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Lindisfarne "Dance Your Life Away" (1986)
Shine On/Love On The
Run/Heroes/All In The Same Boat/Dance Your Life Away//Beautiful Day/Broken
Doll/One Hundred Miles To Liverpool/Take Your Time/Song For A Stranger
'When
the book has been finally written, the heroes always beat the villains in the
end'
When people ask me what I want in the future, there
are a few things that come to mind straight away: peace on Earth, especially
the corners that have only known war; the chance to bring our fallen heroes
back to us and show them that they were loved one last time before they go, a
society that's built on fairness and democracy not exploitation and greed, a
big wet fish to slap egotistical politicians and a lie detector that rings
every time they open their mouths and break a promise and a big fat gun that
wipes out The Spice Girls from all known time streams and parallel universes.
That's usually the point at which most people back away, saying 'I only wanted
to know what to get you for your birthday, geez what's wrong with you?!' and
look at me strangely (well, stranger). The closest I can come in my long list
to a practical thing we might actually get in the future, however, is a machine
that deleted excessive 1980s noise on musical recordings. You know the sort of
thing: big and booming yet tinny drum sounds, twinkling treacly synthesiser
keyboards, a featheriness to the vocals that makes even wonderful singing
groups sound robotic and silly and a general sense that the whole recording is
taking place in a wind-tunnel filled with cotton-wool buds. We may even one day
in the far out-of-copyright future (next year the way things are going...) get
to make our own remixes of beloved AAA albums, with the chance to pare down
promising albums down to their bare-bones and see what they ought to sound like
had they been as timeless as the songs as opposed to being pinned to a certain
week in the 1980s when every recording was made with the same technology and
they all sounded like each other.
The first album in the queue for me will surely be
Lindisfarne's 'Dance Your Life Away', an album full of promising songs whose
lyrics I love and whose melodies I find myself whistling and which I simply
can't sit through the way it was presented on record (and it sounds worse on
CD). You see, I know there's a great album in here somewhere full of exactly
the sort of things I look for in a Lindisfarne album: Alan Hull protest songs,
Rod Clements character assassinations, songs that send out a message of love to
the fans, lovely harmonies, pretty melodies and more hooks than a fisherman
opening his Christmas stocking. Not co-incidentally, 'Dance Your Life Away'
sounds like the sort of record I fall in love with because it ties in with my
other hopes for the future - sadly this album was a bit too early for a song
damning The Spice Girls (though Alan Hull would surely have written a hilarious
song about grrrl power being created by middle aged white men to sell records
had he lived), but it is one of those records about yearning for equality,
damning those who lie and take things they don't deserve and hopes for better
times on Earth. It's exactly the sort of spiritually uplifting album the
mid-1980s needed as the cold war got hotter and the times of Thatcher got
greedier, giving a voice to the 'little man' (or even the little girl still
dreaming of being a ballerina on the 'Billy Elliott' style front cover, against
an ugly industrial backdrop) against overwhelming odds (and overwhelmingly odd
odds too). Though 'Sleepless Nights' probably has this album licked on a
song-by-song basis there's a heart beating strongly in this album that had been
missing for a long time in Lindisfarne's music and - a sojourn to Russia in the
early 1990s aside - it won't ever be quite as central to their recordings
again.
That's why we Lindisfans feel the frustration of how
this album turned out so much and take it quite so badly. This may be the
spiritually uplifting album the world needed in 1986, but it also sounds so
exactly like every other album out in 1986 it's hard to sit through it in any
other year and even at the time 'Dance Your Life Away' rather fell through the
cracks by not standing out. Lindisfarne do occasionally try to address the
music being around them - the first three albums have a nicely cosy early 1970s
'folk rock vibe' and the post-Hull
albums have the same understated acoustic melancholy common to reflective
albums made either side of the millennium. But no other Lindisfarne albums ever
sounded quite as desperate to be a hit as this one, to the point where for much
of the record you're struggling to believe that this really is Lindisfarne. Is
that really the band sounding bored on the pop-synth fest harmonies of 'Shine
On' (the closest they ever came to making generic elevator music, albeit in the
kind of store that's actually quite upmarket?) Is that really Jacka trying to
be Shakin' Stevens and Adam Ant's illegitimate love-child on 'Love On The Run',
which sounds as if everything was recorded a postal code away from the recording
equipment? (All except for the drums of course, for which you actually need to
turn the general level of the album down).
Have Lindisfarne really gone all Andrew Lloyd Webber on the chanted
title track (which is a lot more 'stagey' than anything that actually was in
the Billy Elliott musical). Why on earth do Lindisfarne take all the wonderful
trademarks and hallmarks that made them one of the most distinctive bands of
their era - and decide to sound like a second-rate U2 instead (on the
so-1960s-it-hurts-so-let';s-make-it-the-most-1980s-moment-on-the-record
'Beautiful Day'). Why on earth did Alan Hull take a sweet ballad about
fragility and desperation like 'Broken Doll' and decided that actually, yes,
this would be the perfect song to give the Ian Dury and the Blockheads
treatment. Why did Lindisfarne choose now to reach back to their 1950s
childhood on 'Take Your Time' when we'd already sat through a whole album of
the real thing (a double LP set no less!) on cheap and tacky covers album
'C'mon Everybody' (and why, listening back to that record, did Lindisfarne
think the serious songs were the ones that worked best when they clearly
don't?)
