Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Winter Song was on Lindisfarne’s first LP, Nicely Out of Tune, along with Lady Eleanor and We Can Swing Together. It was a low-key beginning for the band, but the huge success of Fog on the Tyne a year later dragged it into the album charts.

It was, all the same, an indication of Alan Hull’s huge talent. He’d written seven of the eleven songs on the record.

(Photo: Martin McG/Geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Hull died of a heart attack at the relatively young age of 50. But I was reminded of some of this recently when I got an online flyer from two of the other band members, Ray Laidlaw and Billy Mitchell, who tour a show called The Lindisfarne Story. Each edition has a theme, and next year’s theme is Nicely Out of Tune. Sadly, I’m unlikely to make the show, since they’re not coming further south than Beverley.

It also reminded me of the time as a teenager that I saw Lindisfarne in their pomp, in an unlikely three-header concert at Portsmouth City Hall that had Genesis open the show, with Peter Gabriel in full fox costume, Lindisfarne close it, and Rab Noakes pop up in the middle to play a few numbers. Tony Stratton Smith was a bit of a showman when it came to promoting his Charisma label artists.

Alan Hull was our Artist of the Week at our Facebook group in May, and when I researched him then I realised that he had written many of the songs that made Lindisfarne the success they were in the 1970s in a rush before the band was formed. Hull was working as a trainee psychiatric nurse at the time.

The demos he made during that time have been collected together on a box set, Singing A Song In The Morning Light, released earlier this year. They are also gathered together on a youtube channel—88 songs on four records, including Winter Song.

Wizz Jones has an excellent version of Winter Song, and youtube reveals some less likely fans. There’s a version with an orchestra by Sam Fender, who fronted a documentary about Alan Hull’s work and life, and by Elvis Costello, solo on a Canadian television show.

The song itself is a cousin to Ralph McTell’s Streets of London, written at around the same time, in that it addresses someone who is comfortably off and asks them to “spare a thought” for the tramp and the gypsy, who don’t have the same comforts as “winter comes howling in”. The lyric and the arrangement even feel chilly.