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Nightmare Fuel / Steeleye Span

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  • Their rendition of ''Long Lankin'', a lovely little murder ballad to begin with.
  • Their song "Lord Randall", an adaptation of an old Anglo-Scottish ballad about a young lord who returns home after a visit "in the wild wood" with his lover. His mother asks him a series of questions about where he's gone and what he did. As he answers, he repeatedly states that he's "sick, weary and tired" and "I want to lie down". As his mother continues her line of questions, they get oddly specific. She starts off with "where have you been" and, when told that his lover fed Randall some supper, asks "what did you eat?" Then it becomes "What got your leavings?" "My hawks and my greyhounds." "What did they do then?" "They laid down and died." "I fear you are poisoned!" "Make my bed soon." "Where should I make it?" "Down in the church yard..." If the implication that his mother may have known this was going to happen wasn't creepy enough (she keeps her same demeanor throughout the song), add that to the fact that the song starts off warm and jaunty, and gradually the tone of the song gets more ominous, with the background vocalists singing in deep, scary voices, while the mother's tone never changes. It's sure to bring a shudder.
  • "Following Me" is sung from the perspective of a serial killer's next victim.
    (Somebody's following, following me)
    I feel a chill that runs straight to the bone
    (Somebody's following, following me)
    I've never felt so alone and I know that I'm not mistaken
    (There's been other young girls he's taken)
    If I happen to take just one look in his eyes
    He will turn me to ice, oh why can't I run away?
    Something is stopping me running away
  • "Two Butchers" are riding to market when they hear a woman calling for help. One goes to help her, in exchange for which she calls robbers down on him and stabs him in the back.
  • "Shaking of the Sheets" is a cheerful sounding tune about everyone dancing, until you realize what the "dance that everyone must do" is.
  • "Boys of Bedlam" is a chilling song about insanity.
    And when that I have murdered
    The man in the moon to a powder
    His staff I'll break and his dog I'll shake
    And there'll howl no demon louder
  • "Twa Corbies" is about two ravens ('Corbies' in Scots) discussing what to eat, and they decide on a 'new-slain knight', whose eyes they'll peck out and whose hair they'll build a nest with. No one will care, because only his hawk, his hound, and his wife know where he is, and they've all gone away with others.
  • "Lady Diamond" is about a princess who has an affair with a kitchen boy, so her father has him killed and served for dinner.
  • "Alison Gross", in which the guitars get fuzzier and fuzzier as the song goes on, until by the end they're a hellish wall of shrieking square-wave distortion.
  • A group of gold prospectors find out that all the gold they see has been claimed by the giant "Longbone", who brutally kills everyone.
  • "Fighting for Strangers", which combines "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", the tune of "To Be A Pilgrim" with some new lyrics and a proto-trip-hop beat to eerie effect. Doubly so when Maddy joins in with herself in the final chorus, but in an unrelated key.

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