Nothing on this album sounds much like Lindisfarne
as we've known and loved them down the years and only 'One Hundred Miles To
Liverpool' and 'Heroes' do a little bit, with no mandolin, no folk-rock and not
even much in the way of guitar or bass (though there's one hell of a lot of
superfluous saxophone and the same crushing drum beat across nearly every
song). This isn't just something small the album gets a little bit wrong
either. The whole point of this album's set of songs is that you, the
individual, have the right to be yourself and dream big dreams even when the
world makes putting many of them into practice impossible - having Lindisfarne
sound like they're part of the problem, not the solution, is the biggest and
most woeful bit of mis-casting across the Lindisfarne back catalogue. It's not
just the production too but the packing - I mean look at that back sleeve where
the band all stand proudly trying so hard to look cool they're blatantly not
cool while clutching their instruments like a cross between in-fashion band
Madness and a Geordie version of The Godfather. Only Si Cowe, the most erm
'individual' member of a band of originals, refuses to play ball and dresses up
in the aviation suit he once wore for 'Nicely Out Of Tune'. It speaks volumes
both that he's a largely unheard presence on this album (which features little
guitar and no Cowe songs) and that he looks less silly than all the others do
in their lounge suits and jackets.
It would be easy to point blame at the one face on
the back sleeve you might not recognise, producer Steve Daggett who just about
gets away with counting himself a 'member' of the band given that the
dominating instrument on the whole album is indeed his very mid-1980s
keyboards. However, 'Dance' took two sides to tango and that would be a little unfair.
Doggett didn't come to Lindisfarne kicking and screaming about being made to
work with a bunch of forgotten middle-aged overgrown Geordie kids like some
past producers with the band who barely knew their names once the sessions were
over. A keen Lindisfan himself, he had a better knowledge of what the band had
written and done than they did (proving particularly valuable during rehearsals
for the next live tour) and genuinely worked hard to update the band's old
sound into the new and went to great lengths to achieve that, adding guitar
overdubs to the album and co-writing the opening song with Alan Hull as a real
meeting of minds. What's more Daggett was a writer first, performer second and
producer a distant third, which was roughly the order Lindisfarne appreciated.
Daggett had first come to the band's attention as the main songwriter for the
late 1970s new wave band Stiletto, one of the few of the era to have a female
lead in Bren Laidler who had also sang backup on some Ray Jackson BBC
recordings in 1980 after Stiletto got the 'boot' from their record company
after a distribution 'mix-up' (think 'The Jam' if they'd grown up on
Lindisfarne and Fairport Convention, not The Beatles and Small Faces, if Paul
Weller had dressed like Debbie Harry), before forming his own studio for bands
to use (nicknamed 'The Garage') which is where he first met Ian McCallum of
Stiff Little Fingers, who in turn brought along his own 'hero' and mentor Alan
Hull. Daggett was in heaven and naturally producing a Lindisfarne album by his
heroes was the obvious next step - he was young and trendy, the band were
people he wanted to work with, it should have worked so well. But something
went wrong somewhere along the line. Usually in the past Lindisfarne had very
hands-off producers who let the band get on with it, but Daggett was so
enthusiastic (and the rest of the band comparatively bored and uninspired) that
Steve ended up doing more and more. What could have been a grand old tug-of-war
between the old ways and the new, with Hull and Clements setting the
songwriting pace, the others developing arrangements and Daggett adding dashes
of colour, became one producer trying to fill out songs that weren't quite
ready yet with more and more of his own ideas. One relative newcomer versus
five oldies should have been no contest, but instead Daggett's enthusiasm for
new sounds seem to have cast a long hard shadow over the band's old ones.
Maybe that was because there was a sixth member for
this album and yet another 'new' sound for Lindisfarne to incorporate in Marty
Craggs. The sax player had been fleshing out the band's live sound for a while,
adding harmonies and harmonica on songs where Jacka couldn't provide both. A
fellow Geordie a few years younger than the rest of the band, he'd been
knocking on the door of Lindisfarne's wider circle for a while: Lindisfarne
were surprised when his own band nicked one of their old names 'The Chosen
Few', which must have been a shock for those still living close to home when
posters emblazoned with it started turning up everywhere around Newcastle.
