“Everything was going up its own jacksie!" Lindisfarne's down-to-earth approach saw them not always aligned with prog's loftier ideals in 1973

Back in 2013, Prog looked further back to 1973, bang in the middle of the genre's first golden era - a year of The Dark Side Of The Moon and Tales From Topographic Oceans in a feature we decided to call Battle For The Planet Of The Capes! For that we also spoke to Ray Jackson, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist of Goerdie folk rockers Lindisfarne, whose position on the legendary Charisma Records 'Six Bob' Tour with Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator had thrust them firmly into the progressive rock spotlight...

Lindisfarne had toured with Yes in the States in 1973 and had known the band for years. Although their rootsy, folk-tinged music was quite different to Yes, they’d enjoyed commercial success in both the UK singles and album charts. They had briefly broken up in 1973, before the Yes tours, partly as a result of record company pressure

“We had worn ourselves out, we’d worked far too much,” recalls vocalist, mandolin and harmonica player Ray Jackson. “Genesis had said: ‘We want time off to write more material’. Because we made so much money for Charisma, they wanted to keep plugging, plugging, plugging. In a panic to cash in on their ‘split’, Charisma rushed out Lindisfarne Live. Jackson reveals that the reason the sound was so poor was that it was a reference recording for a film on the group that had only used part of the sound signal, about three or four of the recorder’s eight tracks, “so half the things that should have been in there weren’t”.

Jackson noticed that by 1973, Lindisfarne’s approach seemed at odds with prog’s lofty ambitions.

“There were certainly a lot of bands around at the time doing concept albums, and I think they had lost the plot slightly inasmuch as they were going down very self-indulgent routes,” he says. “And obviously, after three more years of that, punk came up because it wasn’t getting through to the younger generation at all.

“Lindisfarne were trying to play direct music and straight songs, but we were becoming the minority, maybe going out of style – but there was a sea change. Album art was becoming more and more expensive, there were triple gatefolds, and everything was going up its own jacksie.

“We didn’t really have a concept of performing as far as lights and stage direction. We just played the songs and got on with it, and if someone was clever enough to light it in a nice way, that was good to us.”