Welcome to the Isle of Wight

Since the time of the ancient Greeks and the travels of Odysseus, the whole notion of ‘islands’ has drawn people in a romantic fascination. The history of literature is full of novels that reflect this allure: Treasure Island, Coral Island, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson. In real life, the rich, the artistic and the drop-out have sought inspiration or escape on an island. Lawrence Durrell on Corfu, D H Lawrence on Sardinia. Tove Jansson, author of the 'Moomin' books, lived much of her life on a small island, Klovharu, in the Gulf of Finland. John Lennon handed over an Irish island, Dorrinish, to Sid Rawles and his Digger band to start a commune there. Agnetha Faltskog disappeared off for years to the Swedish island of Ekero when Abba broke up.

Songs about islands have generally followed this romanticism. Harry Belafonte sang of an Island in the Sun:”all my days I will sing in praise of your forest waters and shining sand”. Weezer did a song with the same title: “On an island in the sun. We’ll be playing and having fun” . The Beach Boys scored a late career hit with Kokomo, which rattled off a whole load of exotic islands. Blondie went for Island of Lost Souls. The Springfields settled for an Island of Dreams.

The British have tended to look to the Mediterranean or Caribbean islands for their holiday fantasies but it does have plenty of its own, including Jura, where Orwell wrote 1984. The largest off England, however, is the Isle of Wight and its popular image is probably as far away from the exotic fantasies of the above as you can get –definitely more towards the comfy end of the spectrum. There was a short-lived time when the IOW Festivals were the epitome of cool happening. In 1969, Bob Dylan chose to play there over Woodstock. In 1970 a line-up including Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Who and Miles Davis attracted an estimated 600,000, more than Woodstock. (Though Joni Mitchell did actually attend this one, it didn’t inspire any songs starting ’By the time I got to Afton Down’...). In 1971 the Isle of Wight Act was passed, preventing unauthorised gatherings of more than 5000 and that was that - the festival baton passed to Glastonbury.

Though annual festivals started again a few years ago, the Isle of Wight is largely known in the popular imagination for two things. The first is as one of the ‘this sounds unbelievable but maybe it is true’ statements that regularly turn up – in this case ,’if all the world’s population stood shoulder to shoulder they could fit on the Isle of Wight’. Statisticians disagree on this one, with the balance towards ‘probably not. ’The second is as the place to go for a trip that goes back to the England of the 1950’s, for a traditional bucket and spade week or two on the beach or the sort of holiday that Enid Blyton’s Famous Five might have had: bicycles, hikes along the cliffs past lighthouses, isolated coves, ice-cream and lashings of ginger beer. There can be simple pleasures – getting glass phials of coloured sand at Alum Bay; seeing an animated Allosaurus singing the Eton Boating Song in the Blackgang Chine amusement park; getting on a bus at Sandown, waiting till a woman gets on and exclaiming, “She’s got a ticket to Ryde”. And there are also little surprises. One might come across island resident Jet Harris, the original bad boy bass player and founder member of the Shadows, who lost their charismatic edge when he left.

Listeners often expect songs to reflect the image of the place they are about, so mandolins and strings for Venice, accordions for Paris, waltz-time for Vienna. New York fits a song like the Lovin Spoonful’s Summer in the City, with its snare drum/pneumatic drill intro and traffic sounds. With this in mind, what sort of song would fit the Isle of Wight? Brass band music or a folk song, or something that would suit the feeling of going back in time a few decades: a Craig Douglas song perhaps? Reggae, even if reggae-lite, probably wouldn’t come to mind. Reggae has, of course, been part of the British music scene since the early 60’s, with Millie Small’s bluebeat My Boy Lollipop probably being the first UK hit in 1964. Over the years it has had its highs and lows. There was Susan Cadogan, a librarian from Kingston (Jamaica) University, taking Millie Jackson’s Hurts So Good into the UK charts in 1975. There was also Paul Nicholas taking Reggae Like It Used To Be into the UK Charts in 1976. See his song and marvel at some dancing that is surely not like anything used to be. ( Trivia note. The 2 women dancers in the clip had appeared as scary blonde twins in the 1960 film Village of the Damned) .

Link to Susan Cadogan song

Link to Paul Nicholas song

Reggae has done plenty of songs about places - like Steel Pulse’s Handsworth Revolution or Sandra Cross’s Country Living - but rarely about family seaside resorts. However, the 2009 offering by Derek Sandy, Welcome to the Isle of Wight, is just that, with a song that seems destined for use by the Tourist Board with its praise for the place. In some ways it is from the same genre as Taking a Trip Up to Abergavenny in that the place described in song exists more in the imagination or parallel universe than reality. Just as a visitor to Abergavenny might be disappointed by the lack of sunshine forever and paradise people so a visitor to the Isle of Wight should not really expect a tropical paradise after a journey over the sea, on the ferry across the Solent from Southampton or Portsmouth. They may well find it fits the laidback mood of the tune: whether it is the best place they have  ever seen is, of course, up to them.

Link to song

Week - end a Rome

Some places have stock sayings or proverbs associated with then that immediately spring to mind. ‘If you are tired of London, you are tired of life’, or ‘See Naples and die’. Rome has perhaps more than most. It wasn’t built in a day; all roads lead to it; when in Rome... In fact, all of these have turned up in song titles- by Morcheeba, the Stranglers and Phil Ochs respectively.

It is also one of those places that writers have waxed lyrical about over the centuries. ‘A poem pressed into service as a city’; or ‘The city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.’ Like Athens, tourists flock to see its antiquities, the Coliseum, the Catacombs and Pantheon. But, like Paris, it has also had an added dimension of chic cool, with its bars and boutiques, coffee bars, the scooters and leather jackets. Think of some of the iconic cinematic images of Rome: the Trevi Fountain scene with Anita Ekburg in La Dolce Vita or Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck whizzing round the streets on a Vespa in Roman Holiday.

Songs about Rome have tended to the romantic. Three Coins in the Fountain set the tone back in 1954, with the song and film actually adding to one of the city’s legends . Since then the story has been that throwing 3 coins in the Trevi fountain is lucky, overlooking the fact that 3 coins were thrown in the film/song because there were 3 characters. By such trivialities are some myths made. (A similar one might be the famous Zorba’s dance by Alan Bates and Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek, copied by sozzled diners in countless Greek restaurants ever since. According to Quinn it wasn’t a traditional Cretan dance: he made up the shuffling dance steps at the time because he had injured his foot.). A string of other songs took forward the notion of a city of romance. Petula Clark sang of Romance in Rome; Perry Como of Arrivaderci Rome; Elvis Presley promised that he would ’make a wish in every fountain’ in Heart of Rome (unlikely given his lack of travel outside the USA). It took Bob Dylan and When I Paint My Masterpiece to put Rome in a different light.

The song here, Week-end a Rome, goes more for the chic bohemian image. The song has a complicated history. It first appeared in 1984 on the electro pop album La Notte, La Notte by French singer Etienne Daho. In 1995, it turned up - remixed and with totally new English lyrics - as the St Etienne hit, He’s on the Phone. In 2010 Vanessa Paradis went back to the original and slowed it down with a gentle bossa-nova rhythm , with Daho popping up to provide the spoken Italian segments. Daho is only known in the UK, if at all, for his work with St Etienne in the 90’s. Vanessa Paradis, however, first appeared in the UK charts in 1988 at the age of 15 with Joe Le Taxi, becoming one of a small number of artists to have scored a hit there with a foreign language song – joining the Birkin/Gainsbourg collaboration, of course ,as well as the Singing Nun ( Dominique), Kyu Sakomoto ( Sukiyaki,) Plastique Bertrand ( Ca Plane pour Moi), Yolanda Be Cool (We Speak No Americano), and Los Lobos ( La Bamba) amongst others.

With lyrics in French and Italian, some of it slang, it is the general feel of the song that hits an English listener first, making Rome sound the epitome of stylish cool. The general gist of the lyrics seem clear. It is raining in Paris and the song’s narrator suggests that a weekend for two in Rome-perhaps Florence and Milan too - would give a taste of the good life : imagine driving with the wind in your hair and the radio playing. ‘Because we are young, Italian weekend’. In the video accompanying the Daho version, he is seen sitting in a cafe under a poster for the Antonioni film, La Notte (La Nuit), suggesting the ‘La notte, la notte’ refrain has a cultural reference as well.