Craggs had also worked with Pacamax, the all-star Geordie charity band that had
a revolving line-up depending who was available at any which time. Craggs
quickly made friends with Ray and Rod and after a nervy meeting with Alan and
Si one night found himself in the band after matching them drink for drink. At
first Marty's presence in the band is tentative: wary that long-terms fans
might not accept him as the first non-original member of the band in their then-sixteen
year history, on this album he merely sings harmonies, plays a couple of sax
solos and is easily the most 'natural looking' of the band on that back cover. By
next album 'Amigoes' he's integrated into the Lindisfarne sound so well he's
second fiddle only to Hully himself - even so, the presence of two younger
members in this era may have evened up the score and even tipped the band more
into this heavier period sound.
This album is, however, dominated even more than
usual by Alan Hull. With Rod only getting one song on the album, that leaves
nine that Hully has a hand in. While some of these songs stretch Alan's writing
palette more than ever before - turning Jacka into an abandoned female 'in need
of repair' on 'Broken Doll' and the overly dramatic 'Brothers In Arms' style
closer 'Song For A Stranger' - most are a 24 carat gold haul of Hull. More than
perhaps any previous album (except maybe his solo debut 'Pipedream') this is
Alan using Lindisfarne as a platform for his own political concerns. As the
1980s grew tougher for many, his heart grew softer and many of these songs
offer a concern and an anger never heard in quite such high volumes before.
'Dance Your Life Away' itself is a cynical song about how everybody in your
life will tell you over and over again to give up on your dreams, to become
just like the rest and how you have to 'toe the line' to get ahead, contrasted
against a chorus of freedom and celebration as the character in the song learns
to block out such societal thoughts and simply 'dances their life away'
beautifully, driven by instinct and beauty instead of rules and discipline.
'Heroes' was written for the miner's strike and a benefit album Billy Bragg was
putting together before being 'borrowed' back again for this album and to have
maximum impact; though uncharacteristically vague it's clearly a celebration of
the working class and the people who risk so much in terms of jobs and
starvation but stand up for what's right anyway, a sort of modern Marshall
Riley's Army. 'All In The Same Boat' 'doesn't hold with know-alls telling me
what to do' and recalls 'Lazy' from the 'Lindisfarne Mark II' days as Hull says
that he'd rather live happily and carefree even if it means he's viewed as
workshy and even quotes from early classic 'Alan In The River With Flowers'
just to make the point about how autobiographical this song is. 'Shine On' is a
sad understated burst of optimism and encouragement in a noisy world that tried
so hard to make us feel helpless and weak, an elder brother putting a
comforting arm around the rest of the world. Liverpool comes to symbolise
everywhere else on 'One Hundred Miles To...', a song that's really about
Lindisfans all over full of pride, awe and grateful thanks. 'Take Your Time',
meanwhile, sounds like an instruction manifesto for every junior Lindisfan out
there, telling us that finding our niche in life may be hard but if we stay
true to our inner selves we don't have to ruin our lives by turning out the way
everyone else wants us to be.
Lyrically 'Dance Your Life Away' may be the
brightest spot in the Lindisfarne canon for many a long year, full of songs
that represent exactly the message an eccentric, oddball, individualistic group
like Lindisfarne should have been offering in an era where being yourself was
considered a weakness and being different to everyone else was a foolish thing
to do. How great might this album have been if, as well as thinking it, this
album had actually come out and sounded as if it was sticking two fingers up at
a world of faceless 1980s anonymity? Instead it came out sounding unlistenable
and samey, with bursts of optimism that sound boring rather than life-altering,
messages of hope that come across as being distinctly depressing and songs that
were written to bring us together make us feel alienated and distant. The
result is a difficult album to judge: more than any other Lindisfarne reunion
album it had the potential to be great but somehow it all comes over so bland
and flat that it ends up being the hardest of them all to sit through, with the
band not trying that hard to be heard beyond the sea of 1980s production
mediocrity. Ironically, for an album that's
all about dancing to your own beat, the rigidity of the backing tracks
more or less all come out at the same walking-pace tempo makes it feel as if
it's been stuck together with superglue, without the chance to dance. Even the
few good bits where it does sound like the band are trying (Hully's vocals on
'Heroes' and 'One Hundred Miles To Liverpool' and Jacka's worthy stab at Rod's
worthy attempt to do something really different on 'Love On The Run') are
drowned out by synths and drums that sound about as much like Ray Laidlaw's
past work as The Spice Girls' grrrrl power do to Janis Joplin. This album,
which could go either way right up to its dying moments, even ends on a
puzzling note as the electro-pop-funk-retro-country vibe of 'Song For A
Stranger' goes for a big build-up ending - and then suddenly switches to a
capella for a line and then switches off mid-song, the equivalent of cutting
'Hey Jude' off before the 'na na nas'. An album full of good songs marred by
questionable decisions taken all the way through the recording process, 'Life
Away' is too hard to listen to for a victory dance but it would be unfair to dismiss
it - the album's heart is arguably in the right place, just not it's
synthesisers. Like the cover the album was a nice idea with a lovely message
that just didn't quite come off and ended up looking a little stupid (the
photographer was hoping for a really moody and scary sky and kept bringing back
the poor girl model back day after day - instead it's just kind of dull).
