“Melting the sky through a hole in your eye where the magic comes”
Singing A Song In The Morning Light – The Legendary Demo Tapes 1967–1970
CHERRY RED
THE making of Alan Hull as a songwriter 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 a trainee nurse in a Tyneside psychiatric institution.
“That’s what changed me and the things I was 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 a lot of things and made the songs go deeper.”
For a while 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, a scabrous wit and a righteous pride in his Geordie working-class roots, the resulta prodigious songbook that is said to have numbered more than 200 compositions.
