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Nicely out of Toon
A future star hones his craft across four discs.
By Jim Irvin.
In full swing: Lindisfarne’s Alan Hull in 1969 – his early solo work was intense and chaotic.
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A GED ABOUT 14, Newcastle schoolboy Alan Hull saw two alumni of his school, Rutherford Grammar, suddenly became nationally known as Hank Mar vin and Br uce Welch of The Shadows. Inspired, he took up the guitar. In 1965, aged 20, his latest band, The Chosen Few, won a newspaper contest and a deal with Pye Records. Two singles (all four sides written by Hull) showed promise, but the headstrong Geordie refused to compromise when his proposed third single, a protest song called This Land Is Cold, proved too edgy for producer Cyril Stapleton. Rather than let Stapleton water down his work, Hull left the band (who went on to become Skip Bifferty) in around the summer of 1966, when he mar ried Patricia Sharp, a nurse who worked at the St Nicholas Psychiatric Hospital in Gosforth. Pat helped Alan get a job at the facility as a junior nurse. That job and the fascinating characters he met there fired him to write dozens of songs.