Top 6 - Lindisfarne

 We don't do Top 6 here much these days but it's always ready and waiting when a suitable subject turns up. I don't give my old heroes, Lindisfarne, all that much thought on a daily basis these days but when I do the mixture of nostalgia and a recognition of what seems to have been lost with the passing of years causes those floods of tears which aren't really floods of tears at all but my hyperbole for an emotional twinge.

They simply don't make records like Lady Eleanor any more with its long intro, gradual emergence from the shadows and Alan Hull's evocative poetry augmented by some classy musicianship from Ray's mandolin amongst others. If it would stand no chance of being a chart hit now it was a slightly unlikely no. 3 in 1972 on re-release after Meet Me on the Corner's success and who would now believe what high ranking the Fog on the Tyne album took among best sellers that year.

Meet Me on the Corner was the first pop record I ever bought if we discount the Mozart adaptation by Waldo de los Rios which was an early signpost towards a lifetime admiring an entirely different genre of genius. But I was glad to be able, some 40 years later to speak to its author, Rod Clements, in a street corner pub he was playing so far away from home and tell him it was. How many times must he have heard that. I can't have been the first. I've more recently come to wonder if its subtext isn't really about a drug dealer. One can read it that way if one feels like it. Even if Lindisfarne were beer people, it was 1972 after all.

It is almost led by its thumping bass line, as it might be since the bass man wrote it. 

It isn't possible to keep Alan's impassioned January Song out of the half dozen and he was much preferable in his 'poet' mode than as the political protester he fancied himself as. All Fall Down was ahead of its time and much of his bad boy renegade repertoire were better than others could have done but,

You need me need you need him need everyone, 

is a colossal line to repeat several times when lesser pop songs depend on the repetition of what they imagine to be their 'hook' to fill out the requisite three minutes (and here I refer as a paragon example to There She Goes by The Las, which is great but is only about a minute's worth plus some musical monosodium glutamate).

As can sadly be the way with so many artists, subsequent albums represented a gradual decline. Not by much in the three by the original line-up before the split into Jack the Lad and then the realisaton that it was better to bury their differences and be the original Lindisfarne again but Fog on the Tyne isn't quite as good as Nicely Out of Tune and Dingly Dell definitely not. And, perhaps surprisingly for a band with more than one good songwriter, Turn a Deaf Ear wasn't written by any of them but their mate, Rab Noakes, which is a tribute in itself.

My friend's girl, she has a wireless aerial sticking out of her head
And a pile of true romances lying underneath the bed
And a giant poster of Rabby Nookes just beside the door
But I know she'll get along fine without him if it doesn't see her anymore.

 

Fog on the Tyne and We Can Swing Together are obvious anthems and essential to the oeuvre but not necessarily the best songs and with only two choices left, one must discriminate. When I hear the word 'righteous' these days it can't help but say 'self-righteous' and Alan might be a case in point. Winter Song is where his poetry meets his self-appointed position on the moral high ground but that doesn't prevent it edging ahead of any number of strong candidates from the first two albums.

It is to be regretted that Johnnie Walker, on Sounds of the Seventies, is more likely to play Run for Home than anything far better from a few years earlier. If Metal Guru was really about 'being T. Rex', it was still just as good as Telegram Sam but Run for Home might be about what it had been like being Lindisfarne and yet is only a workmanlike tribute to themselves. I'd have it any day rather than anything by Queen but there are better b sides on earlier singles, including some virtuoso instrumentals and number 6 in a Top 6 can often be given to something not quite Top 6 that makes it Top 5 plus another one.

The record that prompted this trawl through age-old favourites, most of which I might still be word perfect on, them having been so much a part of my 1970's listening with not quite the extended record collection I have now, was Court in the Act, as below, reporting Alan 'Misdemeanour' Hull's truculent attitude when brushing against the law. The point was, though, that if they wanted to maintain the run of hit parade success, the single from Dingly Dell should have been the harmless nicety Wake Up Little Sister but one can't possibly have any of them when we haven't had Clear White Light, an extraordinary hymn to something vague but that sounds meaningful and worth believing in if we knew what it was. I find that as moving as anything they ever did without it meaning anything more than religion does and it could be another drug song for all we know.