Rocket Cottage

Rocket Cottage is an album by the electric folk band Steeleye Span.

This was the band's ninth album, and the second produced by Mike Batt. It was hoped that the album would cement the band's popular and commercial success, building on their breakthrough into the UK Top 10 with their previous album All Around My Hat and its title track, which reached #5 on the UK singles chart. Unfortunately, Rocket Cottage was a victim of bad timing - by the time it was released, 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, and groups that previously been critical favourites, like Steeleye Span and Yes, soon found themselves being derided as "dinosaurs". Rocket Cottage failed to break into the Top 40, and it was the last album recorded by the "classic" mid-Seventies lineup of the group, with Peter Knight and Bob Johnson both subsequently leaving the group.

The album is perhaps the band's most rock-influenced album, with very prominent guitars and a strong rhythm section. Some fans consider this one of the band's best efforts, pointing to strong tracks like "London", "Fighting for Strangers", "Sir James the Rose", and "Orfeo/Nathan's Reel", the first three of which became classics of the band and fan favorites. Others, however, find the album erratic, complaining that the band's rhythm section tends to overwhelm the vocals, particularly on "Orfeo", "The Twelve Witches", and (to a lesser extent) "The Brown Girl". Oddly for an instrumental piece, "Nathan's Reel" simply fades out. The most peculiar decision was the choice to include an unrehearsed version of "Camptown Racetrack"; Years later Maddy Prior remarked about this decision, "I can't think what we were thinking of with that." This was the band's ninth album in five years, and many feel that their exhaustion is evident.