Helsinki/HKI

An earlier column looked at Finland, where the song Finland  by the Redwoods seemed to me to capture the feeling of the country that I had experienced, the sense of dark forests and lakes and of space and melancholy. I am also aware, however, that this is a partial view. It is partly a town/country difference. In my first visit there, going from Karjaa, a largely Swedish-speaking settlement on the south coast, to Helsinki seemed like going to another country: Helsinki has its own character - as capitals always do – with its modernist architecture and a feel of a Russian city at times. Yet it is more than that. Out in the sticks you might fondly imagine coming across a group of villagers dancing the  Humppa to the sound of an accordion but are as likely to see a death metal group playing Inside the Labyrinth of Depression or something like that.

I recently spent  some days at a conference  in Suonenjoki, a  small town in eastern Finland most noted for a summer strawberry festival. The seasons were on the cusp between winter and spring, with lakes still frozen enough to walk –and in some cases drive – on but starting to thaw at the edges and there was a sense that  everything would suddenly burst into life. In many ways it was the Finland of the song mentioned above. Standing looking across the frozen lake a short walk from the accommodation, the forest circling round like a besieging army , there was  a silence and stillness rarely experienced in England.

This side of Finland  seemed present too at a formal dinner given by the Finnish hosts, at which the musical accompaniment was by two men playing an accordion and a musical saw. (The musical saw came up previously in the Wonderful Land column, which prompted a comment from the wonderfully named Saw Lady of New York.) I had never seen the musical saw used as a lead instrument before and it was pretty impressive, though it did get a bit difficult distinguishing the British, Czech, Irish, Polish and Finnish national anthems when played on a saw end to end. The Finns there had also come in national costume, which actually seemed quite natural but raised an interesting question –what would English national costume be? Morris dancing garb? Pearlie King and Queen? Bowler hat and pinstripes? Shorts, sandals and socks and a carrier bag of crisps and cheese sandwiches?  It seems the same problem as the issue of English  nationalism and song  discussed in the  Waverley Steps column.

Yet even out here the accordion/national costume stuff  is only one side of it. Travelling there the landscape often looked like what I imagine the Mid-West of America to look like – long straight roads lined by woods, giant billboards advertising Coca Cola and McDonalds, small settlements strung along the route with a pizza place and one bar where a couple of locals sat silent and morose with their beers. Karaoke seemed big, though taken seriously. In the nearest big town, Kuopio, there were concert ads for the outfit Before the Dawn, described as “Dark Metal with a bit of an early Gothenburg air”.

This odd dichotomy can also be seen in another institution that has  cropped up before, the Eurovision Song Contest. Finland have been a contest regular since 1961 but have seen more than their fair share of nul points, no doubt handicapped in those decades when contestants had to sing in their own language: Finnish seems to have particularly long words in it. Still, who can forget such entries as Tipi-tii (1962), Pump-Pump (1976) or, indeed, Reggae OK (1981): Reggae like it used to be, with a Rod Stewart haircut and – yahoo - an accordion solo. The point in this digression is that the sole time in 52 years that Finland won was not with some sort of country folk song but with Hard Rock Hallelujah by heavy metal group Lordi dressed as monsters.

Link to Reggae OK

The two songs here reflect in their ways these different aspects.  They are both called Helsinki (or HKI), though the first  - Helsinki by American duo Damon and Naomi from 2011 -  sounds more like the Finland of lakes and dark forests than Helsinki. There is a dreamlike quality to it, with a melancholic touch,  that conveys the stillness of the landscape and there is an instrument near the start that sounds rather like a musical saw, though I don’t think it is. The second one is HKI by Gracias from 2010 (thanks to Inkeri  for pointing me to this) : a reminder that Helsinki is a multi-cultural city with a  hip hop and rap scene .Gracias came to Finland from then Zaire at the age of 4 and still remembers the shock of seeing snow for the first time. Yet the track is a homage to the capital :”Helsinki doesn’t get much shouted out…wish you could see that, nice place to be at”. The Helsinki in the video  is a different side to the one usually seen in brochures but at 3.18  the leaves fall just as they do in the woods by the lakes.

Link to Helsinki

Link to HKI

La Costa Brava

An earlier column wrote of Andalucia in Southern Spain. It is an evocative name in many ways, of Moorish architecture and olive groves and white villages or of Lorca and the Spanish Civil War. Think of some other areas not so far away, however – the ‘Costas’. Costa Brava, Costa Blanca, Costa del Sol, Costa Dorada. At face value they are simply descriptive terms: the Wild Coast, the White Coast, the  Coast of the Sun, the Golden Coast. To British ears, at least, however, they have become over the last 40 years as shorthand for a particular type of  holiday, involving  sun and getting sunburned on crowded beaches, sangria, cheap hotels,  union jack shorts, British bars and cafes serving chips galore and  British food. The ‘Costa’ notion extends further than the Spanish coast actually, to Ibiza and Tenerife, for example –and even to bungalows overlooking Torbay with twee ‘Costa Packet’ signs on their gate.

The best known pop song about the ‘Costas’, Y Viva Espana by Sylvia  - gracing karaoke machines for evermore - is a fitting accompaniment for the stereotype of the British holidaymaker in Spain: “I’m off to sunny Spain….I’m taking the Costa Brava plane”. It was a hit in 1974 at a time when cheap flights and mass tourism to Spain were well underway, enabling the song to be sung by plane passengers en route to Alicante . A time too when Franco, the fascist dictator of the 1930’s, was still in power and Jack Jones, the British trade union leader and veteran of the International Brigades, urged British tourists to ignore the song and boycott Spain.

 There are other songs in the same vein. There was the 1980 hit by Fantastique, Costa Blanca: “La, la, la, lalala lalala, Enjoy the sun, you forget your sorrow, La, la, la, lalala lalala, hear me say, hear me say, hear me sayayay, La, la, la, lalala lalala”. And there was a 1976 track, Costa Brava, by Peggy March. Her name is best known for the 1963 million seller, I Will Follow Him (itself a remake of Petula Clark’s Chariot) but here she is doing an oompah song in German! Now this is what I call a Costa song. It sounds not dissimilar to Chas 'n Dave’s Margate, which also has a reference to the Costa Brava- “You can keep the Costa Brava and all that palaver”. Maybe  oompah rhythms make everything sound similar though.

