Parcel of Rogues

About Parcel of Rogues

Parcel of Rogues is an album by British folk rock band Steeleye Span. It was their most successful album thus far, breaking into the Top 30. The album grew out of a theatrical project the band undertook, a version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, staged in Edinburgh. The book and play were set against the backdrop of the Scottish Jacobite movement, and in the course of developing the play, the band came across a considerable amount of 18th-century Scottish poetry that they mined for the album. If the album has a theme, it is change and the tension between old and new. "The Weaver and the Factory Maid" is about the tension of early industrialization, with a young man celebrating the factory because there are plenty of women for him to pursue, while an old man denounces the factory because of its economic effects. There is a very sharp contrast between the sweet acoustically-driven "The Ups and Downs" followed immediately by the funky distorted loud guitar in "Robbery with Violins". "Cam Ye O'er Frae France" explores this tension in a different way, both in its lyric denouncement of political changes and in the contrast between the poem's traditional Scots language and its sharp electronic guitars. "Alison Gross" is about a literal change, as an evil witch transforms a man who rejects her into a worm. more »