60 albums
1978 - Lindisfarne - Back and Fourth

Lindisfarne are very much a north east band, their name, and the title of their most famous song makes that very clear. However I hadn’t really listened to them much before I moved here. I knew Fog on the Tye and Lady Eleanor and Run for Home but not a great deal else, so it seemed ony right that I followed up The Animals who kicked off this series with probably the north east’s second most famous band.

Lindisfarne - Back and Fourth (1978)

Back and Fourth was, as its name suggests, their erm… sixth album - although it was Back to their most celebrated line-up, and their Fourth album with that configuration. The album contains their second most famous song Run for Home.

I probably hadn’t actually listened to Run for Home for years (although I can’t believe I hadn’t heard it quite a bit), but listening to it triggered some strange familiarity and nostalgia that I am rather puzzled by, as if it was a song that had some importance in my past, but not anything I can actually remember. I was fourteen in 1978, I kissed a girl for the first time in 1978, and had a girlfriend for the first time - maybe somehow Run for Home is triggering memories… memories of fairgrounds, and trips to the Embassy in Esher, and bottles of Pomagne and cans of Kestrel taken to house parties?

My copy, picked up cheap on Discogs, turns out to be a US version and has Run for Home moved to side 1, track 1. The album is patchy, Juke Box Gypsy would be a good enough opener and is sort of a shame that it gets relegated to track 2 on this copy.

Kings Cross Blues made me smile - it seems to be a song about not wanting to travel to London. This lyric made me smile…

Well, taking this journey to the South
To find work to feed the extra mouth
I'll find it hard to have to say
‘Cause they don't talk the same way

Lindisfarne - King's Cross Blues (Jackson / Harcourt)

… mostly because of the irony of that last line (and the whole song) being sung in an American accent.

I considered going to see Lindisfarne’s annual Xmas concert last year but it was a sit down venue which put me off. I have seen a couple of Lindisfarne members though. Ray Laidlaw gave a speech at the unveiling of Hilton Valentine’s plaque in North Shields, and he and Billy Mitchell (not on this album) led a bunch of schoolkids in Fog on the Tyne beside the Tyne at the unveiling of a Herring Girl sculpture, also in North Shields.

Ray Laidlaw at the Hilton Valentine plaque unveiling