Link to Peggy March song

Link to Chas n Dave song

However, considering the popularity of the Spanish Costas for the British there are surprisingly few pop  songs about them. Perhaps the Costa Brava et al seem too ordinary and parochial for the reasons given above. The Kinks might have managed a non-mocking song about a holiday there and the Chas 'n Dave song above sees even the Costa Brava as too posh to entertain as a holiday jaunt. However, pop stars on the whole migrated like Tony Blair, as moths to a flame, to the rich and glamorous: it was to the Cote d’Azur that the Stones decamped during their tax exile . Mediterranean resorts meant, not the Costas but the sorts of resorts artfully scattered in the Peter Sarstedt hit, Where Do You Go To My Lovely, with its references to Juan-les-Pines and to the Aga Khan. (Like the film actor Kenneth More, Sarstedt signifies laughter in this song by actually saying ‘Ha Ha Ha.’ I also have a theory that some of his popularity at the time, 1969, came from  looking rather like Tariq Ali, the political activist then on the front page of newspapers leading anti-Vietnam War marches: it gave Sarstedt a bit of street credibility. It went wrong when both parties got confused themselves: Tariq Ali astounded  a committee meeting of the International Marxist Group by a burst of Frozen Orange Juice and Peter Sarstedt perplexed audiences by encoring with The Internationale)

Link to Peter Sarstedt pic

Link to Tariq Ali pic

Instead of writing songs about the place, however, pop acts were more likely to retire there when the hits stopped. Over the years you could find , for example, Mike Smith - voice of the Dave Clark 5 - living in southern Spain  or Beaky (of Dave Dee, Dozy etc) running a bar in Marbella or Roy Crewdson (of Freddie and the Dreamers) running a bar in Los Cristianos. You can also find those  who impersonate the names of yesteryear – outfits called The Drifters or Four Tops abound in the bars and clubs. A few years ago there was an act  in one of the Tenerife resorts pretending to be Crispian St Peters  ( 2 UK hits in 1966): there seems a certain lack of ambition here when the person in question was deciding who to impersonate.

The song here from 2007, however, La Costa Brava by American indie outfit Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, gives a whole new perspective and suggests that the ‘Costa Brava’ described above is a specifically British notion. Maybe the USA and other European countries- except Germany - hear the words ‘Costa Brava’ as something different, perhaps as the glamorous stretch of coast of Salvador Dali and Ava Gardner still. It sounds an inviting and interesting place here, a place to find yourself and rejuvenate: “And down by the beach there's a small cafe, where we'll meet Lolo and Pablo and drink Moritz all day. So come on over to St Feliu 'cause it's somewhere I've been and I want to take you there.”

 It doesn’t take too long, of course, to get away from the neon lights and   English breakfasts, for you can hire  a car or take a bus or even just walk a few streets and travel to what seems another place and time. Or you can decide that the Costa Brava you see is a state of mind and find the right eyes to view it

Link to song

Waverley Steps

A previous column, North Wales, mentioned the ambiguous relationship Wales and England have had in pop music. The same could be said of Scotland. As with the British Labour Party, Scotland has played a significant role in British pop from Lonnie Donegan through Marmalade, to the Rezillos, to K T Tunstall. However, songs with a Scottish theme in the early days of pop  floated a caricature of bonny Scotland. Like the 1958 Number One Hoots Mon, by Lord Rockingham’s X1, a group of session players. Later covered by Bad Manners, this was an instrumental  with a few vocal interjections that distil Scotland down, like a Readers Digest Condensed Classic, to these well-known Scottish conversation pieces: ‘Och aye’, ‘Hoots mon there’s a moose loose aboot the hoose’ and ‘It’s a braw, bricht moonlicht nicht’.   (To make a rather obscure but satisfying link with another column: Lord Rockingham X1’s bandleader Harry Robinson later did the string arrangement on Nick Drake’s River Man. Hoots Mon  also featured what must be one of the first examples on a pop hit of the Hammond organ, played by Cherry Wainer.) Or like Andy Stewart singing Donald Where’s Your Troosers, a UK hit twice, in 1961 and 1989. Or Jackie Dennis, touted as the UK’s Ricky Nelson, who scored a 1958 Top Ten  hit , La Dee Dah, at the age of 15, six years before another Scot, Lulu, achieved the same feat. As with the Dubliners mentioned in a previous column as looking just like Dubliners should, Jackie Dennis looked just as a Scots lad should.

Link to image
Link to Hoots, Mon

This obviously changed, though in the first beat boom in the wake of the Beatles one of the few Scottish groups to be successful in England -the Poets - dressed up like Robert Burns. However, there became something apparent  that has cropped up before: that songs about Scotland - as with Wales, or America or Australia -  can get away with a sense of nationalist pride and patriotism that songs about England cannot, or at least in the context of pop and rock music. Take the two in the links below. The first is Runrig’s rollicking version of Loch Lomond that turns into an audience sing-along,  a version of which was a UK hit in 2007. (Bill Haley and the Comets did a version called, inevitably,  Rock Lomond in 1957). It is difficult to imagine such an emotion-charged  crowd pleaser about, say Lake Windermere or Chesil Beach. 


The second is  a version of  Robert Burns’ Ae Fond Kiss by Eddi Reader of Fairground Attraction and Perfect fame. Again, I am not sure an English poet could translate into such a musical idiom  in quite the same way. A comparison might be Cleo Laine singing Shakespeare’s  Shall I Compare Thee but this remains in the genre of jazz and also lacks the nationalist resonance of Burns’ work. The differences perhaps here lie in England’s past as the coloniser of these other countries. There wasn’t here  the loss of a country or independence ` to mourn. What had been lost, instead, were the voices of ordinary people  over the centuries as the ruling culture took hold. Hence whilst the unofficial national anthem of Scotland is Flower of Scotland or Scotland the Brave and of Wales is Land of My Fathers, in England it is God Save the Queen -an institution, not a country. Yet Pop and rock has not been the best medium to find those voices.

Link to Runrig track

Link to Eddi Reader track

The capital city,Edinburgh, has been one of those places that seemed familiar before ever going there from dint of images over the years, though oddly few of these came from songs about the city itself. There perhaps isn’t  a really well-known one, though The Proclaimers did Sunshine on Leith, the portside settlement a bus ride to the North; and The Fall did Edinburgh Man, a very un-Fall like ode to Edinburgh (It’s got a tune and everything).  Instead the mental  picture of Edinburgh came from other sources.  From seeing Edinburgh Castle on TV in the New Year celebrations or on the tins of Scottish Shortbread that would get given as gifts at Christmas; the pictures on the sticks of Edinburgh rock.; or Edinburgh in countless films from Greyfriars Bobby to Journey to the Centre of the Earth to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Trainspotting (You couldn’t run down Princes Street like that now, it’s all dug up with an ill-fated tram project. You would fall over). In these expectations it didn’t disappoint. The  Castle looked just as it had been in my mind’s eye. Walking down Heriot Row where Robert Louis Stephenson lived and  had watched as a child the lamplighter working his way down the street, or going through the  big old-fashioned department store of Jenners,  you got a sense of the  genteel Edinburgh, of the town of Jean Brodie. Yet it also seemed a very European city - walking down Thistle Street with its cobbled road, lamplights, cars haphazardly parked and small cafes you could be in Paris.

