Lindisfarne join the line-up for Bognor Regis's Southdowns Music Festival

It completely wrecked the band’s 50th anniversary celebrations, as Rod Clements laments.

“The pandemic was a big blip for us because it was our 50th anniversary year and we had big plans. We even had our own ale being brewed for us and we had books coming out and tours and everything. And it all went down the shoot because of Covid. None of it happened.”

The band has had a remarkable longevity, but inevitably it has had its ups and downs over the years, but the irony was that the band was on a real high just as everything shut down.

“It was incredibly frustrating quite apart from all the plans going down the shoot. We had nothing to do for 18 months and nobody could see an end to it. We didn't know whether it would be another six weeks or another six months and we wasted a lot of time rescheduling gigs and then just having to postpone them again and again after that.

“But you just had to keep hoping. And when we did come back, exactly year ago in August 2021, the first gig that we did was the Wickham Festival which is a great festival. We really love that festival. And the relief and the release after it all was just fantastic.

“And I think we've got more appreciation now of the value of music and also the value of having an audience. It's very much a two-way process. Lindisfarne is very much a live band and we feed off the audience and you can feel the energy on both sides so yes I do think the pandemic is has people of the value of live music and just what it means to everyone.

“And I do think that extra awareness of the value of it all is going to stay around for a long time.”

Rod lives back up in the north-east, just as he has done for a long, long time, close to the regenerated thriving Newcastle from which the band emerged all those years ago: “I think it was in the 80s and 90s that things really started to happen for the city of Newcastle. I think the change came partly out of the industrial decline. Certainly before that the quayside used to be very grim with not a lot happening though there was certainly a dinghy cellar club where we used to play.

“I lived in London for six years. The whole band moved down to London at the beginning of the 70s when we first signed a record deal. We all got put in rented accommodation in the same area of north London and that was great. We need to be down there but we started drifting back in twos and threes and I stuck it out in London until about 1976.”

The ticketed headline concerts at the festival are Lindisfarne on Sept 24, Spiers & Boden on Sept 22, a double header on Sept 23 with the up-and-coming Wrest and The Leylines, and on Sept 25, The Men They Couldn’t Hang. www.southdownsfolkfest.co.uk