Music

It seems that the council is not only pursuing a draconic stance on licence extensions (they aren’t granting any) but are pretty quick to consider closing existing bars down.

‘I feel persecuted by Westminster Council and I feel my business is being taken away from me,’ says Daniel Shell, owner of Paddington Street’s LowLife bar.

Shell used to have five staff before the council asked him to turn down his music limiter (the level at which the volume is deemed acceptable) no less than eight times. This has impacted on his business: he now runs a one-man-show and no longer has live DJs because ‘they can’t hear what they’re mixing.’

When the new licensing act was introduced, LowLife applied for a midnight licence and was turned down. They still only serve until 11. But Westminster has now placed the bar ‘under review’ which means LowLife might soon become no-life on the grounds it is a public nuisance: over the last year 38 complaints have been lodged to the council, predominantly from the residential flats located directly above the bar. ‘When we opened, we wanted a bar for residents, friendly staff, great cocktails and nightly DJs,’ says Shell, who launched the bar in 2003. ‘Music was always really important – but never in a banging it out way.’

When neighbours in the apartments above were considering moving in, Shell told them they would be living above a lively bar. But they went ahead with their purchase only to lodge dozens of noise complaints. Westminster Council admits to being ‘firm as a rule’ over the music limit. ‘Our view is that we’ve reached saturation levels,’ said a council spokesperson. ‘If you buy a flat above a bar, you know it’s going to be noisy. Now the music is just ridiculous. Before there were open DJ nights for locals to have a go. Now, because of the limiter, when the bar is semi-full you can’t hear the music. For me, this is a great place and it’ll be a real shame if it goes,’ said Tristram Bray, a LowLife regular.

Other venues are also suffering. The Hub in Regent’s Park was granted permission by Westminster for live music on the condition that it had a noise limiter, and only three performers at any one time. Bizarre, considering the venue is about 400 metres from the nearest house. And the problem isn’t confined to Westminster. La Brocca in Hampstead and the Old China Hand in Clerkenwell have all had to cancel musicians following difficulties with the new licence.

‘Bars that didn’t have live music authorisation prior to the act now have to make a costly application to their local authority, advertise in their local press, are often required to provide architects’ scale plans, install double glazing and a noise limiter, recruit bouncers and sometimes deal with a public hearing,’ said Hamish Birchall, former advisor to the Musicians’ Union. ‘The government is always telling people how much better this act is and the Musicians’ Union says it’s seen a boom in live music. That might be the case for commercial rock gigs or festivals, but live music is being killed off for many small independent bars.’

Support LowLife by writing to: Licensing Division, Westminster City Council, 14th Floor, Westminster City Hall, Victoria St, SW1 or email: licensing.vswl@westminster.gov.uk

Disagree with our list of London's musical gems? Air your opinion or debate/argue with other readers

1 Streets Of London Ralph McTell [read interview] [download]
2 Waterloo Sunset The Kinks [read interview]
3 God Save The Queen Sex Pistols [read more] [download]
4 Sheila Jamie T [read interview] [download]
5 Peter the Painter Ian Dury [read more]
6 I Was There (At The Coronation) Young Tiger [read interview]
7 Has It Come To This? The Streets [read more] [download]
8 Down In The Tube Station At Midnight The Jam [read interview] [download]
9 Kidz Plan B [read interview] [download]
10 Itchycoo Park The Small Faces [read feature] [download]

11 Oh Happy Day Spiritualized [read interview] [download]
12 London Belongs To Me Saint Etienne [read interview]
13 Mile End Pulp [read more] [download]
14 Gertcha! Chas & Dave [read interview] [download]
15 For Tomorrow Blur [read interview] [download]
16 A Foggy Day Ella Fitzgerald [read more] [download]
17 22 Grand Job The Rakes [read interview] [download]
18 West End Girls Pet Shop Boys [read more] [download]
19 London’s Burning The Clash [read more] [download]
20 Sunny Goodge Street Donovan [read more] [download]

21 K Hole Ali Love [read interview]
22 Soho Bert Jansch and John Renbourn [read interview] [download]
23 London Is The Place For Me Lord Kitchener [read more]
24 Primrose Hill John & Beverly Martyn [read more] [download]
25 Born Slippy Underworld [read interview] [download]
26 London Town Light Of The World [read more]
27 What A Mouth Tommy Steele [read more]
28 I Luv U Dizzee Rascal [read more] [download]
29 Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner Hubert Gregg [read more] [download]
30 You Can’t Always Get What You Want The Rolling Stones [read more] [download]

