When I selected my “20 Albums that made an Impact” for a Facebook challenge several years ago (they are reposted starting here if you’d like to read them), I mentioned that Pipedream by Alan Hull would be a strong contender for my favourite album of all time. I thought I’d spend a little time looking at this somewhat obscure slice of 1970s folk-rock and explaining why I like it so much.
I remember discovering this album quite well. It was in the mid-to-late 1980s, when I was a college student. I was already a fan of Lindisfarne and a regular attendee of their annual Christmas concerts at Newcastle City Hall. I was visiting home, probably during the summer break. I would regularly visit Newcastle Central Library and borrow books and cassettes. One day, browsing the rack of recently-returned cassettes, I spied the distinctive cover of Pipedream, with it’s reproduction of Magritte’s La Lampe Philosophique.
I had seen copies of this album around – the cover was hard to miss- but I had never heard it so decided to borrow it from the library and give it a listen. I was immediately smitten and have continued to be so for forty years.
The background to Pipedream‘s release looks like this: Lindisfarne released their third album Dingly Dell in September 1972, and the reviews and sales were disappointing. By mid-1973, internal tensions in the band led to the original line-up of Lindisfarne dissolving. Simon Cowe, Rod Clements and Ray Laidlaw went on to form a new band, Jack the Lad, with singer Billy Mitchell.
Alan Hull and Ray Jackson kept the Lindisfarne name and formed a new band with a more straight-ahead electric rock sound, but this proved to be less appealing to audiences than the original line-up and disbanded in 1975 after releasing two albums.
During this “Lindisfarne Mark II” era, Alan Hull pursued a parallel solo career, and Pipedream is his first and strongest solo release. It has a similar acoustic / electric crossover sound to the original line-up of Lindisfarne but with a harder edge. The singalong, good-time element of Lindisfarne’s music is trimmed back and rawer emotions are on display.
Side 1’s opening track “Breakfast” lets us know immediately that we are in different emotional territory. Using the type of alternating quiet and loud passages that would later characterise much of rock music in the 1990s, Hull paints a picture of a man watching his married lover dressing in the morning to return to her husband. It’s not a happy story; the woman tells him not to call her on the phone as “My husband will be there / It really isn’t fair / He still believes in trust / I’ve got to catch my bus”, and on her departure the man is left feeling “so empty that I must be dead”.
The second track, “Justanothersadsong” is a bluesy rocker with lyrics detailing a broken-down relationship with the observation that it’s “just another case of human misunderstanding” and some excellent harmonica playing by Hull’s Lindisfarne bandmate Ray Jackson.
The album shifts gear for the third track “Money Game“, a quite beautiful song in waltz time about a young man from a poor family in a relationship with a woman whose father “owns half the town”. Hull has often written about social issues like class division, and seldom more poignantly than here, where the song’s protagonist asks “what does money mean anyway?” and opines that “I’ve got more than all that” because he can “smile when it’s a rainy day”.
Track four, “STD 0632“, is an instrumental with a beautiful and haunting melody line. The title comes from the old telephone area code (Standard Trunk Dialling) for Newcastle upon Tyne. The melody from this track would pop up again on Hull’s second solo album Squire, on the track “Golden Oldies”.
We’re still in a mellow mood for the fifth track “United States of Mind” which is, as the title suggests, a philosophical rumination on both Hull’s state of mind and the world at large. This track again features a beautiful instrumental passage featuring Ray Jackson, this time on mandolin.
Things get a little lighter for the sixth and final track on side one, “Country Gentleman’s Wife“, which features just Hull on acoustic guitar and vocal. Telling the comic story of a visit to a stately home and a meeting with the titular lady, Hull has described the song as something that could have happened, but didn’t, when he was working as a window cleaner in a wealthy area during the 1960s.
Flipping over to side two, we kick off with “Numbers (Travelling Band)“, a mid-tempo rock song detailing life on the road for a touring band – driving to the venue, playing the show, drinking in the bar, going to bed only to get up and do the same thing again the next day. Hull’s lyrics paint a vivid picture of each step of the cycle, all tied together with a clever numeric theme.
“For the Bairns“, the second track on side two, is Hull’s ode to being the father of a young daughter. In it, he describes her coming home from school full of her day, and reflects that one day he will tell her that “The wickedness and strife / Are only part of living, not life.” It’s a sweet, uptempo number with a rollicking saxophone solo by Dave Brooks.
The tempo shifts down a gear for “Drug Song“, a track that Hull has admitted was written under the influence, but that takes neither a pro- nor anti-drugs stance. Instead, it merely reflects on his experiences and some of their real and potential consequences. This track features some beautiful electric guitar from John Turnbull and Kenny Craddock.
Next up is “Song for a Windmill“, one of my favourite tracks on the album (if I had to pick favourites). With a driving beat and mostly acoustic instrumentation until the end, its picturesque lyrics are a comment on industrialisation. The song tells the story of the decline of a windmill in the country as the workers take jobs at a factory in town. Left abandoned, the windmill decays until “just the rats call you home”. The song once again features a sublime instrumental outro.
The tension ramps up for the penultimate track “Blue Murder“, a song which surely owes a musical debt of gratitude to Neil Young’s 1969 song “Down by the River“. The lyrics in this one hint at the need for self-examination and the desire to make a change, to express oneself, and could be aimed at a failing romantic relationship or possibly at Hull’s former band, Lindisfarne. An excellent guitar solo continues to build the tension in the outro of this one, leading up to the final track.
“I Hate to See You Cry” is the final song on the album, featuring Hull on solo piano and vocal. It’s a heartbreaking love song; his voice cracking on the high notes simply adds more emotion to his delivery.
Pipedream is in my opinion a perfect album. There is not a weak song on it, and listening to it takes you on a musical and emotional journey that is complete and satisfying. Each side begins with driving rock before slowing down and taking you somewhere more contemplative before either lightening the mood or heightening the tension before an emotional outpouring. The silence when “I Hate to See You Cry” ends is tangible.
This album accompanied me through my final years at college and my move down to London; I recall listening to it in the car driving up and down the A1(M) in the early 1990s, and saying to myself that I would stop at “The next services after Pipedream“. The haunting line “I am the apple man and I’m rotten to the core” from “Blue Murder” sticks very clearly in my mind from those days. It has been a regular listen for me ever since.
When NME reviewed the album on its 1973 release, the reviewer noted “With McCartney’s writing a mere ghost of his past achievements and Lennon going through a period of musical inactivity Alan Hull is easily one of the best songwriters currently around.”
Pipedream certainly stands among Hull’s finest work as a songwriter and singer. The original line-up of Lindisfarne would reform in 1976, eventually finding success again with 1978’s “Run for Home”. Hull continued to release solo albums up to his death in 1995 aged only 50, but his solo work was always eclipsed by Lindisfarne. The album was remastered and re-released in 2005 on CD with two bonus tracks to mark the 10th anniversary of his death.
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