The stories behind London's greatest songs, the locations that inspired them and

how to trace their origins

Think London, think music, think Swinging Sixties. But the muse didn’t start and stop there. The city has long been the subject of popular song, and it continues to inspire musicians of all genres to this day.

At SideStory, we love scratching beneath the surface. A SideStory Experience with one of our Insiders is a great way to find out more about the goings on behind the city’s cultural trends, while here on the SideStory Journal, we aim to offer a little more – a few ‘side stories’ to accompany your order, as it were.

We’ve created this article for those who are interested in the stories behind the songs of London. It’s an ongoing project, and we’ll keep adding to it over the coming months. If there are London songs you think we’ve missed, reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter and we’ll add them in as soon as we can. The only rules is that the song must be about a specific place in London that we can add to the map, or inextricably linked to a certain London building or landmark.

I Was There (At the Coronation)

Young Tiger (1953)

Marble Arch, Central London

A story-song for London if ever there was one, Young Tiger’s documenting of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation verges on out-and-out reportage. The singer describes taking up his position at Marble Arch the night before the procession, spending the night ‘blowing freezing and cold’ until his ‘stoic stance soon paid dividends/ for I saw them coming around the bend.’ It’s a great track full of roadside observations – like a snapshot from the thronging crowds.

Tiger’s life story in itself is well worth investigating. One of a number of calypso musicians who arrived in London in the 1940s, he documented the struggles of living in the capital as an immigrant with wit and humour, entertaining his community by singing about situations they’d immediately recognise, set to a musical style they’d grown up with. For more, dig out London is the Place for Me – a wonderful collection released by Honest Jon’s Records of Ladbroke Grove.

Waterloo Sunset

The Kinks (1967)

Waterloo Bridge, Central London

The Kinks’ main man, Ray Davies, has talked many times about the images he sees when he thinks of ‘Waterloo Sunset’, arguably the most romantic of all London songs. He has described being hospitalised at St Thomas Hospital, on the banks of the Thames, aged 13 – watching the sunset on the houses of parliament. He has also talked about the 1951 Festival of Britain, and how his father explained that the Skylon Tower was ‘meant to be the future‘. However, the endearing lyrics about Terry and Julie crossing the river, ‘where they feel safe and sound’ were apparently autobiographical, recalling his pre-fame days when he’d walk along Waterloo Bridge with his teen girlfriend. It remains one of London’s favourite songs nearly 50 years on.

Itchycoo Park

The Small Faces (1967)

Valentine’s Park, Ilford

As stories behind London songs go, ‘Itchycoo Park’ requires a certain amount of detective work to unearth – not because it has been lost in time, but because members of The Small Faces were unable to agree on its origin. Ronnie Lane remembered reading a leaflet about Oxford’s dreaming spires that clearly influenced the opening line. Band manager Tony Calder claimed there was no such place as Itchycoo Park, and that any references to parkland that the band may have used in interviews were made up, to throw the BBC off rumours that it was a ‘drugs song’.

However, in his later years, frontman Steve Marriott recalled the precise location as, ‘Valentine’s Park in Ilford. We used to go there and get stung by wasps [hence the invented word, ‘itchycoo’]. It’s what we used to call it.’

Baker Street

Gerry Rafferty (1978)

Baker Street, Central London

In 1975, Gerry Rafferty found himself mired in the dissolution of his former band, Stealers Wheel. ‘Everybody was suing each other,’ he told The Daily Telegraph, ‘so I spent a lot of time on the overnight train from Glasgow to London for meetings with lawyers. I knew a guy who lived in a little flat off Baker Street. We’d sit and chat or play guitar there through the night.’

The song, with its distinctive sax solo (sadly not played by TV legend Bob Hollness, despite what the persistent rumours suggest), carries both the devil-may-care feeling of a night out in central London, and the weariness of the morning after. The good news for Rafferty (and his listeners) is that, by the final verse, the legal issues are sorted out, ‘the sun is shinning, it’s a new morning, and you’re going home.’

Down in the Tube Station at Midnight

The Jam (1978)

St John’s Wood Station, Central London

Originally a prose poem, Paul Weller once explained that the song came from his ‘insecurity and paranoia about being in London’. As a youngster, he had always travelled from (and returned to) the relative safety of Woking, 20 minutes down the train line from Waterloo into leafy Surrey. As exciting as he imagined the capital to be, the scale and volatility was something that he felt keenly, much as most teenagers do on their first solo visit to the Big Smoke.

