60 albums
1976 - Steeleye Span - Rocket Cottage

I love Steeleye Span, and I love Mike Batt, so I have always had a particular love for All Around My Hat (even if the band don’t particularly). Despite all that love I was unaware that Mike Batt had also produced the follow up Rocket Cottage.

Steeley Span - Rocket Cottage (1976)

Rocket Cottage wasn’t a commercially successful record, Wikipedia suggests (without any supporting evidence) that “the sudden explosion of the British Punk scene saw audience tastes in the UK rapidly shift away from formerly popular genres like folk rock and progressive rock” - punk gets blamed for a lot but a look at the 1976 album charts would suggest that punk had very little effect - there wasn’t a single punk LP in the top 10 albums charts in 1976, and the first single by a UK punk band was New Rose by The Damned released four months after Rocket Cottage - and it didn’t chart either.

So, I suspect there were other reasons that Steeleye Span and/or folk-rock had drifted out of the UKs consciousness, maybe it was All Around My Hat’s fault!? I don’t think it can be the fault of the album (or its production) because it is a great and great sounding album and a quick glance at the British Newspaper Archive seems to mostly reveal positive reaction at the time…

The album is everything that fans could have expected - with a few undetailed surprises for those who buy it - and if the single takes off it could bring the album to even wider attention

Sounds Abound by Carol Clerk - 14th OCtober 1976

It is a cracking album, London was the lead single picked for the album but I can’t help but wonder if things had been different if they’d picked The Brown Girl - oddly a track they never seem to play live.

It is rather baffling (to me) that Rocket Cottage wasn’t as big, or bigger even, than All Around My Hat.