The song here, Waverley Steps from 2006 by Roddy Woomble of Idlewild (harmonies by Kate Rusby), captures some of this mixture of the place. Waverley Steps are the steps coming down from Edinburgh’s main station but the precise  lyrics aren’t the most important part.  (I’m not actually sure what Kate Rusby is singing in the chorus. One theory is ‘You wont be molested’ but that can’t be right). It is the mood and tone that resonates more with my experience of Edinburgh. There is something a bit undefinable about the place, something just round the corner, just at the edge of the eye, and ,as with the photo above of a figure vanishing into early morning steam, something slightly mysterious - even when the light won't fade away.

Link to song

Love and Death In Metroland

Suburbs and suburbia have come up before in these columns, with Hatfield (Oxford Street)  and From Willesden to Cricklewood, usually in songs as a place to escape from. England has a particular version of surburbia, less well-known as a subject for songs – Metro-land, that area of Outer London, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire that grew up round the Metropolitan Line coming out from   Baker Street – the gateway to Metroland -  up to Amersham and Uxbridge. It sounds better than ‘suburbia’, a hint of Paris, a hint of  the countryside. It is meant to, for the term was coined by a PR department in 1915 in the attempt to get families to move out of London and commute in for work.  There was even a song of the time,  My Little Metro-land Home, conjuring up a semi-rural idyll on its sheet music cover:

Link to image

It was always a  bit of a con. In the1920’s and 1930’s Metro-land looked back to an Edwardian  age that never really existed – and sometimes a good deal further back. A publicity blurb for Chorleywood  station in 1919 claimed you would walk straight into the 15^th century. ( On the up side you would just miss the Black Death. On the down side you would not be able to get a cup of coffee or plate of chips anywhere). In the 50’s it looked back to a 30’s that never really existed.  In the 1990’s it looked back to a 50’s that never really  existed. The notion was made up of a number of things: mock Tudor houses, nuclear families, neat lawns and lawn tennis ,teashops and afternoon tea, little railway halts with wooden platforms,   a sense that places like Pinner or Chorleywood were really rather different from mere suburbia. John Betjeman wrote a number of poems about Metro-land, including Middlesex: "Daily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train. With a thousand Ta's and Pardons daintily alights Elaine".

It was never an obvious place to inspire pop songs, though some  artists did spend their formative years somewhere there. Elton  John, for example, grew up in Pinner in Harrow, an archetypal part of Metro-land with its mock-Tudor  ,annual  Pinner Fair dating back to the 1300’s and  Morris Dancers in ye olde High Street. I got a sense of what it must be like to grow up in such an environment when as a young child we had a couple of family holidays in a house-swapping exercise that was presumably a cost-saving measure, exchanging abodes with relatives who lived in Harrow. Even at that age I realised that we had got the poor side of the bargain: they got a week by the Dorset seaside in August, we got a week in the urban heat in Metro-land, too far out from the excitements of London's tourist sites to make them easily  accessible. Actually the highlight of one holiday was discovering an old treadle sewing machine in a bedroom and seeing how fast you could make the foot pedal go. It is no surprise that Elton John tended to the more flamboyant when he escaped such a setting. What characterised the notion of Metro-land as much as anything was respectability, the old fear of the lower middle class falling in to a social abyss.

However, it also meant a relative scarcity of songs about it. Even the Metropolitan Line, in fact, is less musically celebrated than others. The Northern Line is perhaps the best served here. There was Love on the Northern Line by  boy band Northern Line: “How was I to know what fate would bring to me, oh seeing you sitting there all  alone silently….. Tell me who would have thought I'd find love on the Northern Line “ (lyrics which raise doubts about whether Northern Line ever travelled on the Northern Line .Whenever  was anyone  able to sit down, never mind all alone?). There was also Robyn Hitchcock’s  52 Stations: “There's fifty-two stations on the Northern line, none of them is yours, one of them is mine”

For the Piccadilly Line there was a 1958 track by Jim Dale, Piccadilly  Line, a parody of Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line. (Despite a long and varied career taking  in pop singer, songwriter (Georgie  Girl),stage actor (Barnum) and narrating the Harry Potter audio-books in the USA, Jim Dale is still best remembered in the UK for his roles as an accident-prone romantic lead  in the Carry On films, forever innocently giving the likes of Barbara Windsor one as she invited a double-entendre.) The Bakerloo Line had the Eddy Grant-penned All Change On The Bakerloo Line, recorded by ska group The Pyramids (aka Symarip) in 1968, making the Bakerloo Line sound as if a permanent party was going on down there. (The  Pyramids, whose most successful single was Skinhead Moonstomp, recall an odd moment in UK  pop history, when white working-class skinheads  - some of whom voiced support for Enoch Powell and later the National Front-  championed  Jamaican ska and rock- steady music : the commercial success of artists such as Desmond Dekker and the Pioneers was partly due to popularity amongst skinheads. Shared links of class and an anti-police/authority culture perhaps explained part of this.It would be wrong in any case  to assume an automatic link between skinhead culture and right wing politics. In the mid and late 70’s, the Anti-Nazi League movement  in London and Manchester and elsewhere had support from Skins Against the Nazis groups.)  Even the Hammersmith and City Line got a mention in Carter USM’s Lean On Me, I Won’t Fall over: “I'll read your letter as I pass away the time, stuck in a tunnel on the Hammersmith and City line”. The Metropolitan Line though? Nothing really.

Link to Piccadilly Line

Link to All Change For the Bakerloo Line

However, the song here from 1988, Love and Death in Metroland by Always, from the album Thames Valley Leather Club And Other Stories, seems a fitting one. Always was basically Kevin Wright, a singer/songwriter with echoes of Lloyd Cole , perhaps Ray Davies :very English, a  melancholic undertone, veering towards the whimsy at times, and songs  with  literary allusions  that dissect English culture. A style that suits Metro-land. ”There’s no escaping from this place, you’ll disappear without a trace”. Well, of course you will. It was an advertising concept -  it doesn’t really exist.

Link to song

Trouble Town

The middle parts of places can sometimes in fiction take on a rather exotic quality –Journey to The Centre of the Earth or Middle Earth, for example. Yet in reality,  the middle of countries often  end up less  celebrated – musically included -  than other parts. Take the mid-west of the USA. Not for them the West Coast or East Coast  sounds or Southern Soul. Instead , Bill Bryson summed up the general image with the first sentence of his Lost Continent book, "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to”.  Or there was Tom Hanks as the music manager in That Thing You Do, giving a warning to a complaining artist: “Jimmy, you'd rather be back on that state fair tour? They're playing in North Dakota this week.”

The same applies to England. The Midlands – too far north to be south but too far south to be north. Life in A Northern Town brings up a set of stock images, real or stereotyped -  salvation army bands, Eccles cakes, Theakstons' Old Peculiar and cobbled streets. Life in a Midlands Town, though, is rather more undefined and  somehow the identity isn’t as clear. In fact, for many people, the Midlands means  Birmingham and the Black Country - the West Midlands - forgetting the East Midlands and Nottingham, which have always seemingly had less notice. Unlike Brum Beat or the ( admittedly short-lived)  Solihull Sound there was never really a Nottingham Sound and musically it has never ranked with Birmingham or  Coventry, home of 2-Tone.The number of commercially successful artists from Nottingham hasn’t been huge. 60’s blues band Ten Years After; actress Su Pollard, who had a 1986 hit Starting Together; and Paper Lace, who had an inexplicable hat-trick of hits, including a Number One, in 1974.(Given their name, one might have expected them to dress up as 19^th Century lace-makers - but instead they opted for American Civil War uniforms for their Billy Don’t Be A Hero hit.)

