Peasouper

She stayed with me until
She moved to Notting Hill
She said it was the place she needs to be
Where the cocaine is fair trade
And frequently displayed
Is the Buena Vista Social Club CD

The Light at The End of The Tunnel (Is the Light of an Oncoming Train) - Half Man Half Biscuit

I haven't lived in London for long but quickly realised that it's one of the only places in England that you can reference in song and feel pretty good about doing it...

This always bothered me about living in the North (and let me admit straightaway, it's a song writing fault rather than a fault with the North!). I was listening to music like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt and I think what I liked about country music was how rooted it was in place. No matter whether the women left you or you were drunk and miserable in a bar, that's not what the songs were about to me, they were about Highway 61, the streets of Baltimore or the T for Texas and the T for Tennessee. Places that seemed to be able to exist in song in a way that Rochdale probably couldn't.

It's hard to conjure a mythology for England.

The easy answer to why is that the country is too small, it’s been mapped out; if God wants this killing done out on the M61 then it’s all too easy to wonder just where on the M61? That farmhouse that it forks around, or the stone that says highest motorway on Britain? It’s easy enough to go past and see Abraham isn’t there and pretty much never was.

I don't know though... Maybe the things is that country hasn’t been mapped out enough. When Tom Waits sings “I wish I was in New Orleans, I can see it in my dreams”, it’s the second clause that counts. It’s the imaginary city that has been there for decades in a hundred Dixieland Jazz songs, Louis Armstrong and Doctor John.

So who has mapped out England in song? One or two songs isn’t enough. The Smiths aren’t enough. You need more magical surveyors, people to go and set down their theodolites and tape measures and make something of a place that didn’t exist before, old songs and pop songs, famous songs and half-forgotten songs so that when someone sings about a place you’ve already seen a few of the sights. My Las Vegas is the Las Vegas that is no place for poor boys like Grams Parsons, but has a thousand pretty women waiting for Elvis Presley. I’ve been to Nashville, but that’s a different Nashville to the one on my mum’s vinyl copy of Nashville Skyline that I picked out of a pile in the loft to take to university with me. 

Is London different? I think it is, I think there have been more magical surveyors laying down the city below the city. You’re never too far away from another marker (or a rat), you can find your way through books and songs. Maybe there are hints of a folk tradition to this, though there’s nothing folk about the song below; some of it just happens to take place near another, hugely better, song. In Robinson there’s something about the villain of the piece chewing over his thoughts on the Northern Line that wouldn’t be there on the Metro in Newcastle. I’m a white man living about 10 minutes from the burnt out Hammersmith Palais, westway to the world, and a short cycle ride from the war rooms of GK Chesterton’s Napoleon and where Jerome K. Jerome’s three men (and a dog) started their journey. I DO get rudely awakened by the dustman on a Wednesday and Alan Moore has drawn pentagrams around my workplace to unexplain who Jack the Ripper wasn’t.

I would imagine that this post actually says more about my cultural reference points than anything else.  I hope you enjoy the song a bit, and next time I’ll try and make a bit more effort with the video – i.e. change out of my cycling clothes.