In an interview with the Scotts Blog, Weller explained that he saw this song as ‘not dissimilar’ to the work done by 1960s pop artists. ‘It’s picking up on the mundane, the everyday things and putting them into a different setting… the very, very ordinary feelings, emotions or details that, once in a song, you hear in a different way.’

The track tells the violent story of a loving husband attacked in a tube station on his way home, but it has no particular reference to any particular place in London (other than Wormwood Scrubs, where his assailants may or may not have come from). However, the sound effects that top and tail the recording were taped down in the tube station at St John’s Wood, which is why we’ve added that location to our map.

Of course, this is not the only music connection that this station boasts, as it is also a stone’s throw from Abbey Road Recording Studios. Quite a beat-driven corner of town, this one.

London Calling

The Clash (1979)

St Augustine’s Church, Highbury

It’s difficult to situate The Clash’s ode to apocalyptic London geographically, as it isn’t associated with one specific location. For the purposes of this map, we’ve gone with St Augustine’s Church, the hall of which was once Wessex Studios, home to the recording sessions that resulted in this and many other classics.

The thinking behind the song itself seems to have been somewhat prescient. While the ‘nuclear error’ that Joe Strummer frets about was related to a 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, the refrain that sees London drowning and the singer bemoaning the fact ‘I live by the river’ had to do with his concerns that the Thames might one day flood and destroy the city. Green activists have held this up as an example of Strummer’s support of their movement, but it seems the singer felt that things on Planet Earth were generally heading downhill.

‘I read about ten news reports in one day calling down all variety of plagues on us,’ he told Melody Maker in 1988. ‘We felt that we were struggling, about to slip down a slope or something, grasping with our fingernails. And there was no one there to help us.’

Electric Avenue

Eddy Grant (1982)

Electric Avenue, Brixton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKJLbv5khLg

Electric Avenue is actually the name of a road in Brixton, notable for being the first market in London to receive electricity – in the 1880s, about 100 years before Eddy Grant recorded this track. However, Grant’s song is set firmly in the 1980s, written as a reaction to the Brixton riots of 1981, when a combination of unemployment and civic unrest exploded on the streets of South London.

In the song’s lyrics, Grant is firmly on the side of the Afro-Caribbean community, seeing them as soldiers and warriors struggling to buy food for their children in a consumerist society. Probably the only song featuring the word ‘multiplication’ to have reached the Top 5 on the British and American charts (we’re happy to stand corrected if you can prove us wrong.)

West End Girls

Pet Shop Boys (1985)

Neal Street, Soho

The story goes that Neil Tennant began writing this 1985 Pet Shop Boys hit ‘about rough boys getting a bit of posh’ after watching a gangster movie at his cousin’s house in Nottingham. Apparently the lyrics ‘sometimes you’re better off dead/ there’s a gun in your hand and it’s pointing at your head’ came to him in the twilight moments before sleep.

Whatever its origins, the singer has said that it’s essentially a song about Soho. ‘When I first moved down to London,’ he told Time Out a few years ago, ‘we used to get all dressed up in our David Bowie imitation clothes, and clatter down the staircase at Seven Sisters tube station on to the brand new Victoria Line, and go down to Shadowramas on Neal Street. And that whole thing of being a northerner and coming down to London: I always had that feeling, and still do, of escaping into the West End.’

Piccadilly Palare

Morrissey (1990)

Piccadilly Circus, Central London

Morrissey, light-fingered in borrowing from his influences as he always was, is thought to have returned to 1960’s radio show ‘Round the Horne’ for this 1990 track. The show starred Kenneth Williams as one of two homosexuals who frequently engaged in ‘palare’ – a London-based street slang from the early ’60s, used as a code at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Several palare phrases are audible throughout the song, including ‘bona’ (which translates as ‘good’), ‘drag’ (‘clothes’), ‘vada’ (‘to look at’), ‘eek’ (‘face’) and ‘riah’ (‘hair’). That Morrissey set this ode to rent-boy life in Piccadilly is no mere accident of alliteration either. Eros, whose statue stands at the centre of Piccadilly Circus, was considered a protector of homosexual men, and in more recent years has ‘overseen’ the #FreedomToKiss campaign for Pride in London.

For Tomorrow

Blur (1993)

Primrose Hill, Camden

While Damon Albarn is the only member of Blur that can claim to be a genuine Londoner, the band have become synonymous with the city, penning odes to the capital throughout their career – from ‘London Loves’ on Parklife right through to the 2012 single, ‘Under the Westway’. The most obvious (and, in our opinion, glorious), however, is 1993’s ‘For Tomorrow’, an impassioned singalong that has been an indie culture anthem for the last two decades.

