Ashley Hutchings left Fairport Convention in 1969. He founded Steeleye Span, but also started The Albion Country Band with his wife, Shirley Collins. They released the classic No Roses in 1971 before breaking up in 1973. Collins and Hutchings continued together in the Etchingham Steam Band, formed around acoustic instruments during an era of power cuts. The Steam Band only recorded a couple of medleys, and not a full album.
Hutchings returned to the Albion Band in 1976, releasing The Battle of the Field, which had been shelved since 1973. He recruited Nicol, fiddle player Ric Sanders, and excellent vocalist John Tams, and they recorded a couple of strong folk-rock albums.
Tams left in 1980 and formed Home Service. The Albion Band struggled on through the 1980s, struggling to find an identity in a changing market. This page focuses on their first decade, when they released a couple of folk-rock classics.
The Albion Band Album Reviews
No Roses
1971, 9/10
Ashley Hutchings originally formed The Albion Band to support his then-wife, Shirley Collins. It’s low-key, but it features 27 different musicians, as anyone who dropped by the studio was invited to join. The core band is Hutchings’ former Fairport comrades – Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol, and Dave Mattacks are heavily involved. But many folk luminaries drop by, like Nic Jones and Maddy Prior.
No Roses finds a middle ground between Collins’ traditional leanings and the electric sounds Hutchings pioneered in Fairport. But it’s still exploratory – the opener ‘Claudy Banks’ features Alan Cave on bassoon and British free jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill. ‘Banks of the Bann’ is sung to the tune of the hymn ‘Be Thou My Vision’, and it’s lovely. ‘Murder of Maria Marten’ is the lengthy epic, recalling Fairport’s dark epics like ‘Tam Lin’, but with quieter interludes featuring Jones and Barry Dransfield on fiddles.
No Roses is a folk-rock classic, very nearly as good as the more celebrated Liege and Lief.
10 Best Albion Band Songs
- Murder of Maria Marten
- Claudy Banks
- Banks of the Bann.
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