So far so good, There are, however, some tricky bits. Take these lines:

"Afin de coincer la bulle dans ta bulle, D'poser mon coeur bancal dans ton bocal, ton aquarium."

A literal translation suggests the intriguing statement:

"To jam the bubble in your bubble ,to put my wobbly heart in your jar, your aquarium"

It may well be that it reads differently in French. Or they could be lines left over from a Serge Gainsbourg song.

My own experience of Rome was a day rather than a weekend, during a family holiday in Terracina an hour or two to the south. The Italian couple who managed the apartment in Terracina spoke no English so conversation was comfortingly predictable, with variations on a fixed set of questions. Stanco? (tired). Fame? (hungry). Caldo? (hot). Freddo? (cold). Early one morning the husband dropped us at the local station to get the train to Rome, where we spent a hectic tourist day seeing the Coliseum, Trevi Fountain, and Vatican and having gelato and coffee. When we returned late in the evening he was waiting for us at Terracina station and asked us about the day in Rome. Stanco? Fame? Freddo? What he meant was ‘Rome, Pour la douceur de vivre, et pour le fun’

Link to Etienne Daho song

Link to Vanessa Paradis song

Waterloo Station

Mention has been made before of the nostalgic lure of the train and the station in British psyche, a way of time travel to the past. In the very first column of this blog, Waterloo Sunset showed the interplay of past and present and the repository of memories lodged at Waterloo Station that the song tapped into. Ray Davies revisited the same place and the themes of nostalgia, regret and a lost England in Return to Waterloo in the mid-1980’s. In 2006, both station and song cropped up again in a record by another artist also associated with the heyday of Swinging London, Jane Birkin.

Despite a dozen or more albums and the 50+ films over the years since appearing in The Knack and Blow Up in 1966, Jane Birkin will probably always be first associated with her 1969 Number One record with Serge Gainsbourg, Je t’aime...moi non plus. Gainsbourg had previously recorded the song with Brigitte Bardot (though it wasn’t released till years after) and had also apparently asked Marianne Faithfull – who later said, ‘Hah! He asked everyone’. It is the Birkin collaboration, however, that became the definitive one and established a number of ‘firsts’ in the UK.

1)The first banned record to get to Number One. It was also banned in many other European countries, though radio play in France was only restricted until 11pm. Top of the Pops got round the problem of the ban by getting a group of session musicians to record an instrumental version called Love at First Sight, which sort of missed the point but promptly became a hit in its own right. At least mums and dads could safely tap their feet as Herbie Flowers, Clem Cattini and co doodled away.

2) The first foreign language song to get to Number One. The title itself , Je t’aime... moi non plus, was a sort of Gallic existentialist joke –Woman: ‘I love you’. Man: ‘Me neither’ – that was totally lost on the British. Instead, schoolboys searched their French dictionaries to find what on earth Gainsbourg was muttering about with ‘ l'amour physique est sans issue’ and could it perhaps work as a chat-up line on the next school trip to Calais.

(3) More debatable this –it is often solemnly cited as the ‘rudest pop record ever ’. When, rather predictably, a comic and very British version involving golf was done in 1971 by Frankie Howerd and June Whitfield, it was also banned by the BBC, presumably on the strength of the title alone.

However, despite Je t’aime, her relationship with Gainsbourg and the decades living in France, on Waterloo Station Jane Birkin sounds so awfully British that it could be Mary Poppins singing – which leads to the uncomfortable thought of Mary Poppins doing Je t’aime...moi non plus with Serge Gainsbourg. In some ways Waterloo Station, from her 2006 album Fiction, almost sounds incomplete. The song was written for Birkin by Rufus Wainwright and she seems to have difficulty fitting some lyrics to the tune, stretching the word ‘Abba’ to such an extent it is scarcely recognisable. There is also a point towards the end where it sounds as if the song has run out of steam, before suddenly picking up again.

However, there is also something haunting and poignant about it, something to do with Jane Birkin’s slightly weary tone over the delicate backing and shimmering guitar work of Johnny Marr, with the 'la la la la la' refrain from Waterloo Sunset that drifts in and out like a puff of smoke from a steam engine and with the theme of re-visiting the past. This emerged in several of the songs on Fiction. In Home, a song again written for her - this one by Neil Hannon of Divine Comedy – she wistfully recalls ’skipping ropes and pipe smoke, church bells..., marmalade on cold toast, endless summer holidays’ and , in a oddly effective video of meeting herself as a child, wonders where home is; London? Paris? Neither?

Link to 'Home' song

In this song, Waterloo Station takes on the guise of a portal to the past, a version of Over the Rainbow. Imagine this. Jane Birkin returns to London from years living in Paris. As the Eurostar pulls into Waterloo there is a blur of memories. Though it is 2006 it is also a sun drenched afternoon in the summer of 1967. The new Kinks release , Waterloo Sunset, plays from a transistor radio and Blow-Up is still showing at the cinema outside the concourse. It is also the summer of 1951 and a porter helps a young Jane Birkin climb into a carriage with her parents en route to the Isle of Wight for their summer holidays. No Waterloo Sunset then but Ray Davies passes through the station with his father to see the Festival of Britain on the South Bank. Fast forward to 2010. On the now disused Eurostar terminal, (the link having shifted to St Pancras in 2007), a staging of The Railway Children, set in an Edwardian golden summer a hundred years before, is taking place. Forward again to 2011. Ray Davies is Director of the Meltdown Festival, a few minutes away from Waterloo Station and celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain.

If you miss one memory there, another will be along in a minute.

Link to song

Hey Manhattan

On my first trip to New York I spent an idle moment trying to compose an email consisting of names of songs about the place. It started off something like, ‘I am an Englishman in New York, having arrived in Manhattan by a Big Yellow Taxi to stay in the apartment of a Native New Yorker. Looking over the Manhattan Skyline, however, I realise I am not The Only Living Boy in New York...’. It didn’t progress much further. However, it did make me think about the significance of names here. The subject of the last column – Harlem - is, of course, part of Manhattan but the names themselves carry a very different set of associations : rather as, in London, Soho signifies something different from the larger area of Westminster.

Perhaps more than any other part of New York, just the name ‘Manhattan’ carries before it a history of images from songs, films and TV, images that were cinematically summarised in the opening credits of Woody Allen’s Manhattan as Rhapsody in Blue plays. These have become so pervasive that it has become hard to separate reality and myth, perhaps not surprising given the importance of the advertising industry there However, the generic picture that has persisted seems to hark back to a specific ‘golden age’, roughly from post - WW2 to the mid-sixties. It is the Manhattan of Madison Avenue and Mad Men; of Holly Golightly and Breakfast at Tiffany’s; of Frank Sinatra’s Wee Small Hours of the Morning that has lingered in the popular imagination, rather than, say, the Manhattan of Wall Street and the 1980’s.

It is the triumph of a mythical era in the UK as much as the USA itself: hence the popularity of Mad Men or the peculiar success of the various Rat Pack Experiences (Manhattan plus Las Vegas), coming to a theatre, club, pub or corporate event near you soon so the ‘ unforgettable halcyon days of hip, cool and style’ can re-appear at Hainault Golf Club. In this phenomenon of buying into another country’s myths I am reminded of a radio interview I heard a few years ago with Dennis Locorierre (ex-Dr Hook singer ), who had been asked to join a reformed Lovin’ Spoonful as vocalist. His reply was “I don’t want to sing my old hits. Why would I want to sing someone else’s old hits?”.The same comment could apply to mythologies.

There have, of course, been plenty of songs inspired by Manhattan, from the Hart-Rodgers classic - “We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy “ – onwards, a tune turned into an evocation of a smoky New York jazz club by Sonny Rollins’ saxophone interpretation. In Manhattan Skyline, Julia Fordham compared the iconic skyline to a doomed and broken relationship between a New Yorker and Londoner (containing the winceable line, ‘You are my Ireland, I am your ‘Nam’). Kate Voegele extended this metaphor by describing the lover in Manhattan from the Sky as ‘ You are my Manhattan from the sky, you look so neat and tidy when I am way up high’. In a further display of lyricism the singer in Death Cab for Cutie fantasised about a marching band of Manhattan coming out of his mouth ‘to make your name sing,and bend through alleys and bounce off all the buildings.” (Marching Bands of Manhattan)

The song here, Hey Manhattan by Prefab Sprout, neatly sums up the pervasive image of Manhattan in one line - ‘hey Manhattan, doobie doo’. For a while in the late 1980’s it appeared as though Prefab Sprout could be huge. The King of Rock ‘n Roll was a big hit in 1988, Stevie Wonder and Pete Townsend guested on the album, From Langley Park to Memphis, from which this song came and Prefab Sprout mainman Paddy McAloon was spoken of as a lyricist in the same league as Sondheim and Cole Porter. It didn’t really work out that way, however, and the Prefab Sprout distinctive sound, with the half-whispered vocals, was not to everyone’s taste: ‘too-clever by half’ was a comment sometimes heard.

