ARCHIVE
ALAN HULL
Singing ASong In The Morning Light – The Legendary Demo Tapes 1967–1970
The formative work of Lindisfarne’s leading light is dusted off to reveal many a rough diamond.
By Nigel Williamson
“Melting the sky through a hole in your eye where the magic comes”
REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS
CHERRY RED
THE making of Alan Hull as asongwriter was not the hours sitting hunched over his guitar in his bedroom with only his introspection for company, but the three years he spent working as atrainee nurse in aTyneside psychiatric institution.
“That’s what changed me and the things Iwas writing about,” he said of his time working with patients at the St Nicholas hospital in Gosforth in the late 1960s. “It made me think about alot of things and made the songs go deeper.”
For awhile the experience threatened his own equilibrium, but the troubled souls in his care also gave him a “million ideas” and taught him that there are many different ways of looking at the world. Coupled with his own poetic sensibility, a deep compassion for his fellow human beings, ascabrous wit and arighteous pride in his Geordie working-class roots, the result was aflood of songs written between 1966 and early 1970, before he formed Lindisfarne. The band then took its pick of the best, but only scratched the surface of aprodigious songbook that is said to have numbered more than 200 compositions. Some of Hull’s songs from the period were haunting and ethereal. Others were raucous singalongs. There were tender love sonnets and songs about the long, dark nights of the soul. Compelling story-telling and angry protest took their place alongside hymns to the hell-raising pleasures of boozing and anthems of faith in humanity such as “Clear White Light”, aline from which gives this anthology its title.