That's 'Dance Your Life Away' in a nutshell, the best possible idea for the era
that just happened to be executed at completely the wrong time.
'Shine On' is one of those Lindisfarne 'nearly'
songs, with the kernel of something totally brilliant and Lindisfarny that
isn't executed in the right way. The haunting catchy chorus, the increasingly
rare Jacka-Hull vocal interplay and some very pretty synth work seem to be
going somewhere, while the mood is very Christmassey with its sleigh bells and
messages of brotherly love. However this is one part Lennon's 'Happy Xmas (War
Is Over)' and another McCartney's 'Wonderful Xmas Time', with a nice idea
that's under-written and takes the easy way out, with forgettable verses full
of simple cosmic phrases that don't actually say anything ('The stars and the
sun shine on everyone, they don't question why - they're just in the sky').
Co-written by Hull and Daggett, it's so close to being a traditional
Lindisfarne number - a 'We Can Swing Together' for more new age hippies - but
it's dressed up to sound like so much other pop fodder. The worst part is that
nothing new happens - the opening burst of sweet 'n' sour harmonies catch your
ear but there's nothing to keep you listening, while the lead singers sound
unusually bored and fed-up. There is a good song fighting to be heard on this
track though, which even on an album that does a lot of this sort of thing is
the one that 'got away' - it has hit single written all over it had the band
only gone for a re-make and given the song the slow build-up it's crying out
for. Sadly, as heard on the album, 'Shine On' doesn't shine and just glimmers
glibly, like a lightbulb in the wrong setting.
'Love On The Run', on the other hand, tries a little
bit too hard. The only Rod Clements song on the album, it's at one with the
other stormy rhythmical songs the bass player had been providing to recent
Lindisfarne albums and a step backwards to the young trendy teenage narrator
trying to come to terms with the first flush of love and romance. In terms of
the fat and chunky riff and the theme - his girl's dad thinks he's from the
wrong side of town - it's very much a flash from the past, albeit at one with
similar 1950s re-treads popular in 1986. The arrangement produced for the
album, though, is almost space-age, keeping us at a distance from the action by
having Jacka sing quietly and a step away from our ears behind what - if this
was a Brian Eno/Paul Simon album - would be described as a 'soundscape', a
collection of technological noise and effects. Over the top flies a bit of
fiddle from the author himself, a brief guitar burst (which sounds more like
Daggett than Cowe or Hull) and lashings of Marty's sax work. Like many a
Clements song, this track second-guesses us all the way as it darts and dives
down passages we aren't expecting at all, such as a minor key change on the
middle eight ('run run runaway') and a synth-fiddle duet that manages to be
both futuristic and traditional. A slow-burner, this song's low key groove is
just about enough for the band to get away with this, while Jacka sounds a lot
more committed than he has of late too. However for once on this album it's the
performance that's a notch above average - as a song this is one of Rod's
weakest as the lyrics come without any of his usual quirks or tricks, the song
fading as they sneak out in her daddy's car to 'have some fun'. Suddenly the
retro 1950s covers album 'C'mon Everybody' from the following year doesn't seem
quite so much of a surprise...
Back in March 1984 Margaret Thatcher made several
thousand miners redundant by closing a coal mine that was under-performing -
there was no attempt at negotiation, no means to soften the blow and even the
more right-wing members of her own cabinet told her it was a very stupid thing
to do. But she did it anyway, expecting there to be little repercussion.
Instead Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, started a
national strike that would last an entire year and split the nation down the
middle between those who viewed the miner's as workshy layabouts and those who
fought the
we've-just-increased-our-salaries-again-but-we're-all-in-this-together-honest
MPs had a nerve. No prizes for guessing where Hull's labour leanings left him:
anger, bitter and disillusioned once again by a world that had stopped caring
about the common man. So when the 1980s version of Alan Hull (Billy Bragg)
tentatively put forward the idea of an album to raise money for the
mineworkers' families for Christmas (who had gone without pay) Hull was right
there, turning in an angry and earthy version of a new song he'd just written
named 'Heroes'. Yet another tale of the
haves wrongly complaining about the have-nots, it inspired one of the best
performances of the 1980s as Hull speaks up and says that far from being
illegal disruptors the men brave enough to take a stand are 'heroes', refusing
to bow down or go quietly. 'Don't let nobody tell you no different' Hull
sneers, 'no newspaper phoney or friend' - to him these men are doing the human
thing and 'no tin pot tyrant, no self made giant' can break through their
bravery. Sadly by March 1985 the strike is all over - Thatcher has it declared
'illegal' in the courts (which is for some reason a far worse crime than
immorally closing the pit down in the first place and destroying towns and
livelihoods in the process) and without the NUM holding a ballot enough workers
got hungry and were forced to return to work to make the strike meaningless.
