Lindisfarne

Easily the best album the group ever recorded, Nicely Out Of Tune is one of the prettiest folk-rock albums of the late 1960s. If Lindisfarne had never recorded anything else, they'd be one of the most fondly remembered acts of their era just for this album. "Lady Eleanor" is a very pretty tune that manages to incorporate elegant mandolin over some heavy rock riffing. "Road To Kingdom Come" is closer in spirit to the group's usual pub-rock sound, a singalong-type number with lots of really crunchy harmonica, mandolin, and fiddle, and a really catchy chorus – "Jackhammer Blues" is pretty nearly as good a rocker. But "Winter Song" is one of the gentlest, most haunting folk ballads of its period, almost too pretty to have come from a rock band, and "Alan In The River With Flowers" isn't far behind. The rest is in the same class and league, and as a bonus the CD contains two lost B-sides, "Knackers Yard Blues" and "Nothing But The Marvelous Is Beautiful" – they're not bad, either.

Lindisfarne's second album, Fog on the Tyne fulfilled and expanded on the promise of their debut, offering a brace of memorable folk-rock (or, perhaps more properly, acoustic rock) songs that were compared favorably with Bob Dylan's work and that of the Band, and even the Sweetheart of the Rodeo-era Byrds, among others, without ever sounding like any of them. "Meet Me on the Corner" and "Fog on the Tyne" are the two best-known songs here, but there's plenty else that's their equal, including "Uncle Sam" and "Together Forever." The only cautionary element to the album was its short running time, an indicator that perhaps the group was being pressed to hard to get records out too quickly.

This was the band's comeback album after a fairly dire patch in the mid-'70s. The fact is, Back and Fourth (originally issued by Polygram) isn't really that good a record, lacking the imagination and spirit of experimentation that highlighted their early albums for Charisma…

Lindisfarne barely command more than a footnote in most rock reference books. During the early '70s, however, Lindisfarne were one of the hottest folk-based rock bands in England, with chart placements on two of their albums that rivaled Jethro Tull, and had them proclaimed one of the most important groups of the decade…

"Happy Daze" was the second album by the Mk II line-up of Lindisfarne and was originally released in 1974. This is the first time that the album has been issued on CD and Market Square have lovingly repackaged it and included seven Alan Hull demos as bonus tracks, six of which are previously unreleased…