Lindisfarne’s 1972 smash Lady Eleanor was an unlikely hit, not least because it was about snuffing it. “It’s a very mystical song, but I know it’s about death,” the Geordie band’s frontman Alan Hull recalled around the time of its first flush of success. “I wrote it almost in a trance.”
Partly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 gothic short story The Fall Of The House Of Usher, Lady Eleanor was one of some 300 compositions Hull had amassed prior to hooking up with his gifted folk-rock bandmates. The story goes that it was while he was still working as a psychiatric nurse in Newcastle, that Hull wrote Lady Eleanor and two more Lindisfarne gems (Winter Song and Clear White Light) in a single sitting during one fateful overnight shift in 1968. Stimulants may or may not have been taken.
“Something that showed the calibre of the man was that, where drugs and medication were concerned, Alan would never have dreamed of giving his patients something he hadn’t already tried himself,” Lindisfarne drummer Ray Laidlaw told this writer in 2023, smiling. “He was a very good psychiatric nurse, I think, but a bit unorthodox. He would take the patients down the pub, or play the piano to calm them down.”
The definitive version of Lady Eleanor featured on Lindisfarne’s 1970 debut album Nicely Out Of Tune (UK No.8), but an earlier version resurfaced recently on the 2024 Hull rarities collection Singing A Song In The Morning Light: The Legendary Demo Tapes 1967-1970. Credited to ‘Alan Hull And Brethren’ – soon to join forces as Lindisfarne – the demo differs from the more famous version in two main ways.
Crucially, Ray Jackson had yet to fully develop his spidery, deftly played mandolin part, and his work-in-progress version is somewhat buried in the demo’s mix. The spectral organ so crucial to the definitive version’s haunting atmosphere is also missing, but Hull’s stunning lead vocal and Rod Clements’s lithe, loping bass lines are already in place.
When Lindisfarne signed to Charisma Records in 1970, they were five unlikely lads who somehow found themselves on a prog rock label. In 2023, Jackson recalled their early tour-bus jaunts on shared Charisma-roster tours: “Van der Graaf Generator at the back smoking jazz tabs, us in the middle with a crate of Newcastle Brown Ale, and Genesis down the front doing crosswords.”
“We were perceived as wild men of the North,” Clements recalled. “Which we played up to no end.”
Later in Lindisfarne’s career, Hull’s highly politicised writing often explored the North/South divide, and that between rich and poor. When Lady Eleanor was first released, in May 1971, initially it sank without trace. It was only after the UK No. 5 success in ’72 of their skiffly, Clements-written Meet Me On The Corner, a single from Lindisfarne’s platinum-selling 1971 album Fog On The Tyne, that Eleanor was “relaunched, not re-released” (Clements) and became a huge hit.
The much more carefree Meet Me On The Corner had put Lindisfarne on the map, but Hull’s spooky, allusive masterpiece went deeper and charted higher, its lyrics depicting ‘A host of golden demons screaming lust and base desire’, and telling of how Eleanor ‘Bid me come along with her to the land of the dancing dead.’
“When Alan was working at St Nicholas Hospital he had access to various mind-altering drugs, including LSD,” Jackson told me in 2023. “That might be where Lady Eleanor came from. But he also told me it was influenced by Traffic’s Forty Thousand Headmen. He didn’t lift it, and the two songs are very different, but if you listen to it you’ll hear some similarities.”
Poe’s Rodrick Usher and Lady Eleanor are mentioned in the first verse of Lady Eleanor, but Hull’s song also seems to owe something to Poe’s 1842 Eleonora, not just The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Sexually charged, and with themes of madness and guilt, Eleonora sees the story’s titular heroine visit its narrator, also her former lover, from beyond the grave.
Ray Laidlaw: “I remember Alan saying: ‘I can’t believe all these people are buying a single about death!’ It was an unusual song and pretty unique to him. Alan had the same upbringing as the rest of us, but he was so articulate, probably because he was so well-read. I think Lady Eleanor is about insecurity, fear of death and madness. A lot of it came from Alan working in the psychiatric hospital. He got so much inspiration from the patients there and the things they said.”
The song’s recording was overseen by John Anthony, Charisma Records’ in-house producer. Although a native of North Shields, just outside Newcastle, Anthony “spoke like a southerner and his image and outlook were every inch the London hip record producer”, Clements says today. “But he was very supportive re: bringing what we had into focus.” Indeed, Anthony was so impressed by Lindisfarne circa Nicely Out Of Tune that he claimed he had found “England’s answer to The Band”.
Together with Meet Me on The Corner, Lady Eleanor changed everything for Lindisfarne. “Before that we were playing The Huddersfield Builder’s Exchange,” noted Ray Jackson, “then suddenly it was major venues.”
Alan Hull died in 1995, aged 50, but his star continues to flicker. Sting, Elvis Costello and the Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner are admirers of his songwriting, while young Geordie star Sam Fender recently covered Hull’s heartfelt beacon for the homeless, Winter Song. It’s Lady Eleanor, though, that remains Hull’s finest hour as a songwriter, and Ray Laidlaw is also fond of 70s Los Angeles funk band American Gypsy’s cover version. “It’s nothing like the way we did it,” he says. “It’s like Shaft by Isaac Hayes or something.”