What was in 1984 a rallying cry and a message from the heart was sadly
anachronistic by the time it was rather meekly re-recorded for 'Dance Your Life
Away' in 1986. Hull sings with the air of a man who knew he was going to be
defeated all along, while this album suffers from the same production mess as
the rest of the album, replacing stinging guitar and simple drumming with
machines and perky synths(sadly both versions include an off-putting saxophone
solo). It's almost as if this was a subconscious take on the fact that workers
were being replaced by faceless robots, turning a very human-celebrating cause
into one that's filled with synthesised regimented sounds. 'Heroes' is a great
song (if not quite as brilliant as 'Cruisin' To Disaster' or 'Malvinas Melody'
in terms of mid-1980s Hull protest numbers) but this is a truly terrible
recording of it, lacking any of the fire and passion that inspired it. Those
who want to hear what this song should have sounded like might need to save a
bit though: sadly the 'Heroes' various artists LP compiled by Bragg (and
released on the 'rock and dole' label!) was a big flop and has never appeared
on CD. Which is a shame because it's actually rather good, with Prelude and
flavour of the month The Flying Pickets the other big names taking part (the
Hull recording would have made a fine CD bonus track too). Do the heroes really
beat the villains in the end? Not in this case, sadly.
The danger with making an album as sonically off-putting
as 'Dance Your Life Away' is that your songs have to be beautiful to shine
through and if you happen to write a song that's deliberately ugly and off-key
to make a point then, well, it's going to sound horrible. 'All In The Same
Boat' is a Jack-sung Hull composition that tries to make the point that we're
all doomed so why not just lay back and be thankful for small mercies? As in
the olden days, 'floating down the river' is a chance for communing with
nature, thinking and meditating, something most onlookers would see as 'lazy',
especially given the diatribes against lazy workers heard in the last song. However
Hull sees this 'time off' as actually his biggest time on, understanding what
life is really poor as opposed to what people fill their time with and integral
to who he is and what he stands for. Once again, Hull takes a flawed democratic
system and pokes holes in people's interpretation of it: why should the police
get involved in the miner's strike on the Government's behalf - aren't they
also hit by low pay and zero opportunities? The journalists talking about the
strike - aren't they at risk of losing their livelihoods without human interest
stories like the strikers? A last gasp plea to bring humanity (or at least the
working class part of it) together, there's sadly again a sense in this song
that Lindisfarne are talking to themselves and might as well make this song
sound silly and childish rather than the actually very adult song they were
trying to create. That's why we start with a silly opening verse about Hull
'not getting much exercise' and 'not thinking - I use my mind', a clever line
about thinking for himself rather than what people want him to and a few
user-friendly lines about love. The real heart of this song comes from the
middle verse too, 'Don't hold with know-alls telling me what to do, I could
call their bluff any time I wanted to!' and the kinder lines about how everyone
should be kind and back off, because 'most folks are fragile, just like you and
me'. A clever unifying lyric then, urging that peace and respect would help us
all in the end result without humanity trying to divide and conquer the way out
Governments and media want us to, but like much of the album it seems as if
Lindisfarne are making this as difficult to listen to as they possibly can.
This song is slow and lazy - fitting given the words, but this song needs a bit
of oomph to get going, while the comedy synths and an almost yawned vocal from
Jacka aren't helping the excitement levels. Only a Jacka harmonica part,
unusual for 1980s Lindisfarne, has anything really going for it and by past
standards even that is perfunctory, not a howled protest blues as in the past. Of
all the songs on the album this might be the one that needs a remix the most:
there's a great track in here, but not the way the band have done it.
Title track 'Dance Your Life Away' is the most
experimental track on the album and deserves marks for having courage the other
recordings lack, even if it's not any more listenable than anything else on the
LP. Hull is at his sarcastic best on this operatic song as he sings over a bass
'n' sax duet and is joined at key moments of the song by a mass chanted vocal
(the band making the most of having four singers in the band now, each one
taking a 'dance' in turn). The 'Billy Elliot' musical/movie missed a trick by
not having this song in the soundtrack somewhere as it's basically the entire
plot in one go. As early as school mankind is being brainwashed, told to think
in terms of 9-5 jobs and Hull is even more sarcastic as Roger Waters as he
despairs 'you can't have no jam tomorrow you had some today' and 'buy some soap
- and don't have hope!' By the second verse the narrator has worked hard and
left school - but there are no jobs around, so he's told to work harder and aim
higher, looking for a 'rabbit in the hat' that isn't there. 'Come back next
week - or maybe next year!' his sarcastic would-be boss intones. Even the third
verse, which takes place after work hours, isn't much better as the narrator
feels the peer pressure deeply, desperate to impress but aware that he doesn't
have what it takes to be 'number one'. Depressed he turns to a preacher who
tells him work is the way out, the best way of passing through 'heaven's door'.
