiscence, and it’s interesting to compare and contrast what’s on offer here with contemporary efforts from Fairport Convention and Shirley Collins...

Disc 1:
Below the Salt 
Spotted Cow
Rosebud In June
Jigs (Medley)
Sheepcrook And Black Dog
Royal Forester
King Henry
Gaudete
John Barleycorn
Saucy Sailor
Gaudete (Single Version)
The Holly And The Ivy 

Parcel of Rogues 
One Misty Moisty Morning
Alison Gross
The Bold Poachers
The Ups and Downs
Robbery With Violins

Disc 2:
The Wee Wee Man
The Weaver And The Factory Maid
Rogues In A Nation
Cam Ye O'er Frae France
Hares On The Mountain
Bonny Moorhen 

Now We Are Six 
Seven Hundred Elves
Drink Down The Moon
Now We Are Six
Thomas The Rhymer
The Mooncoin Jig
Edwin
Long-A-Growing
Two Magicians
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
To Know Him Is To Love Him
The Wife Of Ushers Well (Live At The Rainbow)

Disc 3:
Commoners Crown 
Little Sir Hugh
Bach Goes To Limerick
Long Lankin
Dogs And Ferrets
Galtee Farmer
Demon Lover
Elf Call
Weary Cutters
New York Girls

All Around My Hat
Black Jack Davy
Hard Times Of Old England
Cadgwith Anthem
Sum Waves
The Wife Of Ushers Well
Gamble Gold (Robin Hood)
All Around My Hat
Dance With Me
Batchelors Hall

Neil Young & Crazy Horse "Americana" (3.5*)

I guess, when you’re looking to head off into Retro territory there are two extreme paths you can choose.

You can, should you want to employ twenty-first century technology and match it up with an attitude or sensibility that comes out of the era you’re looking to recreate, end up with something like a perfectly recorded period piece. That would deliver a seventies punk recreation where you could hear the singers’ spittle hitting the microphone or someone singing the acoustic blues with perfectly recorded fingernails scraping along guitar strings.

Alternatively you can take yourself back to the technology that applied at the time and produce something that sounds like it came directly out of the era you’re looking at without stopping along the way.

Most exercises in retrospectivity fit somewhere in between those extremes, with perfectly recorded reproductions played through vintage amplifiers (or whatever), but when you’re looking at the latest effort from Neil Young & Crazy Horse it’s worth stating those extremes because there’s a fair bit of both here.

It’s around nine years since Greendale, the last time Young let the Horse (in the studio sans guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, though he played on the subsequent tour) loose on a fan base that, largely, yearns for the primitive garage band thrash the outfit delivers (basically because anything else is a fair way beyond their actual capabilities), and with the Horse in harness you’re more or less right back in the second approach outlined above, regardless of whether you’re using the latest techno wonders to do the actual recording.

Regardless of what you think about Neil’s recent recording history, there’s no denying the guy’s prolific. Possibly too prolific, in the sense that a little time spent on polishing the product might be better than first thought = best thought, which is where he seems to have been sitting for a while.

Regardless of how prolific you are, sitting down to write a book (Waging Heavy Peace, apparently semi-autobiographical, due out later this year) the effort’s possibly going to steer you away from writing songs and while you’re thinking about the past you’re going to remember things you were doing back when you were starting out in the early sixties.

Those reminiscences apparently included versions of Oh, Susannah by The Thorns and The Company's version of High Flying Bird as played in Ontario clubs and incorporated into the repertoire of Young’s band, The Squires, joining She’ll Be Comin ’Round The Mountain, Tom Dooley and Clementine in their regular set list.

That’s one part of the equation.

On top of that, it’s hard to avoid suspecting the origins of this particular exercise probably trace back to the preparations for the Young & Crazy Horse appearance at the MusicCares tribute to Paul McCartney in Los Angeles back in February, where their cover of I Saw Her Standing There was apparently one of the highlights of the show. If you’re going to go back to 1963, why not go all the way back?

Of course, when you’re talking Neil Young things aren’t that simple.

Sure, he might wake up one morning with memories of singing God Save the Queen at primary school and decide to have a bash at it here, but he also does a bit of research, digging out the oft-forgotten second verse, goes the full back to childhood kick with a kids choir thrown in for good measure and throws in some of My Country ‘Tis Of Thee (same tune, different lyrics), the unofficial anthem of the United States before The Star Spangled Banner got the official gig in 1931.

And if you thought it was just a matter of digging out a few old chestnuts and redoing them as garage rock thump after the artistic and political stances on Greendale, Living With War, Fork in the Road and Le Noise he goes to some trouble to spell out the fact that many of those old hootenanny staples everybody sang so cheerfully back in the day were concerned with murder, sex, and political turbulence in circumstances where physical danger lurked around the corner for those who were inclined to question the status quo.

