Tim Hart, co-founder of electric folk band Steeleye Span

Published on Sunday 3 January 2010 21:16

Born: 9 January, 1948, in Lincoln. Died: 24 December, 2009, in La Gomera, Canary Islands, aged 61.

TIM Hart, who has died of lung cancer at his home in the Spanish Canary Islands, was co-founder and vocal harmonist of the internationally-popular electric folk band Steeleye Span. His voice, in harmony with his girlfriend at the time, Maddy Prior, was a key part of their biggest hit single, All Around My Hat, in 1975, and their 1973 a cappella Christmas hit Gaudete (Rejoice!), a version of a Christmas carol sung in Latin. Hart's shoulder-length hair and Zapata-style moustache were also a major part of the group's image.

Hart, a gifted multiple instrumentalist, had started his career in 1965 as a folk club duo with the pure-voiced, Blackpool-born Prior. Rejecting the British trend towards recycling the new Dylan/Baez wave of American folk music – most of it imported from the British Isles in the first place – they recorded, in 1968, two albums of traditional tunes titled Folk Songs of Olde England, Volumes 1 and 2. Hart sang and played guitar, mandolin, dulcimer, banjo and fiddle on the tracks, all based on obscure traditional songs or poems they had dug out of libraries or collections.

An English band calling themselves Fairport Convention, co-founded by bassist Ashley "Tyger" Hutchings, had already been unearthing old folk songs and bringing them up to date with electrified instruments and amplifiers, notably with what would turn out to be their classic electric folk album Liege and Lief in 1969. That same year, Hutchings heard Hart and Prior perform and, unhappy with Fairport's direction, proposed they join him in a new folk band with electric guitars, fiddle and drums.

Hart and Prior were already keen to bring traditional English, Scots and Irish songs before the rock audiences of the day so they did not take much persuading. A folk-singing friend of Hart's, the now legendary Martin Carthy, suggested they call themselves Steeleye Span, the name of a character in one of the songs Carthy liked to sing, Horkstow Grange.

Thus, in 1969, was Steeleye Span born, releasing their first album, Hark! The Village Wait, in 1970, although the line-up has changed constantly over the years, and for a time included the great Carthy himself. Apart from his instrumental prowess and telling vocal harmonies, Hart sang lead vocal on many Steeleye tracks, including John Barleycorn and Blackleg Miner, as the band toured the world backing such groups as Jethro Tull and Procol Harum.

Hart left the band in 1983, not in the best of health, playing in the studio for the last time on their album Sails of Silver.

After "years of travelling too fast around the world," he turned his back on the music industry, moved to the Canary Islands in 1988 and became an accomplished writer and photographer, mostly of local wildlife and landscapes – "my inexhaustible subject," he called it. (see www.timhartphotos.com).

He had bought a Pentax Spotmatic and begun taking photos while on tour, and, whenever a music photographer would snap him, he would make a point of getting his quid pro quo by asking that photographer for tips – what speed film was he using, what aperture, etc. On his Spanish island, he learned to master – "after a brain-aching struggle" – digital photography and, with British tourists beginning to discover the lushly forested island, produced its first tourist guide, La Gomera: A Guide to the Unspoiled Canary Island (2004).

The current Steeleye Span, with the evergreen Prior up front, still fill concert halls around the world and, two months before he was diagnosed with lung cancer in December 2008, Hart joined Maddy Prior and elements of the band for a gig at London's Cecil Sharp House as part of the Electric Proms Concert. It was to be his last performance. With his cancer advanced, he was unable to play with the band at their 40th anniversary concert at the Barbican on 7 December last year.

Timothy Hart was born in Lincoln but brought up in St Albans, Hertfordshire, where his father, Canon Dennis Hart, was vicar of St Saviour's church for many years. The young Hart attended historic St Albans school, founded more than 1,000 years ago and next door to St Albans Abbey, so when he started a school rhythm and blues band when he was 15 – initially called the Electrons but later the Rattfinks – he made an indelible impression, one way or the other, on teachers and fellow pupils alike. Among those fellow pupils were members of the group the Zombies, whose success in the 1960s encouraged Hart to stick with a musical career.

Even after creating Steeleye Span with Hutchings, Hart liked to maintain his freedom to create. In 1971, he and Prior recorded an album as a duo, Summer Solstice. Between 1981 and 1983, by then with two young children, he recorded two albums aimed at kids – My Very Favourite Nursery Rhymes and The Drunken Sailor and other Kids' Favourites – both backed musically and vocally by other Steeleye members Prior, Rick Kemp and Bob Johnson.

Despite his prodigious output, perhaps Hart will most be remembered for the massively popular Steeleye track All Around My Hat. His harmonies blend perfectly with Prior's voice as they sing, with no instrumental backing:

All around my hat, I will wear the green willow

All around my hat, for a 12 month and a day

And if anyone should ask me the reason why I'm wearing it

It's all for my true love who's far, far away.

… and then that memorable entrance of drums, electric fiddle and guitars which formed a bridge between folk and rock and still brings goosebumps to many of us to this day.

After he was diagnosed with lung cancer just over a year ago, Hart and his wife, Connie, returned from La Gomera and rented a small flat in Reading so he cold receive chemotherapy and other treatment at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Sensing the inevitable, the couple returned to the island to spend his last days.

Tim Hart is survived by his wife and two children.