Maybe, though, this ambiguity suits Nottingham because it seems a good example of a town with not one identity but several- a Tale of Many Cities. For the tourist, it is the past – real and fictional – that dominates: the Lace Market, the Castle, Sherwood Forest and all the paraphernalia associated with Robin Hood. You can drink at the Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem pub at the foot of the Castle where the Sheriff of Nottingham lived, buy a Robin Hood outfit in the gift shop nearby and have a meal at the Friar Tuck Flaming Grill. (Not venison and mead, disappointingly, but gammon, egg and chips). Musically, however, in this  historical Nottingham  you are left with Bryan Adams and Dick James (both Robin Hood again) and possibly Nottamun Town by Bert Jansch or  Fairport Convention.

 If you live there ,it is the present that matters more and your view of that will partly be shaped by where in the many parts that make up the city you live. The song here, Trouble Town by Jake Bugg from 2012, is a bleak one, part teenage angst, part reflection of Clifton, a large housing estate south of the city. ”Stuck in speed-bump city and the only thing that’s pretty is the thought of getting out”. It’s a lyrical theme frequently  found across the urban landscape. Again, though, things don’t fit a neat pattern and past and present shift about as they do in Nottingham itself,   for the style of music of 18-year old Jake Bugg has more resonance with five decades ago, with early Dylan or Donovan,  than anything contemporary. The accompanying video of another of his songs, Love Me The Way You Do, has him traipsing down a railroad track, guitar slung across his back as if he was off to jump a freight train.
Link to Love Me The Way You Do

 Jake Bugg has quoted Don Mclean as his first influence but his songs like Someone Told Me or Saffron  also have echoes of others from a past musical era. Donovan certainly but also David McWilliams, for example ,with songs like Poverty Street, or Bob Lind -  best known for the rather overblown Elusive Butterfly (pipped to the post in the UK charts in 1966 by Val Doonican, complete with rocking chair and cardigan, just as the Bachelors outsold Simon and Garfunkel with Sounds of Silence) but he also recorded many other tracks mixing folk, country and pop. Lind’s biggest impact in the UK, in fact, was in stimulating a brief flurry of homegrown covers of his songs by artists such as Keith Relf of the Yardbirds and Adam Faith, whose final chart entry  was Lind’s Cheryl’s Going Home. This was Stage 3 of Faith’s eclectic musical career, Stage 1 being the pop idol phase from the late 50’s and Stage 2 being when he commandeered the Roulettes as his backing group and jumped aboard a passing beat group bandwagon for a few more hits. Stage 4 was his commercially unsuccessful 1974 album and single, I Survived, another of those songs that should have been a hit but wasn’t. The clip below is worth viewing for Faith’s air of nonchalant cool, even glancing at his watch at 1.12. (Faith died in 2003 and his reported last words are worthy of inclusion in a List of Famous Last Words -  along with ’Bugger Bognor’ and ‘Die, my dear doctor?. That’s the last thing I shall do.’ -  echoing as they did a collective national  thought at the time: “Channel 5 is all shit, isn’t it. Christ, the crap they put on there. It’s a waste of space”).

Link to I Survived

It has been a recurrent theme in this blog that places can have multiple identities depending on who it is that views them and Nottingham seems a particularly good example of this. I visited the city just before Christmas and much of what I saw was the stuff of picture postcards: the castle and the views across the town, the stalls on the Lace Market, church bells ringing out over cobbled streets. I was a visitor and these were not, of course, the same experiences  as those that inspired this song. That will always be the case, particularly with a city that has grown up as the collective sum of very different parts. Perhaps what Nottingham lacks  musically  is its own St Etienne, able to create its own town and sense of place where retro and modern combine and the past isn't a museum piece but part of the living world. As with the song here, voices from the past can be heard in the most contemporary of settings.

Link to song

Euston Station

Waterloo has cropped up several times before as the backdrop in various songs. However, the station I have probably come to know best is Euston. Unlike Waterloo, which provided my entry point to London, it has been the exit for heading North or a transition point for coming into the city. It was actually the first mainline terminus station in a capital city but  it has never quite seemed in the same league as Waterloo. Eurostar never stopped there ,it has never had - to my knowledge -  a cinema or hairdressers  and, of course, it lacks a really famous song.

 They do exist, however, and  two of them either present a neat contrast between romanticism and cynicism or reflect the passage of time between the songs and the changing nature of  the station . There was Euston Station, a mournful Irish lament by Davie Arthur and the Fureys, who painted a picture that seems unfamiliar to my experience of  the place – “And the tambourine lady, and the saxophone man play a sad song of somewhere to go if you can…. So it's to Euston station, to the newsboy's harsh cries, Gypsy girls selling flowers have a glint in their eyes”. There was also A Night in Euston Station by Hungry Dog Brand, with a dubious invitation:   “loonies  drunks, tramps and whores…..come spend a night in Euston Station with strangers approaching to tell you things you didn’t want to know and then ask for change”. Just a normal Friday night then.

There was also the song here, also called Euston Station, by Barbara Ruskin from 1967.British female singers in the 60’s were in rather the same position as the doo-wop groups referenced in the last column. There seemed no obvious reasons why some were successful and others weren’t and every so often you come across a track and wonder why on earth it was never a hit. A few artists who were virtually unnoticed at the time did achieve success in later decades, notably Kiki Dee and Elkie Brooks. (In the mid-60’s, years before breaking through with Vinegar Joe , Elkie Brooks was sometimes described as “the sister of the drummer with Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas”.) There were many others, however, whose names and works remain bewilderingly unknown. Sharon Tandy, for example, whose soul style got her a  recording at Stax Studios backed by Booker T and the MGs but little success in the UK, though her version of the Lorraine Ellison classic Stay With Me is one of the best covers. Or Barry St John, who recorded a string of tracks only  later snapped up by Northern Soul fans: she also did a rather creepy version of  Come Away Melinda.