So you have the original Old Left lyrics of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, and in interviews Young has talked about She’ll Be Comin ’Round The Mountain (covered here, but renamed Jesus' Chariot), generally held to be a Negro spiritual, referring to the second coming of Jesus, with she being the chariot he’ll arrive on but points out an alternative narrative. She, in this reading, is union organiser Mary Harris "Mother" Jones promoting union activity in Appalachian coal-mining camps.

Not quite your usual good time campfire hootenanny interpretations.

As Young and the Horse stomp through Oh Susannah (Stephen Foster filtered through an early sixties arrangement by The Thorns with a nod to Shocking Blue’s Venus), Clementine and Tom Dula (both a la Fort William, spring 1965), Gallows Pole, and a dose of fifties doo wop withThe Silhouettes‘ 1957 hit Get A Jobit certainly sounds like they’re having a ball reliving bits of the past.

At this point I’m inclined to point out that Crazy Horse started off as a Los Angeles-based doo wop outfit called Danny And The Memories, so it’s not just Young’s past we’re revisiting.


Proceedings are rounded off with Travel On, the Haight-Ashbury folk-rock fave High Flyin’ Bird, Wayfarin’ Stranger and, just to wind things up, God Save The Queen. This one seems to have a few Yanks scratching their heads, but I have a suspicion The Squires and their peers, playing rock’n’roll for the kids on the Canadian prairies, were regularly told to finish the night’s entertainment with a rendition of the anthem, along the same lines as the situation where a Northern Ireland club owner insisted John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers finish with the anthem in November 1967 (as preserved on Diary of a Band)...


As with all things Neil, your mileage is likely to vary considerably, and I must admit initial exposure to the B-A-N-J-O on my knee in Oh Susannah produced a hessian underwear reaction that had me firmly in the anti-Americana camp but repeated exposure has scaled that back to minor irritation and there are moments scattered throughout that are quite sublime in a revisiting our garage rock roots kind of way.

Fortunately, in these days of iTunes playlists and other filtering devices it’s easy to avoid the dross (God Save the Queen has already been relegated to the digital back blocks) and it’ll be interesting to see which other titles will have joined This Land is Your Land in the lofty heights of Hughesy’s Top 1500 Most Played. I’d nominate Get a Job as the most likely candidate.

Some links:

Initial announcement in Rolling Stone

Neil interviewed for Reuters, Morning Becomes Eclectic, Fresh Air and All Songs Considered

On Thrasher’s Wheat, A Neil Young Critic Drifts Into Self-parody and The Unbearable Lightness of Being Neil Young

Albion Country Band & Shirley Collins "No Roses" (4*)

Having left Fairport Convention because he wanted to explore traditional material rather than attempt to recreate a traditional vibe through original material and been pushed out of Steeleye Span, the band he formed to explore that inclination when they elected to pursue a more obviously commercial direction it probably comes as no surprise to find Ashley Hutchings launching another project in the same territory with his wife Shirley Collins.

Fairport Convention had started life as an outfit blending American singer-songwriter material, along with original compositions along the same lines on Fairport Convention, What We Did on Our Holidays  and Unhalfbricking before veering towards traditional material when fiddler Dave Swarbrick joined the band for Liege and Lief. An emerging interest in traditional material had Hutchings searching through the material collected at the English Folk Dance & Song Society Library at Cecil Sharp House, and the research had driven the contents of Liege and Lief, and the electrified versions of traditional songs on the first three Steeleye Span albums (Hark! The Village Wait, Please to See the King and Ten Man Mop, or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again).

A good ten years older than her second husband, Shirley Collins had grown up in an East Sussex family with ties to the area's traditional music, moved to London to attend teachers' college in the early fifties and through the early folk revival movement became involved with the likes of Ewan MacColl, who introduced her to American folk archivist Alan Lomax, in London avoiding the McCarthy era witch hunt in the United States. She’d collaborated with Lomax on the song collecting journey through the American south between July and November 1959 that produced the recordings released on Atlantic Records as Sounds of the South that went on to become a key ingredient in the Coen brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou and once she returned to England recorded the jazz-folk fusion Folk Roots, New Routes with Davey Graham and collaborate with her sister Dolly (The Sweet Primroses, Anthems in Eden, Love, Death and the Lady) and the Young Tradition (Peter Bellamy, Heather Wood and Royston Wood).

