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.
