Gotta Hear This # 13

It's the Spring of 1972 and I'm somewhere up the Mourne Mountains with the Boy Scouts. We're done the camping thing already but this time we're on a hike into the hills, steering for a hostel on a windswept slope. If I knew the location I would tell you. I would also go back there myself as it seemed tremendously desolate and cool. It was like one of those shacks you see in old cowboy films, populated by the James-Younger Gang or some other desperadoes.

Inside there was a utility grade stove and we would sit there in the evenings, loving the rough comfort. The best seats were reserved by some older boys, who walked around with the ease of seasoned hill walkers and hostel vets. They were growing sparse beards and always seemed to be singing elusive songs that we half understood.

Their favourite was a tune called 'Meet Me On The Corner'. It was about a lonesome guy trying to cop a deal with a dreamseller. He wants to exchange some rhymes for a reverie. He's setting up a meeting and the deep longing in the guy's voice makes you appreciate the importance of the trade-off.

It was some long time later when I realized that the song had been released by a band from Newcastle, England, called Lindisfarne. To my young ears, 'Meet Me On The Corner' sounded like no song ever written, but with hindsight they were maybe listening to Fairport Convention and definitely immersed in their Bob Dylan. Their lyric isn't really so far away from 'Mr Tambourine Man' with his magic swirling ship. In fact the Lindisfarne recording had been produced by Bob Johnston, who had steered Bob through 'Highway 61 Revisited', 'Blonde On Blonde' and more. Maybe that also explains the quiet rapture of singer Alan Hull, who was clearly on his uppers. You would be, really.

That's essentially all I can remember about my mountain experience. We returned to the city with its bombs and relentless dread, but we were humming a delicate song, written by Geordies and related to us by those boys with beards, rolling their own and addressing the dreamseller.