Steeleye Span take a fresh look at their early 70s albums - East Grinstead and Hailsham dates

Singer Maddy Prior is delighted to be back in business: “The audiences are still hesitant a little bit, I think. We had a fantastic tour in 2019 and it was really fantastic to see the halls full and everybody really enjoying what we were doing. It was just great and we thought ‘Oh great, we have got a really good time ahead of us for the next year or two’, but then it all stopped.

"Actually initially I didn't have a problem with that at all. I live in the middle of nowhere and it was just a question of having some time off. We didn't know it was going to be a couple of years! But we had wonderful weather and it was really quite pleasant to start with and then it dragged on a bit. I run singing courses as well and we had to cancel those and it just felt like absolutely nothing was certain at all anymore.

"But I did enjoy it a bit to start with because I've never had time off and it has to be quite a long time off for me to even notice! And I quite enjoyed not singing. It's not like I'm an opera singer. I don't have to be singing all the time but it is actually physical work and you have to keep yourself reasonably fit but having sung for so long, those muscles were not too bad! But the thing about performance is that it is not entirely who you are but it is big part of who you are and we've been doing this for so long.”

For the current tour the band is going back to the early 70s, in particular the albums Below the Salt (1972) and Parcel of Rogues (1973), albums from a couple of years before their massive hit with All Around My Hat.

“They are special albums. They established a style that we ran with. The early albums were lovely, absolutely beautiful but they were much more folk than rock but with albums like Below the Salt we became much more folk rock. It was just about the personnel changing really. Martin and Ashley left and Rick and Bob joined and they were people that had worked with rock bands. They had a greater sense of that and we just moved with it, I think.

"It's a very democratic band. Everybody brings their skills into it and then you fight your corner! It is not given to anybody, you know! But at the moment we've got a very disparate group of musicians but we're still working to the same blueprint. The music changes but the essence kind of stays the same. There's a whole raft of us that never believed we would be doing this for so long. If you had asked us back then we would just never thought about it but I think the lovely thing is that you're working with people that you've known for a long time and you have kind of grown older together and somehow it works. I enjoy the band and I enjoy the music and we've got a big repertoire of things that we can draw on, different songs that we do but obviously Hat will always be one of them. That's our anthem.”

So why did it become such a massive hit?

“When you hear a song on the radio it either comes out of the speakers or it doesn't and Hat comes out of the speakers. I've had one or two other songs that did that but Hat certainly does. Mike Batt produced it, and he was very aware of that. In those days we were just from the folk world and nobody knew about that kind of thing but it was fantastic for us. We always love playing it. We've always been a live band though we have recorded a lot of stuff. And it's funny when you look back on some of it you think why did we record it so fast! But we did and we could!”