Or Tammy St John (no relation) who recorded the lost gem below, Dark Shadows and Empty Hallways , in 1965  at the age of 14 years. I find this a rather unsettling song, as it seems out of time in a weird way. It starts off sounding like St Etienne and then becomes as if it were a Bacharach-David hit you  had  never heard before. It is like someone creative in devising retro songs travelled from the present back in a time machine to deposit the track in 1965, only 1965 had already happened somehow so no-one noticed it at the time .In the real 1965, a much less memorable Bacharach-tinged song, Where Are You Now, by Jackie Trent, was actually at  Number One. (20 years or so later, Jackie Trent became part of the nation's musical psyche when she wrote the theme tune for Neighbours)

Link to Dark Shadows and Empty Hallways

Barbara Ruskin  falls into this group of little-known 60’s women  singers, though her work was more towards the poppier end of music than those mentioned, reminiscent of Jackie DeShannon.As a woman singer-songwriter she was also a relative rarity in the pop market at that time– artists such as Jackie DeShannon herself or Barbara Acklin notwithstanding. The difficulties artists like her faced seemed obvious with her first release, when her own stronger composition, I Can't Believe in Miracles ,was  relegated to the ‘b’ side in favour of a rather pointless cover of the Billy Fury hit, Halfway to Paradise.  Perhaps for the same reasons, another woman singer-songwriter of that time, Bobbie Gentry ,faced persistent rumours that she didn’t write her most famous song, Ode to Billy Joe, herself. (I once lived in a rented house in Reading where one of the other itinerant tenants would corner anyone he could and claim that he had actually written American Pie and that Don Mclean had swindled him out of his royalties. He disappeared one day leaving 2 months unpaid rent).

Link to I Can't Believe in Miracles

Euston Station appears to have been inspired by her travelling regularly on the Number 73, the bus that runs from the West End past Euston Station to Stoke Newington and Walthamstow .That makes it a most musically-celebrated bus route as there is at least one serious song about it: Busdriver by Kitto. That is unusual as songs about British buses are generally as intrinsically comical as songs about English counties. Paul Simon could make a Greyhound bus trip from Pittsburgh to New York into an epic statement on America. Boarding a Number 73 at Euston and counting the cars as you are stuck at the Angel is never going to sound heroic no matter how hard you try.

The song came out at a time that seemed to be popular for station songs- Waterloo Sunset and Finchley Central  also  came out the same year, as did a track by the Move called Wave the Flag and Stop the Train. Lyrically though it had more in comparison with another song of 1967, Matthew and Son by Cat Stevens – “watch them run down to platform one and the eight thirty train to Matthew and Son”. The station as a symbol of the grey drabness of the 9 to 5 day   working for the Big Boss Man at a time when   Swinging London  was in full swing . Euston Station here is like one of those pictures of a signpost at a crossroads in a children’s story book. Platforms 1-7 This Way: monochrome life, grey suits, commuter train and the office . Platforms 8-11 That Way: Technicolour, Pegasus the flying horse, the giant albatross and Paradise People.

 It is inevitably a bit of a period piece with its  weighing machines and porters in blue – they sound as remote as a man walking in front of the train waving a red flag. However, porters in blue and detective inspectors sound more exciting than the ubiquitous  Burger King and Boots –or, indeed, strangers approaching to tell you things. Maybe there is a parallel universe somewhere where they still exist and where compilation albums of Hits of the Sixties feature Tammy St John and Barbara Ruskin whilst record collectors eagerly search Ebay for a rare track by the little-known  Cilla Black. And, really,  Euston Station is  not  always the same.

Link to song

Mediterranean Moon

Mediterranean is one of those  words that has the power to create a whole line of images from the few letters of the name. Blue sky, blue/green sea, the sound of crickets in the hot sun, olives and tavernas. I suspect my early picture of  it was shaped by two things in particular -   a book about ancient  Greece and Rome that was about the house as a child, with a photo of Mount Olympus that  I somehow found compelling; and the first Jason and the Argonauts film that I saw at a young age. It wasn’t just the animated monsters, courtesy of Ray Harryhausen, that I found memorable, it was also the cinematic backdrop of blue sea and white  temple pillars and olive groves that stayed in my mind. Years later, I visited the temple at Delphi, at the foot of Mount Parnassus and then got a bus down to the sea. ‘Yes, this is really  the Mediterranean’, I thought.

Yet the word has a host of other connotations, as the songs associated with it suggest. For decades in the tourist industry, ‘Mediterranean’ has often meant  the package holiday of Spain and Greece, with songs such as Y Viva Espana or  We’re Going to Ibiza (in the Mediterranean Sea) by the Vengaboys, a UK Number One in 1999, providing a musical accompaniment. This last was a rewrite of a fairly dire Number One from 1975, Barbados by Typically Tropical, in which a cod Caribbean accent informed the listener they were flying Coconut Airways. A creative lyricist then later changed “Whooah, I’m going to  Barbados” to “Whooah, we’re going to Ibiza” and annoyed people all over again. Actually, both the worlds above  co-exist alongside each other. On a holiday resort like Kos, you don’t have to travel far from the bars and English breakfasts in Kos Town to find the white washed villages and shepherds’ huts on wooded hills in the interior. A track like the evocative and shimmery  In Love With Dusk by  Keep Shelly in Athens is a kind of bridge between the two.

The song here though, Mediterranean Moon by the Rays from 1960, is different from these in that it comes from a musical genre –doo wop – that a) is probably not remembered much at all and b) certainly wouldn’t be associated with the Mediterranean, originating as it did from the street corners and subway entrances of urban America in the 1950’s.  In many ways, it turned out to be a cul-de - sac of a genre, though its influence stayed on in more commercially successful groups such as Dion and the Belmonts and the Four Seasons. However, few of its acts had wider standing. The Rays themselves, like many doo-wop groups, had little commercial success other than a one-off hit.( In a comprehensive history of UK pop, they might merit a minor footnote in that Hermans Hermits had a hit with a revival of their Silhouettes song). There were numerous others whose names have largely been forgotten. There were, for example, the Superbs, a Los Angeles group who married doo-wop and soul in a distinctive sound characterised  by the clear soprano  voice of Eleanor Green soaring over the vocal harmonies of the other group members. Despite  standing out from many  chart  acts of the time (the record below is from 1964) they passed by without the recognition they deserved.

Link to the Superbs track

Doo-wop generally, in fact, had little impact on the UK at the time, a few songs -  like the Marcels'  Blue Moon - aside. In fact, just as in the USA where songs by early, black, rock and roll acts like Fats Domino and Little Richard were taken into the mainstream by white singers like Pat Boone, so in the UK doo-wop tended to go through a home-grown transformer  to make it more commercially palatable.  Take the song The Book of Love, originally a USA hit for doo-wop outfit the Monotones. In the UK, it was  a hit for the Mudlarks, a kind of pre-Springfields pop/skiffle group from Luton,  voted the most popular British vocal act of 1958.In the clips of the 2 versions below, you can see/hear how the song became modified by the Mudlarks (backed by the Ken Jones Jive group) into a tune the vicar at the local youth club could tap his feet to as he handed round the lemonade and ping-pong balls to those crazy kids. It was another 20 years before British doo-wop became credible  through revival groups like Rocky Sharpe and the Replays and  Darts, whose first hit in 1977 was a cover of the Rays' Daddy Cool.