Thank goodness then for the lovely simple chorus that links the verses, the one
moment on this album where the band steps away from the regimented keyboards
and, well, dances. The near-a capella burst of wobbly harmonies and the urge to
'dance your life away' when everyone else it trying to turn it into a
regimented march is quite beautiful, the song stepping outside it's framework
to simply enjoy living, without rules, responsibilities or regimentation. It's
a great moment on one of the album's better tracks, but like much of this album
the sound of the bulk of this song is so alien that even Hull at his most
anarchic and ironic can't compete with the bleached feel of the production,
which sucks all emotion dry. Ultimately there's too much 'trap' here and not
enough freedom, though like much of the album the thought process behind the
song is actually rather good.
'Beautiful Day' is the poppiest, catchiest Hull song
in some time - 'Run For Home' perhaps? Unfortunately it's also his least
original song since, well, maybe ev-uh. 'Beautiful Day' isn't so much
'beautiful' as 'average' - the U2 style slashed 80s pop opening, leads to Lou
Reed's 'It's A Beautiful Day' and ends up in Stock-Aitken-Waterman territory.
Admittedly this is a shade better than the Kylie and Jason nonsense of the era,
but this is Lindisfarne we're talking about and even superior 80s pop fare
pales against their worst 1970s excesses. At least this album fits the theme
about not taking life for granted, the narrator suddenly realising how pretty
his wife is, how much he loves her and how much he wants to tell the fact to
the world - but being English, he keeps quiet and writes a song instead. In
different verses Alan reaches out and touches, presumably, wife Pat's shoulders
(with the comfort of her telling him 'there's no pain in growing older'), hair
('I feel a strange surprise to find you there') and her, erm, radio (I hope
that's not a euphemism), full of talk of 'world war three in the skies'). This
puts the song in danger of just being the hokey-cokey and unfortunately the
song isn't a lot more substantial, tied together by repeated refrains about
what a 'great day' it's going to be even though the rest of the world tries to
make sure it isn't. This simple song could still have worked had the band
performed it simply, but they don't, plastering it with icky synths that sound
like a malfunctioning doorbell at the Addams Family residence and a general
mood in the room that the band are waiting to have their teeth pulled rather
than enjoying a 'beautiful day'. Sadly a bit of a mistake this one, the band
either trying too hard to get a hit or not trying anywhere near enough depending
on your take on things. Nice catchy tune, though.
'Broken Doll' defies description, starting out as a
drunken night at the French Riveria complete with accordion and ending up
somewhere between 'Madness' the band and 'madness' the mental condition. Rod's
jumpy ska bass beat is by far the best thing about this song, which features
Hull singing about feeling fragile and abandoned. This is a 'list' song, full
of metaphors for how discarded the narrator feels, while I'd bet my mint
only-played-once edition of 'C'mon Everybody' (seriously, I don't want it) that
this song wasn't written for the band at all but some female singer. Hull feels
like a 'second-hand Rosie', a 'broken doll' and 'Al Capone's moll' and
'searches round for tea and sympathy'. A shame, then, that such a 'feminine'
song, unusual for Lindisfarne, is given such a macho treatment. Even the
accordion is throttled as if it's a Pete Townshend solo rather than a moonlit
night in Paris. Where this song succeeds is in the playful way the narrator
tries to keep the fact they are falling apart hidden from view. By the time of
the chorus 'no don't say it' suddenly the manic backing and the slightly
histrionic Hull vocal makes sense: this is a song desperate to sound happy,
bright and bouncy while feeling suicidal and depressed. In that sense it's the
song that best suits this album's chirpy production values and glamorous pop
despite the deeper feelings lying just under the surface. However even this
recording seems to get more wrong than it does right, with a feeling of 'so
what?' after three minutes of a track that won't stay still long enough to
catch the ear.
The closest to an album triumph is the lovely 'One
Hundred Miles To Liverpool'. Lindisfarne didn't often address their fanbase
directly but it's lovely when they do and the affection between band and fan
has never been rendered prettier than here. The 'Sue' and 'Annie' mentioned in
the first verse were long-term Liverpudlian fans who wrote long letters to Hull
every month come what may. Feeling that they were more like family than fans,
Hull looks forward to 'seeing' them at the gig, even if he doesn't get to meet
them, the long and tiring hours of being on the road suddenly worth it for that
one brief moment of connection which all songwriters live for. After all, if
there are two people Hull knows 'get' his work then why not more? The rest of
the song verges between the real-life observation of what is going on as Hull
writes his song ('Rod and Ray are talking, the radio is squawking...I'm cracking
jokes with all the blokes') and the imaginary ('John and Paul are sleeping, a
streetsweeper is cleaning' - note that Hull names his imaginary children after
The Beatles!) Alan is tired, he's been on the road for too many years and knows
the route from Newcastle to Liverpool well, having traced it in happy years and
sad years, 'in sunshine and snow'. Suddenly, though, the lights of Liverpool
are lit and call him ever onwards, 'the tug boat in the Mersey joining in the
jamboree' as the sight of the venue the band will play in becomes a chance to make
people happy and do what Lindisfarne were put on this earth to do all over
again. While the production could be better and you yearn for the simplicity
the band would have given this laidback lovely song in days of yore, it's
better than most on this album with a haunting Jacka mouthorgan refrain and
some simple la-la-la-ing that gives this song a nicely 1960s feel. The sense is
that, even though Lindisfarne are trying to sound contemporary still, they're a
band that carry a past with them and they realise what it really means to make
a living out of travelling and being away from home for such long periods of
time, not like the young whippersnapper bands they're trying to sound like.