The collaborations with her sister were built around Dolly’s pipe or flute organ with additional light and shade from the medieval crumhorns, recorders, sackbuts and viols of London’s Early Music Consort with 1969‘s Anthems in Eden featuring a twenty-eight minute song cycle about changes in rural England and destruction of ancient traditions that came about after the First World War.

After marrying Hutchings in 1971, the couple set about recording No Roses at Sound Techniques, and Air Studios in London, with Collins’ vocals backed by a selection from a core group that included Hutchings on bass, Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol on guitars, Roger Powell (drums), and Dave Bland (concertina and hammered dulcimer), with additional toning added by what must have seemed a bewildering array of twenty-plus other musicians in various permutations and combinations.

That wasn’t the way things were supposed to go, but as different faces appeared at the studio door, it probably seemed a pity to let what they had to offer go to waste. Apart from that core group, the album included vocal contributions from Maddy Prior, Royston Wood, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Nic Jones, who also played fiddle (as did Barry Dransfield).

Additional instrumental tones were added by Dolly Collins and Ian Whiteman (piano), Dave Mattacks (sticks and drums), John Kirkpatrick (accordion), Tim Renwick (acoustic and electric guitar), Lol Coxhill (alto sax), Alan Cave (bassoon) and Steve Migden (French horn) with more esoteric notes added by Northumbrian small pipes (Colin Ross), melodeon (Tony Hall), hurdy-gurdy  (Francis Baines), ophicleide (a brass keyed-bugle that seems to have been an antecedent of the saxophone, played by Alan Lumsden) and the more prosaic jaw harp (Trevor Crozier).

But it’s all about the music, and having worked through Anthems in Eden and Love, Death and the Lady what’s on offer here has a more contemporary feel, sounding like (as someone put it) Shirley Collins backed by Fairport Convention, which is close to the money, but not quite on it.

Collins’ vocals are as Albion as they were on the preceding recordings, the instrumental work has a recognizably Fairport orientation, but the more exotic sonic contributions take it a step away from the early seventies folk rock scene but not as far as the pseudo-medieval early music present on Anthems in Eden.

As far as the material itself is concerned, we’ve got the returning sailor the faithful girlfriend fails to recognise (much the same territory as John Riley) on Claudy Banks (from Sussex’s Copper family), Romany fortune tellers who end up with the well-born squire (Little Gipsy Girl, from Louise Holms of Hereford), rejected suitors deemed unsuitable by wealthy parents (Banks of The Bann, from Bert Lloyd), notorious killings such as the Murder of Maria Marten (from Joseph Taylor of Lincolnshire), cautionary tales for would-be poachers in Van Dieman's Land (collated by Ashley Hutchings), returning lovers (Just As The Tide Was A'Flowing, from Aunt Grace Winborn, Hastings), cross-country hunting (The White Hare from Joseph Taylor of Lincolnshire), historical and mythical themes in Cornish mystery plays and spring rituals i.e. Hal-An-Tow (part of the May ritual in Helston, Cornwall) and the discovery and burial of unknown women (Poor Murdered Woman from Mr. Foster of Surrey).

All in all, the product of musicians with a deep love and understanding of the English music heritage and a desire to set the tradition in a more contemporary setting that works well provided you’re not put off by the breathy, slightly unearthly Collins vocal character, which may be a tad on the trad folkie finger in the ear style for some listeners.

Still, placing No Roses alongside the likes of Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief and Full House or the early Steeleye Span it’s an interesting variation on emerging themes. More obviously traditional than Fairport, not quite as rocky as Steeleye....

Having delved back this far, I’m looking towards the albums that followed, or those that are available through iTunes (The Albion Dance Band’s The Prospect Before Us, Shirley and Dolly Collins For As Many As Will being prime candidates).

Fairport Convention "House Full: Live at the L.A. Troubadour" (4.5*)

Thank you. This is our last number and it's called Sir Patrick Spens isn't the first thing you'd expect to hear on an album, but presumably it’s the only track from the first of three-nights that were recorded to have made the cut for the disk, so there you go.

In any case, if you’re into musical archaeology, House Full, as the only currently available live Fairport Convention album with Richard Thompson in the band, is probably required listening. There’s the small matter of Fairport’s influence on a group of young Angelenos of Mexican origin who morphed into Los Lobos.

Having lost singer Sandy Denny almost directly after Liege & Lief appeared on the market, Fairport had reshaped the vocal department with guitarist Richard Thompson and folkie fiddler Dave Swarbrick sharing the leads with assistance in the background from new bass player Dave Pegg, who’d been slotted in to replace Ashley Hutchings, who was en route to more traditional territory with his new missus Shirley Collins.