Book of Love version 1

Book of Love version 2

Mediterranean Moon was  a bit of infectious nonsense co-written by Bob Crewe, who went onto bigger success writing for the Four Seasons. The geography is a bit hazy, with a senorita on the Isle of Capri in an Arabian night, but you get the picture.  It is also an example of a musical ear worm, one of those songs hovering between catchy and annoying that burrow into the brain from repetition .The writer Lawrence Durrell said, “The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it is larger than it is”. Here, even a simple  ditty –albeit one  using a repetitive double dactylic metre to get its point across – can conjure up the image of the moon across the Mediterranean, so strong has that dream been.

Link to song

North Wales

One of the things apparent in the last column on Dorset is that it seems easier to write evocative songs about American states than English counties, for the grandiose statement and self-mythology seem to fit more easily with the former. The same also applies when one looks slightly further afield across the border to Wales. Wales and England have often had an uneasy relationship  and  Wales has played an ambiguous role in pop music. There have been plenty of successful musical artists from Wales, of course, from the earliest days of pop: the first UK Number one from a Welsh singer came in 1959 with Shirley Bassey  ( Going back to the last column again and my traumatic experience with Dusty Springfield, I once also spied Tom Jones  -  on Bournemouth seafront. He did oblige with an autograph). However, as a place Wales has not  figured that much in pop songs, (Taking A Trip Up To) Abergavenny  and As I Went By  and a few others aside. There was a time in the 70’s when rural Wales became a haven of sorts for communes  seeking a bit of Eden and this spilled out into some of the music of the time. Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge was named after a hill on the Herefordshire/Welsh border and in 1974 Manfred Mann’s Earth Band gave away a square foot of land near Builth Wells to those who bought their Good Earth album.

For many people from England, however, their direct  experience of Wales came not from a yurt in  Tipi Valley but from a camping or caravan site  on a family holiday, most likely in North Wales. An experience captured by the Wombats in Caravan in Wales: “We're going on holiday, So why have you got an array of board games under your arm? What’s the point in going somewhere else if you're only going to do exactly what you would be doing at home?” I recently read the book The Tent, The Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy, and her description of a disastrous  childhood holiday in Wales as the wind and rain howled through their caravan before it was blown right off the cliff  gave me a touch of déjà vu. Some years ago I had a family holiday in a caravan in Abersoch , the party including our own 9-month old  daughter and my sister’s toddler ,who was  being potty trained.(She was also going through a phobia about clowns. By one of those unlikely but inevitable co-incidences, what did we all see out of the car window as we drove through one of the small towns en route to Abersoch? A clown walking down the street.)  The week there also co-incided with the storms and Force 10 winds that decimated the Fastnet yachting race that year –and made getting to the brick toilet block across the caravan site near impossible.  We made up a little parody of the Fiddler’s Dram hit, Day Trip to Bangor (Didn’t We Have a Lovely Time). The full Wildean wit of our  new  lyrics escape me now but it was called 'Week in Abersoch (Didn’t We Have A Terrible Time)'.

It is fitting then that the song here, North Wales, is itself a parody –of Alicia Keys’ Empire State of Mind Part 2 (I don’t know who  the singer is here, presumably one of the great unsung session singers). Song parody is as old as pop music itself, with Stan Freburg and Peter Sellers having some success with parodies of artists like Elvis Presley and Lonnie Donegan in the 1950’s. The most effective ones, however, came from within the same genre instead of someone from outside pointing a finger. The Barron Knights had a run of commercial success in the 60’s and late 70’s with parodies of current hits, though perhaps  their biggest impact was a different one: the story goes that Bill Wyman started on his road to joining  the Rolling Stones by taking up electric bass after seeing the Barron Knights at Aylesbury Town Hall. The most prolific musical parodist is probably Weird Al Jankovic who has released dozens of parodies from Eat It in 1984 to Perform This Way in 2011. The Heebeegeebies did  something similar in the UK in the early 80’s, including  this pastiche of the Bee Gees in their disco era.

Link to Heebeegeebies song

North Wales is rather different as it doesn’t rely on humorous lyrics to achieve its effect. In fact, the song itself could be taken perfectly seriously, rather in the way that  some of those of John Shuttleworth (aka Graham Fellows) could be if  removed from the character and context. It could almost be used by the Welsh Tourist Board, though they might need to think about the “people are nicer than they are in France” lines. What turns it into a parody are three things.

 Firstly, it capitalises on the fact that it is near impossible to glamourise, still less mythologise, places in Britain –especially provincial ones -  in song without it starting to sound funny. Stockport Council, for example, must have known that Frankie Vaughan singing Stockport - “The people seem to be so friendly, the houses seem to say Come In”- wasn’t really going to rival Tony Bennett and I left My Heart in San Francisco. It faces the same uphill struggle as  the new tourist attraction being touted in Bournemouth a few years ago: a tour of the Wessex Water sewage works. Secondly, the fact that it is supposedly sung by Alicia Keys adds a surreal edge to the lyrics, particularly the image of her  having scampi for tea en route to Anglesey .I was reminded of the report of Whitney Houston having to get the car ferry from Holyhead to Dublin for a concert when volcanic ash shut down air space in 2010.

Thirdly ,however, the combination of the above have another reverse effect, in that it also deflates the mythologizing of the original song, where New York as fantasy and for real are merged into one. “One hand in the air for the big city, street lights, big dreams, all looking pretty. No place in the world that can compare, put your lighters in the air, everybody say yeah”   on  one hand.  “Wave your hands in the air and say Bore Da” on the other. I suspect it is not just the difference between North Wales and New York but the different cultural contexts from which the songs come that creates this contrast. British songs about  places, when not humorous, tend to the melancholic rather than the heroic, the ordinary rather than the myth. You might not feel you are where dreams are made of in Abersoch or Llandudno Junction  but there really are picture postcard scenes – and  you can have scampi for tea if you fancy it.

Link to song

White Chalk

The muddled view of the English countryside has been discussed before, for example in the  For What Is Chatteris column. Sometimes seen as  mystical,  sometimes downright boring, sometimes the backdrop for a picnic or Sunday drive,  more often an arcadia  to escape to  from the dark satanic mills of urban life. Sometimes, though, it has been pointed out that it can be pretty grim and miserable- The Hard Times of Old England -  though I don’t think there is anything  about English rural life that quite matches the Violent Femmes’ Country Death Song in making  a cloud of gloom  descend  on the listener.  (The next track on the album this comes from starts ‘I hear the rain, I hear the rain, I hear the rain, got to feel the pain’)

Link to Country Death Song

I grew up in Dorset, one of the most rural of English counties, and my childhood was  spent in  Poole, Portland, Weymouth and around, a mixture of the English seaside and the hills and valleys of the inland countryside. An odd combination in a way – a Donald McGill postcard versus a chocolate box image. Plebeian  fish and chips, candy floss and donkey rides on one hand and the more genteel –superficially at least -  thatched cottages, village churches and County shows on the other. Some of the landscape remains pretty timeless.  Far From the Madding Crowd and The French Lieutenant's Woman were both filmed there and the famous Hovis advert from 1973 was not, as the ad implied, filmed somewhere  in a northern town like Hebden Bridge but the Dorset village of Shaftesbury.

