Run for home is a single from Lindisfarne's 1978 album Back and fourth. Not really a folk song or even a folk-rock song, it is a full production number featuring a beautiful cor anglais element that reflects the whistfulness of the lyrics. At the time, it was hailed as "Alan Hull's best song to date". Not their highest charting song, it sold more than any other. It fits broadly into the on the road genre of rock song but is more definitely a song that reiterates an idea at least as old as the 1823 song Home sweet home! For Lindisfarne home was the north east but there is nothing that ties this number to any particular place - it can be your home or mine (Wales - where I happen to be writing this). One wonders if the confessions (I've made some mistakes ... I've looned with them screamed at the moon
Behaved like a buffoon) points to a Prodigal returning home theme but there are so few lyrics it would be hard to sustain the argument. It is best listened to as an assertion that when you've seen all that this world has to offer, you'll probably find that your heart feels warmest for the earliest scenes of your life, back at home. Or to go further, it encapsulates Proverbs 2:8 Like a bird that flees its nest is anyone who flees from home. I can certainly identify with the song's way of thinking, having spent most of my life outside Wales, in London. There's nowhere quite like home.
