Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Over at the Salut! Live Facebook group our artist of the week is Alan Hull, the guiding spirit behind Lindisfarne who wrote many of their songs.

A lot of these were written in a vastly creative three year period when he was mostly working as a trainee psychiatric nurse in Newcastle, before Lindisfarne recorded their first LP, Nicely Out of Tune.

(Photo: Marcel Ruf, via lindisfarne.co.uk)

The demos for these early versions of the song were released a couple of months ago in a collection called Singing A Song in the Morning Light, which runs to four discs and eighty eight songs. Uncut reviewed it here.

But our Song of the Day comes from the other end of his career. Hull died suggenly at the age of 50, and his final solo record, punningly titled Statues and Liberties, was released after his death.

Somewhere online Alan Hull is described as “a proud member of the Geordie working class”, and he was politically active for most of his adult life.

Statues and Liberties, written in the dog days of the last long period of Conservative government, has its share of political songs on it. And since it is local election day across much of England today, our song of the day is the title track of that record:

If you are in England and are planning to vote today, remember that you now need an acceptable form of ID (the list is here) to avoid the government’s attempt at voter suppression.

Don’t take my word for it on the voter suppression. The Electoral Commission found that as a result of the introduction of voter ID

“some people found it harder than others to show accepted voter ID, including disabled people, younger voters, people from ethnic minority communities, and the unemployed.”

I think we know what Alan Hull would have had to say about this.