Hey Manhattan is perhaps not one of their best songs but shows McAloon’s typically neat ways with words. Written as a kind of faux show-tune, it manages to look behind the myths of Manhattan –‘just to think the poor could live here too’ - whilst recognising their allure: ‘These myths we can’t undo, they lie in wait for you, We live them till they're true’. You see in a place what you want to see: for the narrator, this includes Sinatra, Fifth Avenue and the Carlyle Hotel, where Kennedy owned his own apartment. My own initial experience of Manhattan was more prosaic but probably more enjoyable. My daughter took me to the Morning Star diner (I went in vaguely expecting, from the name, a communist menu) between 50th and 51st Street : waffles, eggs over easy and not a doobie-doo to be heard.

Link to song

Bells of Harlem

A residential and business section of upper Manhattan, New York City, bounded roughly by 110th St., the East River and Harlem River, 168th St., Amsterdam Ave., and Morningside Park. That doesn’t sound a likely basis for a song. Call it Harlem however, and mental images change. From a faraway viewpoint, impressions of Harlem come from a pot-pourri of images: the Harlem Globetrotters, the Harlem Boys' Choir, the Cotton Club, Bill Clinton’s office, the churches – and the Apollo Theatre, a fabled Shangri-La for lovers of soul music, where Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Sarah Vaughan once played. There was also the book, Manchild in the Promised Land, the autobiography of Claude Brown, which left a lasting impression on readers from its memorable and vivid picture of growing up in Harlem in the 1950’s. The title of the book came from the ‘promised land’ image that New York and Harlem once held for black Southern share-croppers, before they actually arrived there.

As with most districts of New York, Harlem has had its share of songs about it over the years, adding to the mythology surrounding the place: a mythology that U2’s Angel of Harlem picked up on with its references to Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Some, like many songs about Liverpool, have focused on the vibrancy amidst the poverty. The Drifters’ Midsummer Night in Harlem, a 1974 release, sung of ‘a kind of smell in the air like the whole world’s cooking, so many girls and they’re so good looking, big sugar daddies sitting in their caddies’. This particular line-up was Charlie Thomas’ Drifters: the Drifters’ market in the UK at that time was largely sewn up by the line-up featuring Johnny Moore and the record did not sell that well there.( The Drifters had a notoriously large number of versions circulating at various times. On a walk along Hadrian’s Wall, I saw a country pub miles from anywhere with a poster advertising the forthcoming, and frankly rather surprising, appearance in the saloon bar of The Drifters, ‘direct from the USA’,).

A few years previously to the Drifters song, Bill Withers had released his own Harlem with a similar sentiment, recalling the drink and parties on Saturday night and Sunday best the following morning:’ Saturday night in Harlem, hey everything’s alright, you can really swing and shake your pretty thing, the parties are out of sight... Sunday morning here in Harlem, now everybody’s all dressed up”. One of the best known songs here, Spanish Harlem, recorded by Ben E King, Aretha Franklin and Laura Nyro amongst others, was positively lyrical about the place.

Other songs have given voice to a different Harlem. Rappers Immortal Technique and Jim Jones, in their Harlem Streets, Harlem Renaissance and Harlem gave a kind of updated version of Manchild in the Promised Land.:“ The subway stays packed like a multi-cultural slave ship, It's rush hour, 2:30 to 8, non stoppin'.........It's like Cambodia the killing fields uptown, We live in distress and hang the flag upside down”. The gentrification of Harlem - rezoning - means little but more exploitation..

However, the song here, Bells of Harlem by the Dave Rawlings Machine, takes a totally different approach and echoes the title of Claude Brown’s book. Here, Harlem is less a geographical district of New York and more a vision, both spiritual and political - a promised land. Though it came out in 2009, as a Rawlings/Gillian Welch composition on the A Friend of a Friend album, it sounds like something Bob Dylan might have done round the time of Chimes of Freedom in the Civil Rights era. with a nod to Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come. In fact, musically and lyrically it is drenched in the past. Part of the final verse – “The Brazos rose, ain’t no more cane, we ground it down to sorghum” – is a deliberate lift from the tune Ain’t No More Cane, a work song of chain-gang prisoners cutting sugar cane along the River Brazos in Texas; recorded by Leadbelly and later by Lonnie Donegan and then Dylan and the Band. In this respect Bells of Harlem could be seen as a kind of modern spiritual reverie of hope and redemption.

It could also perhaps be heard as a comment on the Obama election. On a trip to visit my daughter in New York we went to Harlem - in part to see the Apollo - a few days before the November 2008 Presidential election. Amidst the street stalls selling 'Yes We Can' badges and t-shirts and shops with cakes with Obama’s face on them, there was also a sense of anticipation and excitement about what the election results might bring. On the night of November 4, at least, the church bells rang on 125th Street and beyond..

Link to song

Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)

In Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, the central character has been born into a life of leisure courtesy of the royalties from his father’s success in writing a perennial Christmas song, Santa’s Super Sleigh. This is probably rooted in some sort of reality as from about October onwards, many shops feel the need to start playing their musical loops of seasonal Christmas cheer, usually with the unimaginative mix of Slade, Wizzard, Wham, Jona Lewie et al. Within these, however, there is a sub-genre of songs focusing on snow, which tend to be more effective in raising associations with places than the generic all-purpose Christmas ditty.

By and large, songs featuring snow fall into one of two categories. The most common are those inextricably linked up with Christmas and, given the reality of snow, have an odd feel-good factor. In these songs, snow is a paradoxical backdrop to a warm feeling of goodwill to all men: Let it Snow, for example, or Winter Wonderland. These can easily veer to the Hallmark card end of songs, overly sentimental and cute, though even the most trite can shine in the right hands. Take Frosty the Snowman: a children’s song about a happy jolly soul becomes transformed by the Ronettes belting it out over Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Hal Blaine thundering round his drum kit or takes on a rather haunting, even slightly eery, tone, with the Cocteau Twins.

However, there are others that paint a much harsher picture of a snowy landscape. Little Feat sang of Six Feet of Snow. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds more than doubled that with Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow. Midlake painted a grim picture of survival in It Covers the Hillside: “It covers the roadways, it covers the hillsides it covers the houses, it covers the frozen pines”. Lindisfarne drew an equally dismal vision in their English urban setting of Winter Song,a kind of Newcastle version of Streets of London: “The creeping cold has fingers that caress without permission, and mystic crystal snowdrops only aggravate the condition....when winter comes howling in”. A long way from ‘the lights are turned down low, let it snow...’

In England, snow has played an iconic part in books, films and song, part of a hazy picture of a bygone country and age that perhaps never existed in reality and songs about snow can evoke real or imagined memories. In reality, a white Christmas is not that common. In the imagination (and on the front of christmas cards of course), it always snows, creating a magical landscape. Robins sit on snowy branches, couples skate over frozen ponds, hot chestnut sellers ply their wares, small boys spin their hoops down a cobbled street and peer wistfully into the frosted windows of a sweet shop full of humbugs.

Whereas American songs about snow and Christmas tend to look to an era of a semi-mythical 1940’s and 1950’s, English ones often reach further back, to the Nineteenth Century and beyond. Much of the robins/chestnuts/ice skating paraphernalia comes directly or indirectly from Charles Dickens and the Victorian invention of a traditional Christmas. However, this is mixed up with folk memories of a more ancient rural past of old England: in Snow Falls, The Albion Band described the annual death and rebirth of John Barleycorn: “And the snow falls, and the wind calls, and the year turns round again”. The result is an almost Pavlovian response by the listener to songs about snow and England, a mixture of real and false memories and nostalgia. It is a response perfectly captured by Ray Davies in his Postcard from London: ‘I found a postcard the other day, a faded photograph taken of a cold winterscape…It was a city I used to know and as a child when it was Christmas I played in the winter snow” .In memories of childhood, it always snowed at Christmas, just as summers were always shimmering and hot.