The new line up had recorded and released Full House, and were on the road behind the album (as the saying goes) when they landed in L.A. for a week-long gig at the Troubadour (opening, believe it or not, for Rick Nelson) that was legendary for a couple of reasons. According to Dave Pegg the band were doing a week's residency, two spots each night and three on the weekend for which we were going to be paid five hundred dollars. But when we went to collect our wages, we'd drunk so much we owed them fifteen hundred bucks. Impressive, even taking into account the possibility that the drinks in question were overpriced and the band were generous tippers where leggy waitresses were concerned.

The finer details of alcoholic catering may have had something to do with the related fact that Led Zeppelin were performing at the Forum and Robert Plant, John Bonham and Fairport’s new bass player were old mates from Birmingham. Dave Pegg invited the foursome to the Troubadour after their Forum gig at the Forum and when they arrived a dressing room consultation resulted in Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones joining Fairport on stage for a set that included Hey Joe, Morning Dew, Banks of the Sweet Primroses, Mystery Train and That's Alright Mama. While the mobile eight-track machine was rolling throughout the tapes (existence confirmed by Joe Boyd) are buried deep in the Polygram vaults.

But it seems they exist. In White Bicycles Boyd reminisces: the tape reveals Plant’s vocal being louder than any of the amplifiers, Page trying to keep pace with Richard on jigs and reels and Zep manager Peter Grant at a front table cursing and abusing the waitresses.

He also recalls Linda Ronstadt being invited on stage (another night, another distinguished guest) after Fairport had run out of encores for another forty minutes covering songs she had forgotten she knew.

There’s nothing from either night here, however. So what’s on the disk?

Well, for a start, there’s nothing that predates Liege & Lief (predictable, the infamous car crash would still have been relatively fresh in the memory), and the Liege and Full House material is fleshed out with traditional material, a World War I bagpipe lament and, on a lighter note, Yellow Birds (or boids, up high in banana trees).

Even if you’re not familiar with Fairport, those of us who went through high school in the sixties will probably recall Sir Patrick Spens from the poetry anthologies (I had the impression it was regarded as somewhere in the same postcode as iconic as far as medieval ballads were concerned), but don’t let that put you off.

Actually, while Sir Patrick Spens and Banks of the Sweet Primroses get proceedings off on a nice roll, there’s nothing there to suggest you’re in the presence of anything other than a fairly good folk-rock band, things change with the jigs and reels in The Lark in the Morning Medley, which may not be the fastest of their kind in captivity (that honour quite possibly goes to Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron or Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzies) the version here romps along at a merry clip, and like the later variations, is played with stop on a sixpence precision by an outfit with considerable instrumental chops (Swarbrick’s fiddle work might not quite rate as virtuoso, but it’s in an adjacent postcode and Richard Thompson is, well, Richard Thompson, enough said) and a rock hard, hard rocking rhythm section.

Those chops come to the fore again in twelve and a bit minutes of Sloth, and yet again in the play-out to Matty Groves, with the traditional Staines Morris wedged between them. The vocal department on Matty Groves shows what they lost with the departure of Sandy Denny, but there’s a rough-hewn rustic note to the Thompson and Swarbrick take that has its own charm, from where I’m sitting.

Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron cart us back into jigs and reels territory, then there’s a stately take on Battle of the Somme, a piper’s lament that you might not expect to work in this setting but if you didn’t you weren’t aware of Thompson’s ongoing affinity with the skirl of the pipes.

Up to this point we’re revisiting the original House Full. The related release Live at the L.A. Troubadour gives us Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzie's Daughter's Lament for the 77th Mounted Lancer's Retreat from the Straits of Loch Knombe, in the Year of Our Lord 1727, on the Occasion of the Announcement of Her Marriage to the Laird of Kinleakie, which predictably gets abbreviated to Sir B. McKenzies. Non-Einsteins will no doubt be able to figure out why, and proceedings are concluded on a lighter note with the old Yellow Birds.

In their day, the five man Fairport were, by all accounts, an awesome experience in a live setting and as the only officially released live recording of the lineup House Full, with that extra material from the cousin-brother Live at the L.A. Troubadour tacked on the end is close to essential listening for anyone interested in investigating this little corner of the folk-rock genre.

In summary, a crack five-piece outfit at the height of their considerable powers. I was, back in the day, highly impressed by Angel Delight, the studio album that followed this live excursion, by which time Richard Thompson had gone. Classic, exuberant British folk-rock from the best all-male lineup of a band that has gone on to become an institution (they’re still going strong with a 45th anniversary coming up, and there’ll be those who’ll rate a configuration featuring Sandy Denny as slightly better).

They never, as someone or other pointed out, made an album like this again, but then again, no one else did either. For $10.99 at the iTunes Store it was a no-brainer...