In an interview I once did with Maddy, she suggested that the producer was more influential as well in the choice of material.

I wrote it up as follows:

Two years after the final break-up, the band was back again, this time with the stable lineup that had recorded the classic mid-seventies albums: Maddy Prior, Tim Hart, Rick Kemp, Peter Knight, Bob Johnson and Nigel Pegrum. "They asked us to make an album," Prior recalls, "and we got on so well, we thought we'd tour."

The album in question, Sails of Silver (1981), exemplifies the incertitude that characterized the band through the 1980s. It contains only one traditional song, the rest of the material having been written by the group. The unfamiliar material and slick production values both contribute to the feeling that this is not a Steeleye album at all. Prior explains, "Because we'd all kind of gone in different directions, all doing different things, with different ideas, that certainty that we'd had before, we'd lost. We were so in disarray, and we didn't have the material we were confident with. So [producer Gus Dudgeon] had a lot more input, and I think that's why it sounds very sweet and rounded and nothing offensive in it, you know. And that wasn't what we were known for, and it isn't what we do, what we're good at." Still, she insists, it's not a bad album, really. "I actually think it's quite a jolly album. And very accessible."