Alan Hull died on November 17, 1995, aged 50. A founding member of Lindisfarne, he wrote “Lady Eleanor”, “Fog on the Tyne” and “Run for Home”, alongside a solo catalogue that began with Pipedream. Some of the songs that established his reputation had taken shape before the band’s recording career, while he was working in a psychiatric hospital.
Born in Benwell, Newcastle upon Tyne, Hull was already writing and performing when he became a trainee psychiatric nurse at St Nicholas’ Hospital in the late 1960s. In a 2018 account for Live Theatre, Lindisfarne drummer Ray Laidlaw recalled how contact with patients changed Hull’s thinking and fed his songs. He remembered Hull discovering that playing the piano could soothe distressed patients. The work gave him reasons to question conventional definitions of sanity.
Laidlaw began making music with Hull in 1969. The group then known as Brethren joined forces with the songwriter, and the partnership became Lindisfarne. They signed to Charisma in 1970 and released their debut, Nicely Out of Tune, that year. Hull brought a substantial stock of original material to musicians who could give it a full band arrangement; “Lady Eleanor” became one of the clearest examples of that partnership.
The recording set his vocal against mandolin and organ, giving its story of death and unease a distinctive setting. As James McNair explored in Classic Rock, an earlier demo lacked the organ and had a less developed mandolin part. Those differences show how much the finished recording gained through arrangement. Its first single release in 1971 made little commercial impact, but the song reached No. 3 in Britain in 1972.
That delayed success arrived as Lindisfarne’s second album, Fog on the Tyne, was reaching a much larger audience. Released in 1971, it spent four weeks at No. 1 on the UK albums chart in 1972. Hull wrote its title song, but the same record also held his “January Song” and “City Song”, extending the picture of his writing beyond one familiar chorus.
Success did not keep the original lineup together. The band split in 1973, and Hull and Ray Jackson continued with a new Lindisfarne lineup. That year also brought Pipedream, Hull’s first solo album; Squire followed in 1975. His solo work and the band’s history remained closely connected: musicians assembled for Pipedream became part of the revised Lindisfarne. When the original lineup reunited, Hull supplied another hit with “Run for Home”, which appeared on Back and Fourth in 1978 and reached No. 10 in Britain.
He continued recording under his own name as well. The acoustic live album Back to Basics appeared in 1994, revisiting his songwriting in stripped-down performances. By the following year, he was working on Statues & Liberties. Laidlaw remembered their last conversation, in November 1995, as one full of excitement about the record.
Statues & Liberties was released in 1996. It closed with a new recording of “Drug Song”, returning to a composition that had appeared on his first solo album, Pipedream.