Lindisfarne have already won their original fanbase over already and this
charming attempt to write a fan letter back that somehow turned into a song
somewhere along the way is a lovely example of just how close the connection
between band and fans really is, a hundred, a thousand, a million miles (or
years) apart it doesn't matter because the affection is constant and band and
fans are closer than they think.
An eerie synth links the song to 'Take Your Time',
which is just daft because both songs are amongst the happiest on the album.
This typically Hull song about picking yourself up and being true to your own
values in a world that wants you to adapt and confine yourselves is even more
early 1960s and sounds like a hippie folk-rock version of Motown. A very Buddy
Hollyish chorus complete with 'hiccup' (and a title that Buddy had already
used) sadly makes for a more derivative song than it needed to be, with some
original lines about 'smiling at a world that spits in your face' undone by a
singalong chorus done better so many hundreds of times before. It's easy to
miss how great this song is underneath another rather tired performance and yet
more plinkety-plink synths however. Unlike most songs using a 'take your time'
chorus this isn't about a romance but about Hull's belief that there is the
perfect job out there for everyone and that all we have to do to find our niche
in life is keep searching for what it is. As an ex-window-cleaner and
psychiatric nurse never given a hope of making music into a living, he knows
full well how many dead-ends and disasters we might have along the way before
we find what we were put on this earth to do. In this song even our failures
are successes because they show us what we can't do: 'The moment you realise is
the moment you understand' and that our worst moments (getting the sack,
becoming unemployed, having to move district) can all be opportunities for the
right thing to come along. It's a shame, then, that such a hopeful positive
song is positively lost here with perhaps the single worst harmonies of
Lindisfarne's career and a sense that the band are rehearsing this song and
noodling at it, not living and breathing it the way it should be. Regrettably
Lindisfarne don't seem to have done this song live at all, which is a shame
because that's where it sounds as if it might have taken off - sadly here it's
another track that doesn't quite make it.
The album then closes with 'Song For A Stranger', a
mournful track that sounds musically the most like the past (a brief mandolin
opening and more of a folk rock vibe than normal) while lyrically taking
Lindisfarne even further from home. Over a cod-dramatic lyric celebrating
brotherhood Hull tells us 'I have travelled over mountains, over sunsets, over
sky, I've envisaged things before me and always tried to keep an open mind'. My
guess is that Lindisfarne were trying to emulate the success of their fellow
Geordies Dire Straits here, whose title track of record-breaking 1985 album
'Brothers In Arms' sounded exactly like this song - dramatic and just a little
bit daft. There's a sense in both songs that Hull is celebrating a war platoon
full of comrades as much as the friends he's made playing rock and roll and
that simply belonging to the same 'unit' is enough to make a stranger a close
friend. Lindisfarne were, of course, close to Dire Straits (they were named in
Si's kitchen after all) and must have looked on enviously at their mainstream
success, a status that Mark Knopfler for one seemed to despise yet a band like
Lindisfarne would have sold their mandolins to taste a bit of. Sadly, however,
Lindisfarne aren't that sort of a band and they prove it again here with a song
and performance that try so hard to appeal to the everyman hat it loses the
quirkiness and originality behind all of the band's best moments. The group
have nothing to bite on here, just a general lyric about befriending someone
against a backdrop of nature at it's most epic and despite the wide scope this
song is far less 'human' than tales of the fog on the tyne and shops selling
sausage rolls. Everyone here sounds lost, the track suddenly cutting off after
an a capella line of 'am I only dreaming?' as if the narrator has just woken up
and Lindisfarne have realised they're only play-acting, pretending to be
something they're not. Like the rest of the album, it would have sounded better
had we actually been able to hear everything properly without the production
sheen - though Dire Straits arguably add more, the difference between the two
recordings is that between night and day as everything in 'Brothers In Arms' is
there to enhance the mood, tug at the heart-strings and make everything sound
epic; on 'Song For A Stranger' everything sounds flat and lifeless and you have
to work out what's going on despite the production not because of it.