The song here also brings such echoes, in a rumination set against England’s snow. Goodbye England (Covered in Snow) is by English folk singer-songwriter Laura Marling from her 2009 album I Speak Because I Can and released as a Christmas single, despite its lack of festive cheer. Behind the observations on a shifting relationship and independence lies the imagery of a snow-covered English countryside. Laura Marling has spoken of this being rooted in a childhood memory of walking to the local village church: ‘I remember my Dad saying 'Please bring me back here before I die.' I was probably about 9 when he said this to me and I remember thinking 'What an horrific thing to say!'. But I hope I go back there before I die. I've got quite long roots in England, and because I grew up here, the beauty of England resonates with me more than any other kind of beauty”. This is sentimentalism with a harder edge: “I want to lay here forever in the cold, I might be cold but I'm just skin and bones, and I never love England more than when covered in snow”

The associations for me sparked by the song are a kaleidoscope of memories of places. Some are real: digging a Mini out of a snow drift in Hebden Bridge one New Years Day, watching the birds and ducks on a frozen Northamptonshire river a few days ago. Some are perhaps imagined. Did I really stand watching, at the age of maybe 5 or 6, people skating on a frozen lake in the local park or has this image been put there from too many Christmas cards and pictures of Victorian scenes? England covered with snow: places I remember, places I think I remember, places that never really existed.

Link to song

The Baltic Sea

Pigeon-holing other countries has a persistent attraction, as a recent series of maps of Europe labelled according to national stereotypes showed, with over half a billion hits.

Link to mapping of national stereotypes

This has a long history but some countries seem to face a bit of a struggle. In a programme from the 1970’s TV comedy series, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, upwardly mobile Bob Ferris(Rodney Bewes) quizzes working-class traditionalist Terry Collier (James Bolam) on his views on foreigners. After running through stock stereotypes on a list of nationalities – 'Russians? Sinister. Spanish? Lazy’ - he is asked, ‘What about the Danes? ‘ There is a pause, then the answer comes ‘Pornographic’.

The English have often seemed to find it hard to get a handle on Scandinavian countries, something parodied by Monty Python in their Finland song: “You're so near to Russia, so far from Japan, quite a long way from Cairo, lots of miles from Vietnam”. Views on Sweden seemed to have sporadically shifted but seem to only focus on one thing at a time. In the 1950’s and early 60’s the association was depression, the existentialist angst of Ingmar Bergman films - playing chess with Death  - and endless dark forests and long winters. There was also a mistaken belief that Sweden had a very high suicide rate, a myth that seems to date to the Eisenhower presidency and American alarm at the cradle - -to - grave welfare state and social democracy of Sweden and the effect this must have on its citizens. Later on, the image was of liberalisation of pornography and providing a haven for draft dodgers from the Vietnam war, before its major exports in Abba and the Volvo car shifted public perception again to reliability and efficiency. Now, I suppose, the standard association is with Ikea, its furniture and the side attraction of Swedish cuisine. On Fathers Day one year I was treated to lunch in the Brent Cross Ikea cafe: Swedish meatballs, cranberry sauce and potatoes, a Daim bar and unlimited coffee, all for £1.99. How do they do it?

The same uncertainty has been found in songs. Sweden itself has exported plenty of pop music, notably Abba, of course, but a string of others from the instrumental Spotnicks in the early 1960's through to the Cardigans, Europe, Roxette, Ace of Bass and Peter, Bjorn and John. Songs about Sweden from outside observers, however, have been less common. Australian singer Darren Hanlon took a novel angle with his vocal plea, Operator-Get Me Sweden: “I really must apologise for my compulsive behaviour, one left his heart in San Francisco, mine's in Scandinavia”. Others have tended to generalisations about being worthy but boring. The Stranglers 1978 Sweden began’ Let me tell you about Sweden, only country where the clouds are interesting”. The Divine Comedy’s Sweden saw it as “ Safe and clean and green and modern, Bright and breezy, free and easy”

The song here is The Baltic Sea, from the 2008 album Nothing Personal, It's National Security by Swedish-Scottish indie pop group, The Social Services, originally formed and based in Stockholm. It is in this same genre -‘You’re as cold as the Baltic Sea and you close your doors so readily’ - though with the virtues of the country ,from forests full of blueberries to recycling facilities, recognised. Stereotypes, of course, can contain some truth and the closing chorus of ‘We can be your friends’ does seem to echo the sometimes less than comradely attitudes of Sweden’s Nordic neighbours to their big brother. The Danes and Finns, in particular, seem to have an often acerbic attitude: perhaps that of unruly classmates to the school swot. (‘You know you have been in Denmark too long if you feel comfortable laughing at jokes about Swedes’).

My own main experience of Sweden some years ago was rather coloured by its circumstances: a family holiday, including my 2-year old daughter and mother-in-law, in a Mini. All of the party came down with food poisoning on the 24 hour ferry to Gothenburg - not the fault of the smorgasbord – and on arrival there was a 3 hour drive to Varmland as the symptoms took hold. On the bright side, however, we did get to see the inside of a Swedish country hospital, as well as forests full of blueberries. And, contrary to the song, the staff there all smiled back.

Link to song

The Holland Song

In the 1970’s, British TV was fond of showing police detective dramas, sometimes British but more often American. With shows like Kojak, Cannon, Columbo, The Rockford Files, New York and Los Angeles came to seem as familiar to the British viewer as London. One detective series, however, Van Der Valk, was different. The detective was Dutch (though the actor playing him, Barry Foster, was British and later popped up playing Sherlock Holmes) and instead of the usual American mean streets, the drama was played out against a backdrop of the bridges and canals, bicycles , trams and cafes of Amsterdam. And instead of the routine car chase screeching to an inevitable finale, Van Der Valk often had a more leisurely boat chase, with the villain in one boat and the detective in the one behind as they pootled round the canals before a convenient bridge offered the opportunity for an arrest (and perhaps the words “u wordt ingekerft, zonneschijn”)

Link to opening credits

I suspect that the popularity of the programme – its theme tune, Eye Level, was Number One in Britain for 4 weeks in 1973, finally knocked off by David Cassidy and The Puppy Song - had much to do with the outdoor locations.  (In much the same way, I had an aunt who sat through TV Westerns because she liked the scenery).The city is, of course, very photogenic and has been the setting of numerous films since then, including Snapshots, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Oceans 12 and the 1999 Silent Witness. It has also been well covered by songs since Max Bygraves and Tulips from Amsterdam in the 1950’s. Perhaps one of the most well known has been Jacque Brel’s In the Port of Amsterdam, recorded by Scott Walker and David Bowie amongst many others. In English language versions, however, the lyrics can seem totally overblown, as far away from the image conjured up by Tulips from Amsterdam as possible – “There's a sailor who eats only fish heads and tails,And he'll show you his teeth that have rotted too soon, that can haul up the sails, that can swallow the moon”

In some ways, songs about Amsterdam have been less successful in capturing the city’s landscapes than TV and film. In some, the ‘Amsterdam’ seems either purely incidental – as in Coldplay’s song of the same name –or in a lyric that could really be anywhere: as in Janis Ian’s Amsterdam. Mainly, one of two sets of imagery have cropped up. One, predictably, has focused on the drugs and hippy legacy. Amsterdam, by American group Guster, for example: “From way up on your cloud, You're never coming down, Are you getting somewhere? Or did you get lost in Amsterdam?” Or Van Halen’s Amsterdam: “wham, bam, oh Amsterdam. yea, yea, yea, stone you like nothin' else can”

The second has been to go back to its art and history-famously with Don Mclean’s Vincent, the sheet music of which is in a time capsule buried under the Van Gogh Museum. Jonathan Richman also had a stab at both the painter and the museum with his ode to Vincent Van Gogh: “Now in the museum what have we here?

The baddest painter since God's Jon Vermeer.” The prog rock outfit King Crimson chose a Rembrandt painting as the inspiration for their 1974 Night Watch epic. Neutral Milk Hotel went back to another famous icon of Dutch history - Anne Frank- with their deeply obscure lyrics of Holland 1945.