Link to Hovis advert

Growing up there, I made little association between pop music and the places I lived then. Those I did have, in fact, could be  very convoluted. At a young and impressionable  age I once spied Dusty Springfield on Weymouth esplanade and asked for her autograph. She, however, declined the request and I became converted to the opinion that actually I liked Lulu better. Like everyone, a snatch of a song can bring back  childhood memories like Proust’s madeleine but that is because I heard the tune in a particular place at a particular time, not because the song was about that place. Songs were meant to be about faraway places with strange sounding names – Capri or Amsterdam, Honolulu or Siam, not Sturminster Newton or Blandford Forum. That would be both unthinkable and risible, as there is something intrinsically not rock and roll about Dorset .In fact, few English counties are. Carolina In My Mind sounds fine, Suffolk In My Mind doesn’t. Sweet Home Alabama –yes, OK. Sweet Home Buckinghamshire –not really. Songs about places like that  were either  the provenance of earnest folk singers in Aran sweaters and a finger in their ear or comedy acts. In fact, English rural life has provided a rich source of musical humour over the years, from Benny Hill’s Gather In the Mushrooms to The Wurzels' Combine Harvester  (a UK Number One in 1976) to The Darkness and English Country Garden. Other than that, there were The Yetties (a kind of Dorset Wurzels)  and Dorset is Beautiful. Oh yes, and Robert Fripp   and Al Stewart both grew up in the market town of Wimborne Minster, though its influence isn’t obvious in the music of either. (The town is best known for a model village, so that you can visit  Wimborne and walk round a set-up of Wimborne in miniature. I am surprised King Crimson didn’t do something to expand on  this theme)

Behind the rolling hills and the bustle of the seaside there was also an insularity. To some on Portland – an ‘almost island’ connected to the mainland by Chesil Beach – Weymouth, about 4 miles away with its fancy slot machine arcades and cinema, was a mixture of Sodom and Gomorrah, Gay Paree and Las Vegas. There were even stories of people who had gone from Weymouth on the steamer to Guernsey and had French food. Why would they do that when they could go and sit on the shingle at Dead Man's Bay with a bag of  Portland dough cakes?  In fact, those who lived on Tophill on Portland even  viewed those from Underhill with suspicion and vice versa.(The Donny and Marie Osmond hit, Morning Side of the Mountain,  comes to mind  here – “There was a girl, there was a boy, if they had met they might have found a world of joy. But he lived on the morning side of the mountain and she on the twilight side of the hill”.  Or if  he lived in Underhill and she lived in Tophill).It was uniformly white. The only black faces to be seen were on the Black and White Minstrel Show on Saturday night TV.

Yet there was also underneath it all at times something else,  a glimpse of  the past, of  the  lost wild gods of England and the distant echoes of  an old and forgotten  way of life. You could sense it on Chalbury Hill, looking out from the ancient  burial mounds across the  hills and hedges  towards the Roman road coming out from  Dorchester,  with the giant hill figure at Cerne Abbas, on the chalk cliffs above the fossils at Lyme  or in the small and eerie ruined churches standing on pagan sites. I once came across such a deserted church while walking as a child along the cliffs above Portland: peeking in the heavy wooden door to feel a sudden chill was the only time I have felt somewhere could really be haunted. Those feelings are captured in the song here, White Chalk from 2007 by P J (Polly) Harvey, originally from Bridport in Dorset. There is something haunting and unsettling about it, as there is about much of her music. On the cover of the album of the same name she is seated in white looking like a figure from a Victorian séance and the voice sounds as if from another dimension.

It is relatively rare that a song captures exactly one’s own feeling about a place, in such a perfect  match that the song and place become the same. For me, Waterloo Sunset does. Scott Walker’s Copenhagen does with a couple of lines-‘Copenhagen , you’re the end, gone and made me child again’  -  and an enchanting fade-out. And so does White Chalk, floating like a dream from a childhood memory : “White chalk sticking to my shoes. White chalk playing as a child with you. White chalk south against time. White chalk cutting down the sea at Lyme .I walk the valleys by the Cerne, on a path cut fifteen hundred years ago”. A memorable song about an English rural county after all and not a single joke about Farmer Giles’ giant marrow or a morris dancer in sight.

Link to song version 1

Link to song live version

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100 Miles To Liverpool

In the early 1980’s the Thatcher Government apparently discussed a novel idea for dealing with a city – Liverpool -  they regarded as a problem: the bright idea tossed about was shutting the whole  place down and moving its population elsewhere. It seemed a long way from the heady days of  less than 20 years before when the ‘Mersey Sound’ had London music  agents flocking to Liverpool to sign anything that moved and  even folks in deepest Dorset could go about saying “It’s fab gear, wack” without ridicule. As late as 1972 the lasting remains of this image could give Little Jimmy Osmond a UK Number One with Long-haired Lover from Liverpool without any sense of irony. (Unlike Stereo Total who dug up  Bonnie Jo Mason aka Cher’s  1964 Ringo, I Love You (Yeah Yeah Yeah)  in 1999, in what  one must assume is a kind of Gallic  joke)

In pop music history , of course, Liverpool has played an iconic role, with artists from there having had 56 number one hits. The Beatles weren’t the first successful pop act from the city -  Billy Fury, Frankie Vaughan and Michael Holliday had all had UK chart success before them -  but they did spearhead a new era in music, making Liverpool perhaps the equivalent of Memphis .Most of those following in the first wave of the British Beat boom, however, had little lasting musical  impact and soon either returned to a day job or found shelter in the supper-club and nostalgia circuit. Even in 2012 you can catch the Merseybeats at Skegness or Ilfracombe with half their original line-up from 1961  intact. The exception here  were the Searchers  whose 12-string guitar jingle-jangle sound on songs like Needles and Pins  and When You Walk In The Room  influenced ,in a neat but ironic little circle, the Byrds who influenced back the Beatles and thence a long string of acts from REM to Teenage Fan Club to the Smiths. (In an exceedingly trivial but entertaining diversion below,  clips show 4 different versions of  Love Potion Number 9 by the Searchers from 1964 to 2009, motivating the listener to wonder what it must be like to sing a particular  song every week for 45 years or so. The eagle-eyed viewer will spot that whilst the guitarist and bassist remain constant  there are 4 different drummers - in pedantic order, Chris Curtis, John Blunt, Billy Adamson and  Eddie Rothe. I sometimes wonder if I should get out more).

Link to Love Potion Number 9 (1)

Link to Love Potion Number 9 (2)

Link to Love Potion Number 9 (3)

Link to Love Potion Number 9 (4)

Few of these acts –or those that followed in the 80’s and 90’s - featured Liverpool as a place  much in their music. The first was probably Gerry and the Pacemakers with Ferry Cross The Mersey, followed by the Beatles with Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields, but most acts looked further afield for inspiration. As mentioned in the column on Manchester, many of the songs about Liverpool too  tended to  a  sentimental, even maudlin, view of the place not generally found  much with big English cities, where a harder edge is more common. Try transposing Ferry Cross the Mersey to the Woolwich Ferry and it wouldn’t work. Then there’s  the Leaving of Liverpool (the Dubliners, the Pogues), Heart  As Big As Liverpool (the Mighty Wah!), Liverpool Lullaby (Cilla Black, Judy Collins). The cynical might say people only get sentimental after they have left the place.

