Last night, at the last minute, I managed to blag tickets to see Lindisfarne – a band I thought had broken up decades ago.

Not only that, but they were playing in North Shields, where the group’s founder member, Rod Clements, was born and raised – and wrote their hit single Meet Me On The Corner up the road in Tynemouth.

To my delight, I found he’s still in the band at the age of 78 – albeit as the only original member – and his talent for playing bluesy slide guitar is undiminsished, along with his fingerpicking on the mandolin.

He even managed a verse of their signature song Fog On The Tyne, and turned out to be an excellent raconteur with a dry wit, not least when introducing “one of our more recent songs… written in the Eighties”.

Any Way The Wind Blows is a powerful song about the social and economic impact of the miners’ strike when many Geordies lost their jobs and sought work offshore (on the oil rigs) or in other countries (as depicted in Auf Wiedersehen Pet) – “or, if they were really unlucky, down South.”

The late lead singer Alan Hull’s son-in-law Dave Hull-Denholm proved an admirable stand-in, and played a couple of hand-picked numbers from Hull’s solo catalogue, while a band of veterans, in which the lavishly bearded bass guitarist Ian Thompson stood out.

Although I’ve rarely listened to Lindisfarne since I was my school days, when they were popular among my fellow pupils, I was surprised to find how well I knew so many of the songs.

Lady Eleanor, Meet Me On The Corner, January Song, the still intensely weird Dingly Dell, and the singalong favourites We Can Swing Together and Fog On The Tyne.

As well as this lovely season-appropriate one, Winter Song, one of the highlights of their 1970 debut album Nicely Out Of Tune – sounding just as good more than half a century later.