Yet there have been some songs that reflected more the writer’s personal experience of the place . Al Stewart, whose sojourn in Brooklyn was the subject of a previous column, wrote about a tour of Holland in his 1972 Amsterdam song. Michelle Shocked reflected “It's 5 a.m. in Amsterdam and this is how I know. There's a church beside a park and it fills the dying dark with five strokes”. The song here, The Holland Song, by Two Nice Girls, from their 1989 album of the same name, is another such personal response to the place. Two Nice Girls, a self-styled ‘lesbian rock group’ from Austin, Texas, came closest to commercial success with Sweet Jane (With Affection), a merging of Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane and Joan Armatrading’s Love & Affection. The Holland Song was written by group member Kathy Korniloff when she was 16 and, in an odd way, it is maybe this that makes the song suit the place. Though the lyrics are clumsy at times- “These Dutch are too much, they built this land from the sea” – there is also an almost gauche enthusiasm that, with the harmonies and jazz-tinged folk backing, manage to give a warm and sunlit feeling to the place despite the rain and North Sea breezes. As so many people feel when they visit Amsterdam and wander along the canals and in and out of cafes, the message is - I think I could live here.

Maybe people seem to feel at home so quickly in Amsterdam because they find what they expect to find, whether that is windmills and tulips in the market, Van Gogh’s landscapes or Panama Red - though the unexpected is always there to delight, like mayonnaise on hotdogs and chips. And taking away an image of a watercolour land is as good as any.

Link to song

Painting and Kissing

As touched upon before, songs about places can go from the macro to the micro, from the whole sweep of an entire country to a small individual spot at ground level, a cafe, a station, a hotel. These can include those songs about a particular street or road. These can be an ode to a famous landmark, as in On Broadway or Hollywood Boulevard, or ETBTG’s teenage yearning to be in Oxford Street. They can romanticise the ordinary , as with Donovan’s Sunny Goodge Street. They can push the unknown and obscure into the spotlight. Without The Beatles’ Penny Lane, who would bother going to see the street near Allerton Road and Smithdown Road in Liverpool? Or Woking’s Stanley Road without Paul Weller’s album of the same name?

It can be, however, that the filter of music and lyrics can cast even the shabbiest of thoroughfares in a new light for the listener. The Holloway Road in North London lies at the start of the A1 that runs up to Scotland. It remains a road that is resolutely ungentrified, one that sits amidst the noise of the traffic and sirens and police vans, the litter, cheap cafes and burger joints, the discount stores. It looks totally unprepossessing. Yet with its cultural diversity - Jamaican, Columbian, Brazilian, Russian, Mexican, Australian, French, Polish, Turkish, British, Swedish, Irish, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Bahraini, Chinese, Congolese, Japanese and Beninese all live here - it has its supporters: here is N7 Heaven. Metropolitan University is here, as is Holloway Prison.

It has also appeared  in pop songs at regular intervals. In fact, as a location it has a special place in pop history. Outside 304 Holloway Road, now a grocery store, is a small plaque to the eccentric record producer Joe Meek: ‘Joe Meek, the Telstar Man, lived, worked and died here’. In the almost forgotten pre-Beatles era of British pop music, Joe Meek was responsible for some of the most memorable and idiosyncratic records of the time, all recorded in his small studio above a leather goods shop on Holloway Road. The most famous was the Tornados’ Telstar, an instrumental intended to invoke the space age but which evokes more than anything a British funfair.Yet the Tornados were the first British group to get to number one in America - and Telstar was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite pop record. But there were a string of other Meek hits between 1961 and 1964, including the trio of hits by sometime actor, John Leyton, ( the ghostly Johnny Remember Me, Wild Wind and the grammatically correct Son, This is She) and Meek’s final big hit, Have I the Right, by the Honeycombs, ‘discovered’ in a pub in the nearby Balls Pond Road.(Have I the Right was marked by a tub- thumping sound from female drummer Honey Lantree, augmented by the other members of the group standing on the wooden stairs leading up to the studio and stamping their feet, the sound captured by microphones attached to the banisters by bicycle clips)

This, alone, was enough to make the Holloway Road a mini-Mecca for lovers of British pop. It has, however, been referenced since in a number of songs. The Kinks sang of “ my baby impaled in Holloway jail.” Marillion also sang of a Holloway Girl. St Etienne set their dreamy Madeleine there (“Down Holloway Road she goes, wasting time”). Koop’s Beyond the Son must be the only record in history to mention the South China seas and the Holloway Road in the same lyrics, with an intriguing reference – “ Saw Mr Brenan in the Holloway Road yesterday, Walked past with a bag of potatoes on his shoulder”. And the song here , Painting and Kissing by Hefner from their 2000 album We Love the City, a suite of songs about London and the lives of people living there.

Hefner were a British indie band that had echoes of Pulp and the Smiths. Against the deadbeat backdrop of Holloway Road and the Wig and Gown - a football pub named after Highbury Magistrate’s Court - the song is an ironic story of an unexpected relationship and self-delusion. Underneath, the music careers away driven by a tinny organ riff and at times seems to be going down a path of its own. On top, vocalist Darren Hayman tries to convince himself that the relationship was better than he sometimes suspects it might have been: “And as her kissing got worse, Oh her paintings improved, but what does that prove? It proves nothing.” The listener, however, is not really sure that he has learnt anything. For once, Holloway Road comes out on top and it is Linda from Holloway Road, with her paintings and Chardonnay, who is the sophisticated one in this relationship. Crikey.

When you come out of the tube station on Holloway Road , there are a lot of ghosts of the past about. From highwayman Dick Turpin; to all the groups of yesterday who lugged their amps and drum kits up the stairs to Meek’s recording studio; to John Lennon and Yoko Ono visiting Michael X at his Black House at No 101.The eyes might see Argos, Chicken Village, Pizza Zone, Holloway Express, The Nag’s Head; but it is not hard to find a bit of music to give a brief glimpse through coloured, if not rose-tinted, glasses.

Link to song

Alone in Brewster Bay

An early column looked at the Bee Gees’ song, Massachusetts, about a place the group had never been to and chose because they liked the sound of the name: a song more to do with feelings than geography. The same could be said of the subject of this column, also set in Massachusetts but where the actual setting was a mere backdrop for a song about something else, in this case the sadness of separation. A place becomes the trigger for the songwriter to explore emotions which the listener may or may not carry themselves to the physical location.

The song here, Alone in Brewster Bay, by the Chicago-based singer Minnie Riperton, is titled after a small settlement south of Boston overlooking Cape Cod Bay. Minnie Riperton is probably best known for her 1975 hit, Loving You, and for her extraordinary 5 ½ octave vocal range that went into whistle register, first showcased on a record, Lonely Girl, released under the name Andrea Davis at the age of 18.

Link to song

Stevie Wonder once described her voice as that of an angel, with the capacity to produce a sound both ethereal and haunting for the listener. Her musical work, however, was much wider than Loving You might suggest. As part of the Chicago-based Gems in the mid-sixties (Trivia note: their biggest success was a record with the intriguing title, That’s What they Put Erasers on Pencils For), she supplied backing vocals to records such as Fontella Bass’s Rescue Me; and as joint lead vocalist with the psychedelic rock group Rotary Connection covered an eclectic range of styles from rock to soul to jazz and all points in between. Listen to their 1968 release Christmas Love and you are transported via a little historical snapshot (‘Nixon and Humphrey need a little love’), to a world of headbands, anti-war demonstrations and keeping the freak flag flying.

Alone in Brewster Bay came from her 1975 album, Adventures in Paradise, written during a holiday in the Cape Cod area sometime in the early 1970’s.With the evocative sounds of seabirds in the background and a gentle guitar backing, the song is a romantic lament that shifts between mournfulness and hope. The mood and lyrics, with the imagery of birds and bleak sky set against an awareness of time passing, is reminiscent of Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes. You then realise that both women died at the age of 31 within a year of each other, both leaving a few pure gems of work and a sense of a potential unfulfilled. You also wonder whether the early deaths have inevitably tinged their work with a retrospective sense of sadness that perhaps wasn’t intended. Certainly, it is difficult to listen to Minnie Riperton’s final song shortly before her death, Back Down Memory Lane, ( ‘I don’t want to go back down memory lane, save me, save me, back down memory lane’) without an overwhelming feeling of poignancy.

Perhaps because of this, it would be easy to carry a melancholic feeling from the song to the place that inspired it. On a visit to my daughter in Boston a couple of years ago, we went to a number of the towns and villages in the area where Minnie Riperton vacationed nearly forty years ago. In many ways, the harbours, little antique and gift shops, white boarded houses, the ice creams and beaches and sounds of seabirds, must be closer to the English south coast than Chicago. I was reminded of that stretch of coast round Poole and Sandbanks and Brownsea Island, though without the sandals and socks and occasional glimpse of a front garden gnome. (I later satisfyingly discovered that Brewster, MA, is twinned with Budleigh Salterton in Devon).