The song is partially set in Primrose Hill, a part of the Borough of Camden where members of the band were known to live and socialise in the mid-1990s. While the poetic lyrics are largely abstract, most famously they serenade the view from the top of the hill (‘it’s windy there and the view’s so nice’). These lines were painted on the path leading to the summit by a fan a number of years ago, and they remain a visible part of the local culture to this day. Albarn has said in interviews how much it delights him that his song has its own little tourist spot.

The final verse finds ‘Jim’, the song’s protagonist, going to a flat in Emperor’s Gate. This, it turns out, is where Albarn’s parents lived in the 1960s. As it happens, they lived next door to one of The Beatles – a fact that the young Damon always found impossibly glamourous – and so the location suggested itself as somewhere poetic and worthy of inclusion in a song. Not that Jim’s life is portrayed as particularly attractive. It’s this character, after all, that coins the phrase that became the title of the album: ‘Modern life, well it’s rubbish.’

Time for Heroes

The Libertines (2003)

Trafalgar Square, Central London

To Londoners in the know, The Libertines will always be associated with Holloway Road – The Boogaloo pub next to Highgate Station in particular. However, one of their most famous songs took things to a more central location, detailing the London May Day riots that exploded in Trafalgar Square back in 2000.

A song from a more hedonistic time, Pete Doherty, the principal songwriter behind this track, recalled that the song was, ‘written in a stupor, recorded in a stupor and performed in a stupor.’ However, his sense of injustice was perhaps in better shape than he was. Recalling the riots and his artistic response to them, he has said, ‘I felt like there were so many things wrong, and I didn’t know where to channel it. For that moment, I was with people who believed the same thing.’ And the people would seem to agree – it remains a mainstay of the band’s set to this day.

Hometown Glory

Adele (2007)

Norwood Road, West Norwood

The UK’s biggest-selling artist of the past decade, Adele hails from the South of the river – West Norwood, to be precise – which is where she wrote her first ‘protest song’. Not that it protests against anything, or anyone, other than her mother. The singer claims she wrote it as an 18-year-old in 10 minutes, as her mother tried to persuade her to leave the area and to go to university. ‘I played it to her as a protest song,’ she told The Observer, ‘and said this is why I’m staying.’

She has also said that the song was, in part, inspired by a drunken night out in Central London (how many London songs start this way, we wonder?) Talking to Q Magazine in 2008, on the occasion of the song’s release, she explained: ‘I was really pissed, wobbling all over the place. This French woman comes up to me and goes, “You need help, dar-leeeng?” And I went, “Nah, it’s me hometown, luv.”‘ And that, it would seem, is all the inspiration you need to write the song that launched one of the most successful pop careers of modern times.

Green Fields

The Good the Bad & the Queen (2007)

Goldhawk Road, West London

Damon Albarn, a repeated writer of London songs, first wrote this beautiful little ditty following a night out with friends, ‘somewhere on the Goldhawk Road’ – just as the opening lyrics suggest he did. ‘It was one of those rare occasions when you pick up a guitar and it takes as long to write it as it does to sing it,’ he told the NME at the time of its release, although the demo that accompanied the single as a b-side appears to date from 1998, meaning the song took at least nine years to gestate.

‘It was many years ago and Alex (James) was hanging out with Marianne Faithful,’ Albarn told The Sun at the time. ‘One drunk, messed-up night with them I ended up on the Goldhawk Road in somebody’s little demo studio. I dont remember writing this song but apparently I just sat down and sang this thing into a tape recorder, melodically and structurally. Then I woke up in the morning not really too sure about what happened the night before. A few years later, people came to me, going: ‘Marianne played me this demo you did and I really love it, and I was going, ‘Really?”

Indeed, the version on the demo, with lyrics somewhat different from the final release, did find its way onto a Marianne Faithful album in 2005, when it appeared as ‘Last Song’ on the album Before the Poison.

Trellick Tower

Emmy the Great (2011)

Trellick Tower, North Kensington

The most recent song on our SideStory list of London songs so far, the gorgeous ‘Trellick Tower’, drips with the sadness of heartache. We caught up with Emma-Lee Moss recently, and – although she was promoting her new album Second Love – she was kind enough to recall situation in which she wrote the song.

‘I used to live a few streets away from Trellick Tower,’ she explained, ‘and I was fascinated by it. I find all Brutalist buildings incredibly compelling, it looks like the future imagined by the past. I once brought a friend from New York on a sort of pilgrimage to go see it, and she was like, “No offence, but that’s ugly.” I think maybe Londoners have some kind of secret collective appreciation for places like the Barbican and Trellick Tower.’