| Commoners Crown | ||||
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| Studio album by Steeleye Span | ||||
| Released | January 1975 | |||
| Recorded | September and October, 1974 at Morgan Studios | |||
| Genre | Electric folk | |||
| Length | 38:39 | |||
| Label | Chrysalis | |||
| Producer | Steeleye Span and Robin Black | |||
| Steeleye Span chronology | ||||
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| Allmusic | link |
Commoners Crown is an album by the electric folk band Steeleye Span, its seventh release overall and the second album with the band's most commercially successful line-up. It reached number 21 in the UK album charts.
The album's title refers to a sculpture produced by Shirtsleeves Studio. The sculpture is composed of hundreds of tiny human figures assembled to form a crown. The tiny figures also decorate the liner notes.
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By this point, the band had evolved into a full-fledged rock sound, comparable to Jethro Tull during its folk rock phase. Several of the tracks feature strong rock drumming and heavy guitar riffs, but the material remains almost entirely traditional folk music, with the exception of 'Bach Goes to Limerick', a surprising attempt to interweave a classical Bach violin piece with a traditional Irish fiddle piece.
The lead track, 'Little Sir Hugh' is based on a medieval song about the English saint Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, a 13th century boy supposedly murdered by Jews. The original song's lyrics are sharply anti-Semitic, but the band deleted the anti-Semitic elements.
In addition to 'Little Sir Hugh', the album's highlights include 'Long Lankin', the band's longest song to date and something of a fan favourite, and 'Demon Lover'.
The band continued the whimsical streak demonstrated on Now We Are Six by inviting comedian and actor Peter Sellers to play the ukulele on the closing track, 'New York Girls'. The band decided that it wanted a ukulele on the song, but no one in the band knew anyone who played the instrument. Finally someone remarked that Sellers was known to play it, and they decided to ask him, even though none of them knew him at all. To their surprise, he agreed, and the song became one of only two recordings he made with a rock band. The other was "After the Fox", recorded with The Hollies in 1966. He also contributes some vocals spoken in character as Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister (originally portrayed by Sellers and Spike Milligan in the BBC radio comedy programme, The Goon Show), which many fans of the band found distracting. On the original vinyl release, the song ended with Sellers saying "I say, are you a matelot? Careful what you say, sir - we're on board ship here". The subsequent CD releases omitted the quip. [The current 2009 3 disc EMI box set A PARCEL OF STEELEYE SPAN reinstates the quip] The song is also unusual in the sense that all the male band members (except Nigel Pegrum) take lead vocals on two verses each (Rick Kemp singing verses 1 and 5, Tim Hart 2 and 6, Peter Knight 3 and 7 and Bob Johnson 4 and 8), with Maddy Prior singing the chorus. Despite this odd note, 'Commoner's Crown' is often cited as one of the band's best efforts.
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