Truly, though, there is a great album going on deep
within the grooves of 'Dance Your Life Away' somewhere but that's the problem:
there is no groove. This is a more commercial record than usual in many ways,
with a bigger sense of style and a lot more overdubs than any other Lindisfarne
release and if you heard this album in 1986 rather than somewhere nearer today
then this probably wouldn't have struck you as odd: all albums came like this
at the time, whether they were by hungry new wannabes or acts like Lindisfarne
with a near twenty year pedigree. However usually Lindisfarne can just about
get away with sounding like everyone else around at the time without
sacrificing what makes them special: 1982's 'Sleepless Nights' did it and
1989's 'Amigoes' will nearly do the same, while it remains up to the individual
listener whether 'C'mon Everybody' was too 1950s, too 1980s or too Lindisfarne
to work as the mass-market-appeal covers album the band were aiming for. Here
they fail badly as even Hull's emotions get over-ruled by cold synths, Si and
Rod are all but ignored and Jacka seems to be wondering why he's even bothering
to turn up to work anymore (ir won't surprise anyone to learn that he's only on
one more 'proper' band LP and doesn't even appear much on that). The trouble
is, of all the albums Lindisfarne made when they reformed in 1978, this is the
least identifit and the most 'Lindisfarny' of the lot in songwriting terms,
with two-thirds of the record about the old themes of overcoming obstacles,
dispensing with injustice and living life on your own terms. Had it been
recorded the same way as the original 1970s trio this album may yet have been a worthy
successor, speaking up for the English working man with enough love left over
to heal the rest of the world too. Sadly that's not what we get on an album
that tries so hard to be like everybody else, with what must be one of the
biggest discrepancies between song themes and production on any AAA album. The
result is, sadly, the nadir of Lindisfarne's back catalogue just because it's
so hard to listen to in the modern age, with more period trappings than Madonna
in shoulder pads waving a £5 note and moon-walking with ET. But this isn't one
of those AAA nadirs where absolutely nothing about this album worked whatsoever
- instead 'Dance Your Life Away' is one of those records that pains you
precisely because you know, deep down, the material deserves so much more
respect than it was ever given, synthing it's life away when it should have
been dancing.
A NOW COMPLETE LIST OF LINDISFARNE ARTICLES
TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
'Nicely Out Of Tune' (L)
(1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-37-lindisfarne-nicely-out-of.html
'Fog On The Tyne' (L) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/news-views-and-music-issue-88.html
'Dingly Dell' (L) (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-146.html
'Roll ON Ruby' (L) (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/lindisfarne-roll-on-ruby-1973.html
'Fog On The Tyne' (L) (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/news-views-and-music-issue-88.html
'Dingly Dell' (L) (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/news-views-and-music-issue-146.html
'Roll ON Ruby' (L) (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/lindisfarne-roll-on-ruby-1973.html
'It's Jack The Lad' (JTL)
(1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-61-jack-lad-its-jack-lad-1973.html
'Happy Daze' (L) (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/news-views-and-music-issue-50.html
'Pipedream' (AH) (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/news-views-and-music-issue-63-alan-hull.html
'Happy Daze' (L) (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/news-views-and-music-issue-50.html
'Pipedream' (AH) (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/news-views-and-music-issue-63-alan-hull.html
'The Squire' (AH) (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/alan-hull-squire-1975.html
'The Old Straight Track' (JTL) (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/news-views-and-music-issue-109-jack-lad.html
'The Old Straight Track' (JTL) (1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/news-views-and-music-issue-109-jack-lad.html
'Rough Diamonds' (JTL)
(1975) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/jack-lad-rough-diamonds-1975.html
‘Jackpot’ (JTL) (1976) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/jack-lad-jackpot-1976.html
'Magic In The Air' (L) (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-15.html
'Magic In The Air' (L) (1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/news-views-and-music-issue-15.html
'Back and Fourth' (L)
(1978) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/lindisfarne-back-and-fourth-1978.html
‘The News’(L) (1979) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/lindisfarne-news-1979.html
'Sleepless Nights' (L) (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-83-lindisfarne-sleepless-nights.html
‘The News’(L) (1979) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/lindisfarne-news-1979.html
'Sleepless Nights' (L) (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-83-lindisfarne-sleepless-nights.html
'Dance Your Life Away' (L)
(1986) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2017/01/lindisfarne-dance-your-life-away-1986.html
‘Amigos’ (1989)
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/lindisfarne-amigos-1989.html
'Elvis Lives On The Moon' (L) (1993) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/lindisfarne-elvis-lives-on-moon-1993.html
'Here Comes The
Neighbourhood' (1998) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/lindisfarne-here-comes-neighbourhood.html
'Promenade' (2002) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/lindisfarne-promenade-2002.html
Si Cowe Obituary and
Tribute (2015) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/simon-si-cowe-lindisfarne-guitarist.html
Surviving TV Clips http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/surviving-lindisfarne-tv-clips-1971-1996.html
Live/Solo/Compilation
Albums Part One 1970-1987 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/lindisfarne-sololiveraritiescompilation.html
Live/Solo/Compilation
Albums Part Two 1988-2015 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/lindisfarne-sololiveraritiescompilation_29.html
Essay: Keepin’ The Rage On Behalf Of The Working Classes https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/lindisfarne-essay-keepin-rage-on-behalf.html
Essay: Keepin’ The Rage On Behalf Of The Working Classes https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/lindisfarne-essay-keepin-rage-on-behalf.html
