Please to See the King

Writer and critic David Keenan once accurately described Please to See the King, the second album by English folk rock institution Steeleye Span, as sounding like a medieval Velvet Underground. It’s most obviously there in the droning, clanging electric guitar and dulcimer, which can get crushingly intense at time – the way Martin Carthy’s downward-strummed guitar crashes through “Prince Charlie Stuart” is startling. It’s there in the wheezing violin drones as well, though Steeleye Span are careful to corral that sound and shift it in different directions – see the slow-motion maypole melancholy of “The Lark in the Morning”. For a second album by a group with an ever-shifting line-up, Please to See the King is a major achievement; it’s also one of the greatest folk rock albums recorded, up there with Shirley Collins’ No Roses and Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief; it’s every bit as pioneering and as intense.