Monday 18th January

I first heard and saw Lindisfarne in 1972 at the Weeley pop festival, and I was a fan straightaway.  They came from Northumberland and were an electric folk band, playing with conventional instruments and a fiddle player.  They were a great ‘good-time’ band, with such songs as ‘Fog on the Tyne’ and ‘We can swing together’ and used to do long jams incorporating folk tunes we all knew into their music.  But they also had a brilliant songwriter in Alan Hull who incorporated Social Justice into songs like ‘Scarecrow song’ and ‘Clear White Light’.  My favourite Lindisfarne song was on their first album ‘Lady Eleanor’, a bewitching tale very much in the folk tradition but sung beautifully.

The original line-up made three records and took the album charts by storm, ‘Fog on the Tyne’ was the best selling album of 1972.  Their third album was called Dingly Dell and was far more prog-rock with wonderful weird bass sounds on it.  But after this album the band split and with a new line-up they continued but somehow the magic had gone and eventually Alan left to go solo.  I bought his two solo records but they weren’t as good as the ones the early ones he made with Lindisfarne.   The original members reformed a few years later and had one excellent album “Back and Fourth”.  They continued to tour and record with diminishing success.  Alan Hull, the real genius of the band died in 1995 and the band finally called it a day in 2004.

They were really a band of that magical time, the first three years of the Seventies, and could never really respond to changing times, but I still love them and will always remember sitting in a muddy field drinking orange juice laced with gin and slimming tablets listening to their sweet music late one summer night in 1972.  And as you can just see it cost a a massive £1.50 for the whole 3 day festival….Life didn’t get much better than that.