Some, however, stood outside the usual framework. Suzanne Vega’s  In Liverpool brought an outsider’s –and fresh – view:” In Liverpool, on Sunday, No traffic  on the avenue. The light is pale and thin…No sound down in this part of town, except for the boy in the belfry”. It was apparently inspired by finding the city not as glamorous as she thought it would be. There were also  a few that avoided the dangers of over-romanticising and  reminded the listener of Liverpool’s history as a major slaving  port, portrayed at the International Slavery Museum on the Albert Docks where nearby you can also see the Beatles Story or go on a Yellow Duckmarine ride. Again as previously mentioned in the Manchester column,  Liverpool’s The Real Thing brought out their 4 from 8 album with its trilogy of ghetto songs, including Children of the Ghetto, in 1977--- to lack of commercial success  after  their pop hits and , as Eddy Amoo remarked in a recent interview, “Children of the Ghetto finished us”  It was a step too far from the  image of the city that people wanted to see. Another Liverpool group, Amsterdam, however, had more success with  Does This Train Stop On Merseyside in 2005, “See slave ships sailing into port, the blood of Africa's on every wall. Now there's a layline runs down Mathew Street, It's giving energy to all it meets”.

Link to Does This Train Stop On Merseyside

The song here, 100 Miles From Liverpool, from 1995 but  originally recorded as a group track in 1986,  comes from perhaps an unusual direction -  from Alan Hull of  Lindisfarne, a group  closely associated with Newcastle ,on the opposite coast of England ,with songs like Fog On The Tyne and Run For Home. It chugs along as a road song like Driving Away From Home, with Liverpool the equivalent of Phoenix or Tulsa. It probably says more about Alan Hull than Liverpool  and there is a poignancy that comes not just from the regrets of some of the  lyrics but the awareness that the recording was done shortly before his death. Liverpool appears almost as a mirage, perhaps as Suzanne Vega had seen it: “But in my dreams I see Liverpool in lights, dancing in the streets 'til the early morning light. The tug boat on the Mersey joining in the Jamboree” .

You  realise things aren’t always as they seem. The Dakotas, who backed Liverpool singer Billy J Kramer on his hits as part of the ‘Liverpool Sound’ actually came from Liverpool’s great rival, Manchester. The Cavern Club that  the tourist sees today isn’t the original one but a rebuilt construction, like  Warsaw Old Town. Many of   the  grand and imposing buildings in the city centre weren’t philanthropic projects but built with the wealth of the slave trade and Caribbean plantation owners. As with most places, I suppose, we end up seeing what we want to see.

Link to song

Trafalgar Square To Anywhere

One of the odd things about some places is that whilst they stay the same themselves, one’s perception of them changes from time to time –either because they appear and re-appear at different stages of the life cycle or because you experience them at different times for different reasons. An example of the first was mentioned in the column For What Is Chatteris, with the local park. “I sometimes thought about the families in the small park down the road from his house. The children went there to play on the swings and roundabout and eat ice - creams; a few years later they were back with their school or college friends, hanging about the park and War Memorial drinking cider and smoking; a few years after that they were back with their own children playing on the swings”. In the meantime the park itself hardly changed at all. There are songs about particular parks but one of the best park songs is a generic one,  Billy Stewart’s Sitting in the Park (covered in the UK by Georgie Fame) and it is rare that I can sit on a park bench anywhere without the tune going round my head.

Link to Sitting in the Park

An example of the second - where associations can come from a variety of things -is Trafalgar Square in London. Traditionally it has been where New Year has been celebrated and one of my stored memories of the place is coming through it after watching the Millennium firework display along the Thames. Traditionally too, it has been linked to the pigeons that flocked there to feed from the tourists before the move to eradicate them. I have a black and white photo of my sister aged about 8 standing in the square with a bag of bird seed bought from one of the vendors who used to be there and pigeons swarming all around. Genesis did a song about the birds in 1977, Pigeons: “Who congregate around Trafalgar Square taking pot shots at the tourists? Oh you've got to watch out, when you wander round the square in the morning, cos they're everywhere, they're everywhere”

In film and music it has often been used in the same way as Big Ben or Tower Bridge, as a iconic image that simultaneously denotes traditional and Swinging London - red buses and black  taxis circling the column and fountain, the epitome of where it’s at. I was once sitting in the square eating a pork pie and hard boiled egg and Paul McCartney drove  past in an open top sports car – it seemed very fitting to the setting. It was used in this sense in Bill Wyman’s Si Si Je Suis Un Rock Star, possibly the most entertaining song by one of the Stones outside of the group. The clip below shows Trafalgar Square in 1981. It also has the only instance I have seen of Bill Wyman dancing –sort of.

Link to Si Si Je Suis Un Rock Star

It is not just a tourist spot, however and since the Nineteenth Century it has been a focus for political demonstrations, where marches started or finished en route to Whitehall or Hyde Park  to hear speeches by Bertrand Russell or Tariq Ali or Tony Benn or George Galloway on nuclear disarmament or Vietnam or government cuts or Iraq. That aspect has cropped up in songs from time to time.  The Stones’ Street Fighting Man was supposedly inspired by a 1968 anti -Vietnam War demo that started in Trafalgar Square before moving to Grosvenor Square and the US Embassy. Chumbawamba were cynical about the place in Marching Round in Circles:” They let us make a noise ,they let us march around in a specially built police-cell they call Trafalgar Square”. More recently David Rovics claimed poetic licence with his Trafalgar Square:” Even the mayor came out, called him a criminal of war. Said "World domination ain't worth fighting for". They said "We don't like Dubya or his poodle, Tony Blair", on the day the statue of George Bush was toppled in Trafalgar Square”.

But beyond all these images it is a place on which people construct their own personal associations. Like Chris Difford in his own Trafalgar Square: “Every time that we scream and shout I’m the clown who’s wrong but when this is all over I’ll meet you in Trafalgar Square”. Or like the song here from 2007, Trafalgar Square to Anywhere, by Dave House,  a singer with echoes of Frank Hamilton of Waterloo Guildford. (He is from Kingston on Thames, itself not far from Guildford). Trafalgar Square here is an image familiar to many, the starting point for a possibly fraught journey home on a late night bus or tube. A little personal story set to acoustic guitar and cellos.

I suppose you might go to Trafalgar Square to look at Nelson’s Column. Oddly enough, though, that has been a mere backdrop to my visits there, feeding pigeons on a holiday trip up to London, on marches over the years, seeing a new millennium in or just sitting in the mid-day sun. Same place, just seen from a different angle each time.

Link to song