It wasn’t, of course, melancholy at all. I was seeing the places with my own eyes and had my own experience to take away. In such ways can memories of a place differ.

Link to song

N 17

One of the songs most beloved of the sentimental and the drunk alike is Danny Boy, the archetypal Irish ballad dripping with pathos from its famous opening lines:” Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling, From glen to glen, and down the mountain side”. In fact, songs about Ireland have often combined two themes – the lament of the exiled and emigrant romanticising their homeland and the magical and mysterious rural Ireland rooted in ancient cultures. Songs that painted pictures of a never-never land of rolling green fields, misty mountains, Guinness in country pubs served by a red-haired colleen and a hint of leprechaun have always found a ready market in England and the USA. One of the best-selling acts in the British charts in the sixties were The Bachelors, who had more hits than the Beatles in 1964 by laying on the Irish charm and whimsy thicker than butter on soda bread. (In 1966 , rather bizarrely, their version of Sounds of Silence outsold Simon & Garfunkel’s in Britain). In a post-punk era, groups like The Pogues may have had a harder, less romantic, edge but songs like A Pair of Brown Eyes could still lament “the streams, the rolling hills ,Where his brown eyes were waiting”.

Equally a recurrent theme in songs has been a nostalgic sense of loss voiced by those living and working overseas and who sought to recreate Ireland elsewhere. Songs that range from the purely sentimental to the ambiguous-the Pogues’ Thousands Are Sailing - to the dark bitterness of Christy Moore’s Missing You:"So you sail cross the ocean, away cross the foam, to where you're a Paddy, a Biddy or a Mick, good for nothing but stacking a brick”

The song here, N17, first released by the Saw Doctors in 1989, combines both themes in a infectiously joyful ode to the trunk road that goes through Sligo and Galway. An echo of Watford Gap and Driving Away from Home but with a more romantic setting. Over the last 20 years the Saw Doctors have produced a string of Irish folk/rock songs, often based round their home area of Tuam and County Galway. At times, you think that songs like The Green and Red of Mayo or Never Mind the Strangers might topple into sentimental cliché. What stops that, apart from the general upbeat and uplifting mood of much of their music, is the little snapshots of everyday life in the lyrics and the wry humour behind much of the observations, as in Music I Love –“ I've tried going to disco, throwing shapes on the floor, nothing ever happens. I don't go any more. Girls never know what I'm talking about, so I think I'll just take the easy way out. I'll just sit in my room with all the lights off, my mother and father think I'm gone daft .I stay home with the music I love”

N17 became one of their perennial sing-along anthems. As with many other songs about Ireland, it is written from an exile’s perspective ,of someone daydreaming on the filthy overcrowded trains of the stone walls and the grasses green. Yet it also recognises the usual truth behind such yearning: “I know things would be different if I ever decide to go back”. The same truism as in Kari Bremnes’ Song to a Town: you return at your peril as a stranger.

Even with the Saw Doctors, it seems sometimes hard to escape the clichés about Ireland. Yet cliches are usually just such because they are based on some sort of common experience and it is not difficult to find the Ireland of these songs. I once went on a holiday in Sligo in a caravan drawn by a monster of a horse called Ross who, over-dosed on oats, took out a farm gatepost in his urgent desire to get into the field. Maybe I expected to see what I saw because of the songs but there really were rolling green fields and the misty mountain of Knocknarea and country pubs where people with accordions and concertinas, fiddles and pipes wandered in for a ceilidh.

I don’t remember the N17 in that slow meander round Sligo. However, in the last week I have experienced the “twists and turns on the road” of the N20,further south near Cork, sitting in a mini-bus with a group of Finns and Poles as heads bounced off the ceiling with the bumps and swerves as the driver gave assurance he was only driving slowly, mind. Yet there was a feeling of going back in time, to the past as a foreign country- and perhaps a sense of the never-never land hovering somewhere just out of sight.

Link to song

Harvest Moon

Comment was made in the last column about the age-old influence of the sun on the earliest writings and music. The same is true of the moon, which has exerted perhaps even more of a mystical pull on the poetic and musical imagination over the centuries. Worshipped as a god/goddess, linked to witchcraft, werewolves and lunacy, waxing and waning over the years.

In song, inspiration has been more diverse than with the sun, from the stereotyped moon/June romantic odes through the more imaginative reflections of Moondance and Moonshadow to the philosophising of Dark Side of the Moon. There has been a Blue Moon, covered countless times from the Marcels’ doo-wop version through Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley et al, with a particularly atmospheric version by the Cowboy Junkies. But there has also been a Pink Moon (Nick Drake), a Yellow Moon (the Neville Brothers), a Black Moon (Emerson, Lake and Palmer),a Red Moon (David Gray). It’s been a Bad Moon and a Sad Moon and a Harsh Mistress. Jonathan King claimed that Everyone’s Gone to the Moon. And the B-52’s put it quite clearly, without room for argument –There’s a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon).

The first landing on the moon might have lessened this allure but didn’t. There was a brief flurry of songs like Space Oddity and Rocket Man but the moon generally remained something aloof to admire from afar. One of the most hauntingly effective songs in this genre was Monochrome by The Sundays, which turned a childhood recollection of the moon landings into something wider- a child trying to understand an adult’s experience. “It’s 4 in the morning July in 1969, me and my sister, we crept down like shadows. They’re bringing the moon right down to our sitting room, static and silence and a monochrome vision. They’re dancing around, slow puppets silver ground.....And something is said and the whole room laughs aloud, me and my sister looking on like shadows”

In fact, it almost seemed as if it had been forgotten that man had been to the moon and songs continued as they always had done.The song here, Harvest Moon, reverts to the softer, more benign notion of the moon, albeit with an emotional hold over human feelings. It is a Neil Young composition but the version here, by jazz singer Cassandra Wilson from her 1996 album New Moon Daughter, adds another dimension. She has a rich, smoky, sometimes breathy, contralto voice that can have the timbre of a saxophone, and her timing and interpretation can turn a cover version into a different song. Here, as with some other of her covers - such as Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time or, oddly, The Monkees’ Last Train to Clarkesville - the song is slowed right down. Words hang in the air, time passes , and the song becomes a wistful reflection the listener is drawn into. The technique is perfect for such a song about gazing at a full moon whilst, behind her languid voice, the guitars shimmer over the sounds of crickets and frogs.

As with Always the Sun, the listener will find their own setting for the song. My mind takes it to a view from over 20 years ago on a holiday with a young family on the Greek island of Kos. We had been to the Asklepion Temple above the town amidst cypress and pine trees, where lizards bathed in the hot sun on rocks, and had walked over the hills back to the coast. In the evening, I sat looking out over the dark sea towards Turkey, as the bright moon hung in the night sky amidst a sudden shower of shooting stars and the sound of crickets provided an incessant backdrop. Time passed slowly.

The sea, the sun, the moon – universal themes and countless songs. The listener will find the one where a time falls into its place.

Link to song

Always The Sun

After the sea, it seems only fitting to consider a similar genre where a song about something universal is taken by the listener to be a backdrop to a very specific memory. In this case, the sun - linked to the sea in countless holiday brochures about Greece, Spain or Italy and sometimes overtly in song, as in The Verve’s The Sun, The Sea. And sometimes linked even further, as in Club 18-30 holiday brochures or by -who else-Serge Gainsburg in his Sea, Sex and Sun recording.

These songs sit apart from those about summer generally, which could fill a book on their own. Songs about summer tend to rely on producing a good - time feel through a range of stock associations, though these can vary according to the national origins of the song in question. Listen to the Beach Boys’ All Summer Long and you think of Californian sunshine, surf boards, glistening teeth and tans. However, Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime is definitely a hot English summer, one that might include a lot of beer, packets of cheese and onion crisps, wasps and blokes with sideburns so extensive they needed planning permission.

Songs of the sun can be as equally vacuous/good-time ,I suppose, as in The Sun Has Got Its Hat On. However, by and large, they tend to be more lyrically and musically challenging and, like those of the sea, let the associations be made by others. They do not even necessarily conjure up the expected scenes of languid summer days. Pink Floyd took a sci-fi slant of the sun as a planet with Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. Judy Collins took the magical process of Yeats’ poem , The Song of Wandering Aengus, with Golden Apples of the Sun. The Beatles Here Comes the Sun becomes more than just an ode to spring when interpreted by artists like Nina Simone and Richie Havens.

