The closing song on Lindisfarne’s third album was this sparse, haunting tune. It’s like nothing else they – or anyone else – has ever done. Apparently they wrote it for their previous album Fog On The Tyne but felt, understandably, that it didn’t fit.

 

 

Dingly Dell is all atmosphere. It starts almost silently, Alan Hull’s impassioned vocal, and poetic lyrics, stealthily joined by a melancholy echo of eerily distorted bass and guitar before opening up into a burst of celestial harmonies, embellished with subtle orchestral flourishes.

 

Hull was adamant that the strings should sound “sinister” rather than “syrupy” way, and he achieved that with the help of drummer Ray Laidlaw’s classically inclined younger brother Paul, who composed and recorded an arrangement for a string section, four woodwind players and two French horns.

 

Lindisfarne’s label had high hopes for Dingly Dell, their third album, after the success of their second one Fog On The Tyne, and the hit singles Meet Me On The Corner and Lady Eleanor (from their first).

 

Working again with Bob Johnston (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash), who had produced Fog On The Tyne, they hoped it would take them to another level in 1972. It did – but not in the direction they had hoped.

 

Critics slated it, it failed to produce a hit single (neither All Fall Down nor Court In The Act cracked the Top 20) and it didn’t help that they insisted on packaging the album in a plain cardboard sleeve, with no information front or back except the band name and album title, insisting that the music should “speak for itself.”

 

For me it was a step forward – as one of the few favourable reviews put it, the album sounds “like Pentangle with higher wattage, duelling with Fairport Convention”.

 

There are some great songs on the album, which divides fairly evenly between conventional ‘rock’ songs like Don’t Ask Me and Bring Down The Government, which satisfyingly sticks it to Ted Heath, and folk ballads like Plankton’s Lament and Poor Old Ireland that remind us of the band’s roots in the folk clubs of Tyneside.

 

But the band were also split down the middle and in 1973 three of them (Laidlaw, Rod Clements and Simon Cowe) left, leaving Hull and mandolin player Ray Jackson to keep the Lindisfarne flame fllickering, though never burning so bright as before.

 

This may actually be my favourite Lindisfarne song: thanks to its enduring weirdness it’s stuck in my memory for nearly 50 years and I think it stands up perfectly after all that time – for me anyway – while Hull’s vocal is arguably the finest he ever committed to record, as are the band’s harmonies, which remind me very much of Fleet Foxes; or perhaps vice-versa.