Giddy London
A set of songs for my favourite city
I just got home from a quick trip to London.
London is my favourite city. It has been, ever since I first walked the Millennium Bridge across the Thames, in 2006.
I looked to my left, and saw the great dome and spire of St Paul’s Cathedral towering emphatically god-wards. I looked to my right, and saw the postwar brick shithouse of a power station, since repurposed into a bastion of modern art, squatting solidly along the Southbank. And I got this weird feeling, as though reality had cracked, and the worlds of Mary Poppins and 1984 were no longer separate or even fictional, but sort of collapsing into each other over me. Like a scene from Inception. (Though I couldn’t make that comparison at the time, as it was four years before the film existed.)
Exactly eighteen years later, and my fascination with the city has never faltered. Two days ago, I walked the two miles from my hotel in King’s Cross to Liverpool Street Station. Wandering along the streets, there’d be one whole block of charming little townhouses built in the 1870s. Turn a corner, and there was a hulking block of concrete flats built in the 1970s. A few blocks further were remains of the Roman walls that first set out the original boundaries of the city, 2000-odd years ago. And practically every third lane I turned down was pocked with pits and skeletons of new structures rising up. I grew up in a village too small to merit even a single stoplight, and without a single structure older than 1964, when the original village fell into the water. That a city simultaneously so very old and very alive as London can exist never ceases to amaze me, and the depth and density of this unfolding history I find giddy-making. And I have not seen any other city that can hold a candle to it.
I did live there for a short while. All my pursuits in education, employment, and romance there were a disaster (as one’s early-20’s can be). But none of that seems to sour my enthusiasm for the place, and I am always looking for an excuse to visit. So when Ryanair had €40 roundtrip tickets from my city to that one this month, I decided to grab a seat. Which means I’ve been thinking about London lots this month. So I made a London mix.
There are lots of good songs about London, and that remind me of London. As with last week’s mix, there were many difficult cuts. I decided I had to impose a limit on one song per artist, otherwise the thing would be about half Pogues and a quarter Jam. Which could work for a long mix, but would throw off a memo-sized one.
And unfortunately, I had to cut my favourite London song from the playlist. It’s “Swinging London”, by Hazy Osterwald Jet Set. I have it on a compilation called THE IN-KRAUT Vol. 2 – Hip Shaking Grooves Made In Germany 1967-1974. Sadly, and inexplicably, Vol. 3 is on Spotify, but not Vol. 1 or 2. Much to the world’s loss. But some fellow has put the track on YouTube, if you want to listen to it there. Luckily, I was able to substitute a Magnetic Fields track that’s also called “Swinging London”, which is very different but also fantastic.
Any thoughts about London, or of songs you think ought to have made the mix? I might make another London mix down the line, so if you have a recommendation, please leave it below.
Oh my goodness, giddy mix is right! Well done! Currently fueling my late night work sesh as I ponder my trip to the UK this summer in the background. Hope we can connect there! What immediately came to mid for me is a favorite song by an Aussie band, The Waifs, London Still. Love them!
Back at it (fueled by British punk!)
I would season this playlist with the joyful, loose-limbed calypso of Lord Kitchener. 'London is the Place For Me' opens with the precursor to the chimes of Big Ben being picked out in a minor key on a piano, before gallivanting all over town in high style.
From the London-centric Fox Base Alpha by St Etienne I would choose 'Girl VII' which lists a number of locations around the city, mixed in with destinations from farther afield. Alternatively you could go for 'Judy, Don't You Worry' by St Etienne vocalist, Sarah Cracknell, which opens with the lines:
"September evening's gone
I've done another year
Found a new career
Had to move to London"
'London Town' by Shack appears to be about renting cheap digs in the Capital where the electricity is paid for by coins in a meter.
The Soho Hobo (Tim Arnold – who grew up in the area) conjures up some sprightly West London soul in 'Manners on the Manor'. Arnold's aunt, June Brown, who played Dot Cotton in the long-running London soap opera, EastEnders, paid for his drug rehabilitation among the monks of the Thamkrabok Monastery in Thailand.
Nick Cave – another artist who has waded through drug addiction – claims to have often gone to church before scoring heroin. He documents this period of his life in the song 'Brompton Oratory'.
'Down in the Effra,' by The Effras recalls an apocryphal Victorian story of a coffin falling through the bottom of its grave and into the River Effra that flows underneath West Norwood Cemetery, and thereafter being carried into the River Thames.
The video for Blur's 'For Tomorrow' opens with Damon Albarn floating on his back in the Thames (I am sure this is a homage to a film but I can't recall what it could be). Graham Coxon takes a running kick at a litter bin in Trafalgar Square, scattering pigeons, while Albarn muses “London's so nice back in your seamless rhymes, but we're lost on the Westway.”
'England' by The National ponders, from across the Atlantic, on the whereabouts of a love lost “somewhere in London”.
'London Can You Wait,' trades in the overwrought, back of hand to the brow angst Gene did so well on their first two albums
For those who are feeling estranged from the city, there is the jaded 'London' by Smoke City or the vitriolic motorik groove of The Fall's 'Leave the Capitol'.
Finally there is 'Love Letter to London' by Luke Haines, who casts a disdainful eye upon those who used the city as a playground when they were young before moving out to the provinces.