The song here, Always the Sun  - recorded in 1986 by the Stranglers, towards the end of their decade as a chart group - is an example of an occurrence when a view of a place previously unseen suddenly fitted perfectly with the personal mental image created by the music. The Stranglers were always hard to pigeonhole, a punk band that included a hippy- ish keyboard player and a drummer now in his seventies. Seemingly crass songs like Peaches ('Walking on the beaches, looking at the peaches'), sat along others about Trotsky, vikings and extra-terrestrial visitors. Their repertoire also included two evocative and poetically lyrical songs that bathed the listener in the moods of the sun. Their 1982 hit, Golden Brown, was a delicate and dreamy ballad in waltz-time with what sounds like a harpsichord and with lyrics supposedly about heroin but which could have come from a nineteenth century Romantic poem ('Golden brown, texture like sun...Every time just like the last, On her ship tied to the mast, To distant lands, takes both my hands').

Link to song

Always the Sun had equally obtuse lyrics that at times pour out in such a wordy fashion you wonder how Hugh Cornwell will fit them all in before the line ends .It has a sharper and more powerful sound, with Jean-Jaques Burnel’s diving bass lines, the background swamped in the keyboards and Hugh Cornwell’s melodic guitar break reminiscent of that on Golden Brown. The overall mood, however, is just as evocative. One reviewer described it as like being in a deep ravine and looking upwards towards to the sun.

For me, both this song and Golden Brown for some reason brought an echo of a Van Gogh painting of a French cornfield. One day about 12 years ago, on a family camping holiday in France, I unexpectedly came across the view I had in my mind. Trying to find a go-cart track out in the countryside we stopped for a picnic at the edge of a cornfield. The sky was deep blue, the field stretched away red and yellow, there was the sound of crickets and the sun cast a warm blanket over the landscape. As in a film, Always the Sun came into my mind as the musical accompaniment. For me, at least, a song finding its place.

Link to song

The Sea

There is a genre of song that is about a general sense of place but that each listener can relate in their own mind to a more specific time and place. Songs about the countryside, perhaps, or mountains or woods. Possibly the most extensive examples are about the sea, which lends itself to song lyrics as it did to poetry. I don’t mean so much those songs about events that happened at sea - like Procol Harum’s A Salty Dog or Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - but just about the sea itself, the best of which enable the listener to identify with something in their own memory.

There is the classic La Mer, by Charles Trenet, which for some reason –possibly I heard it playing at the time on someone’s transistor radio –I always associate with Weymouth sea front: blue sea, sand and sandcastles with paper flags in them, ice-creams, Punch and Judy, donkey rides. The original words, apparently written on toilet paper on a French train, are actually a lot more lyrical –‘The sea, that one sees dancing along the clear gulfs, has silver reflections’ – than the much more chirpy English version that became Bobby Darin’s Beyond the Sea. Or there is the song Sailor by the American group Hem, which could be taken as a love song or a child’s lullaby. Listening to the words –‘over the ocean, pearls in the sky strung round the moon, pointing to you’ – the rich musical backing and the soft, almost murmuring, voice of singer Sally Ellyson, and the sea becomes a picture in a book of nursery rhymes. You can almost imagine Wynken, Blynken and Nod sailing past in their wooden shoe.

As someone who grew up on the south coast, the sea was part of my childhood, something always there on the landscape and marking the edges of my world. Most of the time it was a backdrop to the sort of scene described in Morrisey’s Every Day is Like Sunday, with the trudging back over wet sands and the tea and chips in the seafront cafes. There were times however, as on Portland Bill or Chesil Beach, where the storms, the undercurrents and the breaking waves on rocks, made the world of the seafront seem pretty irrelevant. It is for associations like this that a different sort of song is more fitting

The song here- by Fotheringay, the short-lived group built round Sandy Denny after she left Fairport Convention for the first time - is also just called The Sea but it paints a very different picture. It came from their 1970 album titled after the group and though some of it now sounds dated – file under Folk-Rock, early 1970’s – The Sea, fittingly given its subject matter, is timeless. The musical backing is one of those moments when words and music provided a perfect complement for the subject matter. Cymbals crash gently like waves, the bass carries the listener forward as an undercurrent and the  guitar solo by Jerry Donahue sparkles like splashing droplets in the sun. There is a feel of the Fleetwood Mac instrumental, Albatross, at times.

The mood, however, is deceptive. The sea here is not wild but is certainly not the millpond calm of Sailor or the poetic horizons of La Mer. The lyrics, penned by Sandy Denny, paint the sea as something relentless, even slightly sinister at times, with the power to bring human effort to nothing- ‘Fall and listen with your ears upon the paving stone, Is that what you hear? The coming of the sea’ There are also not many lines like this – ‘Sea flows under your doors in London town, And all your defences are all broken down’ – that could have come from a song any time in the last 2000 years.

Whether Sandy Denny based the song on a view from a particular piece of coastline or not doesn’t really matter, for the listener will bring to mind their own place to fit it. For me, the association is with being on Brighton Pier one dark wintry evening, with stars bright in a clear sky. The sea wasn’t particularly rough but it crashed endlessly against the pier supports, with spray rising to splash my face, so that the whole structure felt fragile and the blackness below was a reminder that the whole facade of a seaside town can be pretty vulnerable. The coming of the sea.

Link to song

Oslo

The song Oxford Street, based on adolescent memories of growing up in Hatfield, highlighted the genre of the song about small towns, typically about the homogeneity and stifling of creativity that such places can produce. Yet ‘small town’ can have a different meaning. Some capital cities are so big that you can only relate to a particular chosen district, whether it’s Stoke Newington, Cheetham Hill or Greenwich Village. Others manage to be big cities but still with a small town atmosphere, a term that in this context has a positive connotation. They are compact enough to be able to walk right across, they seem accessible and informal, more relaxed than places like London or New York. One writer said of Venice: ‘Venice is a small town with sweet, small town manners’ (Judith Martin in No Vulgar Hotel :the Desire and Pursuit of Venice).

The same could be said of several of the Scandinavian cities. In fact, just as it is said that visiting the Isle of Wight transports the visitor back in time to the 1950’s, so it easy to feel you have gone to the past in many parts of Norway, Sweden or Finland. It is not just the wooden houses and cobbled streets. In a conference venue in one of the smaller towns one might stumble upon not only a group such as Herman’s Hermits still on the road with original drummer Barry Whitwam and still doing I’m into Something Good – bringing to mind those Japanese soldiers who appeared from the jungle on Pacific islands in the 1970’s and 1980’s unaware that WW2 was over - but musical outfits that one might think only existed now in the pages of pop historical memorabilia: Johnny and the Hurricanes! (Big hit - Red River Rock 1959) The Spotnicks! (Big hit- Hava Nagila,1963)

So Copenhagen is one such place that has retained a small town atmosphere, with its gabled houses, narrow streets and churches. Another is Oslo, Norway’s biggest city with a population of half a million or so. Though it has a subway system, most of the centre is easily reached by walking and it isn’t hard to feel a sense of accessibility about the whole place, from the harbour to Vigeland Park. There is a novel called Hunger by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun that is worth reading before visiting Oslo. It is set in the Oslo of 1890 (Kristiana) and can be read for what it is: a compelling account of a penniless writer wandering the streets of the city in an increasingly desperate state of hunger.(By page 108, readers are likely to be searching for a snack if they hadn’t eaten before starting the book). But is also worth reading because of the descriptions of some of the streets and squares and parks that haven’t changed that much in the last 100 years or so - the place that the author/writer calls "that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him”. Dating from about the same time is the famous painting, Munch’s The Scream, set on a road overlooking Oslo.

