The inside story of Lindisfarne's Run For Home

Run For Home was the first Lindisfarne single since All Fall Down in 1972 to chart. And the first since Meet Me On The Corner in 71 to make the Top 10. The band appeared on Top Of The Pops to promote the single, on July 13, 1978. Also on the same show were Renaissance, as well as Suzi Quatro, The Boomtown Rats and Racey.

Where did the inspiration for Run For Home come from?

“It happened when we were in the studio working on the Back And Fourth album. We were waiting for Gus Dudgeon, our producer, to turn up one day, so Alan Hull sat down at the piano and began playing. He had a book of his unused songs lying around, so I flicked through it and came across this one. It looked interesting, so I persuaded him it play it, and it quickly became obvious it was a really good tune.”

What was the reaction to it?

“It became our best selling single, even though we had higher charting ones. It just sold a lot of copies over a long period of time.”

Did you feel like a pop star?

“We never thought of ourselves in that way. Even though we did do Top Of The Pops. It was just a song that did well for us, and we took it in our stride. We were never treated like pop stars anyway.”

Was having a hit a blessing or a curse?

“It could easily have been a blessing, if we’d followed this up straight sway with another single, making the most of the momentum. But we didn’t, so it never had any long term impact.”

Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021