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 , 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 and two more Lindisfarne gems ( and ) in a single sitting