The song here is simply called Oslo, by the Oslo-based Little Hands of Asphalt, largely the musical project of singer-songwriter Sjur Lyseid. It came out on the Leap Years album in 2009 but is timeless enough to have come from almost any era. The harmonies and soft melody sound at times like Teenage Fan Club of the mid-1990’s.The harmonica that comes in towards the end could be Donovan circa 1965.The lyrics have some witty touches- ‘But your good intent was clear when you split and left me here, to my regret I left my high horse upstairs’ – and they revert to the double meaning of ‘small town’. The song is a slightly awkward, introspective account of an adolescent romance breaking up or a friendship that has ended –but ‘I’ll be seeing you around, because Oslo is a small, small town’. In that regard, it could be the personal statement from someone growing up in any number of towns and finding the horizons too limited. It does also, however, have strong echoes of Oslo - the swimming in the lake and the closeness to nature, the celebration of the sunny summer months before the winter darkness sets in, a bit self-effacing, a slight touch of melancholy,

I had a possibly unusual experience of Oslo. I was staying in a hotel/conference centre an hour or so away and for reasons I never really understood in a country where gender equality has been long entrenched, women travelling with their husbands on the country bus into Oslo got a reduced fare. I therefore trundled back and forward a few times as a pretend husband so conference attendees could travel cheaply to shop in Oslo. However, it did enable me to wander round the streets and parks like the character in Hunger, though obviously not reduced to eating my pencil. A small town still at heart, perhaps, but probably not as easy to understand as it might first seem to a visitor.

Link to song

And If Venice Is Sinking

The column on Paris showed how easy it was for songs to pick up on the common stereotypes of such a city. Perhaps the only other city that rivals Paris for that, at least in Europe, is Venice, a place with a resident population of around 60,000 but visited by some 20 million every year. Most will bring with them a collection of expectations of what to see gleaned from postcards, TV, films, songs: the canals and gondolas, the churches and cathedrals, the Bridge of Sighs. Some even get what they want from a distance. At The Venetian in Las Vegas, visitors can experience the wonders of Venice without the hassle of actually going there. As its publicity blurb puts it, ‘ Escape the hustle and bustle of the Las Vegas Strip with a relaxing gondola ride at the Venetian. From the soothing sound of water lapping the sides of the gondola to the eloquent singing of the gondoliers, passengers will feel as if they have truly been transported to Italy...Surrounded by a ceiling emulating blue sky as well as architecture inspired by Venice landmarks, a gondola trip down the Grand Canal delivers a unique Vegas experience’

Equally, pop songs about Venice have often tended to the O Sole Mio to It’s Now Or Never to Just One Cornetto end of music, redolent of operatic gondoliers proffering an ice-cream to the sound of rippling strings .Like Connie Francis’s Summertime in Venice (‘I dream all the winter long of mandolins that play our song’) or Perry Como’s Mandolins in the Moonlight (‘in tune with the strings of my heart’). Or the string-laden pathos of Charles Aznavour’ s How Sad Venice Can Be (‘When the mandolins play a song she sung for me, One unforgotten day’).They certainly like their mandolins there. A bit of an exception lyric-wise was Steve Harley’s Rain in Venice, though his assertion that ‘Love has flooded my heart, there’s rain in Venice for the first time’ is not really true. It rains in Venice quite a lot. When I was there one July there was such a sudden torrential downpour it caused the waiters to come racing out of the cafes and restaurants to grab tables, chairs and canopies before they were swept away into the canals.

The song here, And If Venice Is Sinking, recorded by the Canadian group Spirit of the West in 1993, is very much a tourist view of Venice and was written by the group’s singer, John Mann, after his honeymoon there. (The laugh that can be heard during the lines about Marini’s Little Man is apparently from his wife, the actress Jill Baum, joining in the backing singing). Musically it is a joyous celebration of the city from someone – like many of the annual visitors - who has fallen in love with it and is willing to go down with it like a ship if it eventually sinks into its own lagoons.: a possible reality that has troubled the city for years. There is the sound of the accordion and mandolin as might be expected but also a tuba and a rollicking sing- along chorus that veers between a Celtic folk dance and a German polka.

Lyrically, it takes a rather different slant from the usual one of serenading gondoliers. Instead, it captures another side of Venice that many visitors take away memories of. As you go about by foot or boat, there is a constant sense of religion and ornate and crumbling history, not just from the grand architecture of buildings such as the Basilica di Santa Maria but from the icons, candles, statuettes, window boxes of flowers seen down every alleyway or canal side. In a different musical context, some of the imagery in the words –‘they come in bent backed,, creeping across the floor all dressed in black... come to kiss their dead’ – could seem darker, drawing the listener into the shadowy and eerie Venice of the film Dont Look Now. Here, they seem the recollections of a visitor to Venice awestruck, christened with wonder, by what he sees. Equally, the Marino Marini priapic Little Rider sculpture that caused the merriment on Mann’s honeymoon is at one of the museums and art galleries - the Guggenheim Museum on the Grand Canal- that is firmly on the tourist trail.

Venice is a strange place that seems to exist in its own world, with its own special light and sky. It can, at times, seem as though you have wandered into a Canaletto painting. You can look from the top of the Campanile at the people and pigeons in the mosaic square below and know that millions of others have shared the same view - yet that and all the sights down the alleys and canals seem somehow a unique experience. Thomas Mann once described Venice as ‘half fairy tale and half tourist trap’. Somehow the fairy tale part becomes the reality and the one you take away with you.

Link to song

I Often Dream of Trains

Trains and cars and planes, as Bacharach and David might have put it, though that would perhaps sounded a little less romantic than the actual line. So after Heathrow airport and the M62, the train. The train journey and the railway station have long been part of the language of songs. The record that sparked off the skiffle era in Britain, which in turn provided the catalyst for the Beatles and the other early sixties groups-Rock Island Line – was about a train and recent comments on this blog have pointed out just how many train songs there have been. Many have titles and lyrics that shimmer with the promise of adventure and exotic travel: Marrakesh Express, Trans-Europe Express, This Train Will Be Taking No Passengers. I did, however, experience a tinge of disappointment in reading that the last train of the day from L.A to Georgia leaves at 2.30pm and that leaving on the midnight train would never really be feasible.

As with driving songs, however, songs about trains show a difference in the American and British perspective. The American genre tends to be in the spirit of car songs, heading off west to unexplored territory with the spirit of independence "Everyone loves the sound of a train in the distance”, sang Paul Simon, calling to mind the travel writer Paul Theroux’s comment: “Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”

There are far fewer songs in the English version of this genre and the perspectives tend to be different. As with motorways, there isn’t the physical space to imagine an expanding frontier so trains and stations have come to symbolise something else in songs. In part, they mean departure, the train pulling out and loss. UB 40’s She Caught the Train (‘They said she'd take the train ,I ran to catch the train, Oh my, the train is gone’) or The Sundays’ Cry (‘I’m standing on a platform, Now I’m staring from a train’). However, in England they can also signify a journey that is less about entering physical space and more about another dimension-the past, real or mythical. The age of the steam train and all it signified in terms of a different picture of England hangs heavy still, decades after it passed away, which is why The Railway Children became such an iconic film for some people.

The song here, I Often Dream of Trains by Robyn Hitchcock, picks up on this idea of trains as metaphor, mixed up with some semi-Freudian analysis of a relationship. It is from his 1984 album of the same name, which also included another set of musings on transport from days past, Trams of Old London (‘Trams of Old London, taking my baby into the past...on a clear night you can see where the rails used to be’). Robyn Hitchcock was/is something of an acquired taste. Some of his work is very reminiscent of the post-Pink Floyd Syd Barrett, though perhaps more self-conscious, with an eccentric, surreal, at times whimsical, Englishness also found in artists like Viv Stanshall of the Bonzos.

I Often Dream of Trains is a characteristically odd mix of the banal and poetic imagination. There is the image of a train beside a frozen lake and summer turning to winter overnight, painting a rather dream-like and stark landscape suddenly brought down with a bump to the destinations of Reading and Basingstoke, presumably picked for the ordinariness. I once lived in Reading –judged at one time as the most average town in Britain - for four years and had several train journeys to it, none of which I have ever dreamed about. I also once saw a TV interview with Pete Staples of The Troggs, who hailed from Basingstoke’s neighbouring town of Andover. He remarked something like ‘There was a lot going on in Andover. It wasn’t like, well, Basingstoke.’

The surreal bit about this is that the train journey in the real world here doesn’t exist either. Hitchcock has described it as “a kind of imaginary route in my head that goes from Southampton to Oxford. I don't think it ever really existed, but I often find myself on it, in a very old railway carriage,” It’s the sort of train journey that might well go through Adlestrop-the station of Edward Thomas’s famous poem of the same name-as well as Basingstoke. Trains, particularly in England, can sometimes retain the romance of travel longer when they stay in the imagination.

Link to song