31 A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square Judy Campbell [read more] [download]
32 London Dungeon The Misfits [read interview]
33 A13, Trunk Road To The Sea Billy Bragg [read interview] [download]
34 I Can See For Miles The Who [read more] [download]
35 LDN Lily Allen [read feature] [download]
36 Albion Babyshambles [read more] [download]
37 Knocked ‘Em In The Old Kent Road Harry Champion [read more] [download]
38 A Rainy Night In Soho The Pogues [read more] [download]
39 London The Smiths [read more] [download]
40 14 Hour Technicolour Dream The Syn [read more] [download]

41 Up The Junction Squeeze [read interview] [download]
42 Lambeth Walk Noel Gay/Douglas Furber [read more] [download]
43 Swinging London Town Girls Aloud [read more] [download]
44 Consider Yourself Lionel Bart [read more] [download]
45 Cockney Translation Smiley Culture [read more]
46 London Pride Noël Coward [read more] [download]
47 Baker Street Gerry Rafferty [read more] [download]
48 London London Caetano Veloso [read interview] [download]
49 Punky Reggae Party Bob Marley [read more] [download]
50 Herculean The Good, The Bad and The Queen [read interview]

1 Ralph McTell

1 Streets Of London Ralph McTell [download]
Post-war poverty, drugs, love and redemption – the most recorded London song of all time isn’t what you think it is
‘I grew up in post-war Croydon. I was quite a sensitive little boy and poverty was all around us, but because it was so common you didn’t notice unless somebody got something that you didn’t get, like pennies to spend or a new bike. There was no one that I knew that even had a car. So I was never aware of that poverty, until you saw someone who was worse off than you. I used to go to Saturday morning pictures at the end of Surrey Street, which was a busy bustling market, and collect boxes for firewood while they were clearing away the stalls. But late at night there was this old chap who used to wander up, kicking up the papers and picking up the rubbish from the market, just the odd bit of stuff that had been dumped, and it was an image that I always remembered.

‘When I was a busker in Paris in 1965, when we were coming home from our little jaunts in the Latin Quarter, there were a lot of very impoverished people – they call them clochards – sat over the hot-air gratings in the Metro, and I formed this idea of writing a song about those people. The time was right for that sort of song because of the protest movement and that social awareness that was apparent in all songs. So I started writing “The Streets Of Paris”. But I thought: Wait a minute, these images are everywhere. So I wrote it as “Streets Of London”, to a tune that I’d already composed.

‘After I got back from Paris, I offered it to a very good friend, a singer called Derek Brimstone. I scrawled it out on the proverbial napkin, in a pub somewhere in Fulham, and after a few months, he rang me up and said “ ’Ere, Ralph, you gotta do that song. It’s going down a storm!”

‘I thought it wasn’t quite complete, so I wrote a fourth verse and started doing it and Derek was right. The reaction to it was absolutely sensational. But I had to be persuaded to record it by my producer Gus Dudgeon. He begged me to put it on my second album, and I didn’t want to. But after the very last track for that was recorded, he said “Just do one pass for me, Ralph.” The band went to the pub and I sat there and did one pass on it. There was a cover version within four days of its release and it went round the world in a week [at one point the single was selling 90,000 copies a day].

There are now 212 or 214 cover versions – it’s been covered by everyone from Roger Whittaker to Sinéad O’Connor to the Sex Pistols. It’s sung in schools, and it’s used in English lessons all over Europe, even though it’s bad grammatically! A friend was hitch-hiking around the Himalayas ten years ago, and they asked him to sing them a song, and in return they sang him a song in English that they’d learnt from another hitch-hiker – it was “Streets Of London”. I don’t know how or why it happened, but there you go.

‘I have to say that the real important thing for me about that song, and in that song, is that I had a friend I was busking with in Paris and he was fascinated by drugs. He drifted into heroin and became seriously addicted and in a very poor state rather rapidly. In one of his half-hearted attempts to come off, we were talking and I was really trying to lay it on him. I said to him, “Why d’you fuckin’ do this, man? You’re killing everybody who loves you, you’re driving us all up the wall.” And he said, “Well, why should I change?”

In the end, this feeling of alienation, that he couldn’t be approached, was the key to the song. It wouldn’t have been written if it was just about homeless people, it was written about a mate of mine. So that “How can you tell me you’re lonely?” was the important thing, and these verses were the examples to him. When you see somebody worse off than you are you feel compassion, and you feel ashamed for feeling whatever you might feel, and that was the whole point. But the strangest thing of all about that intentioned message to a disconsolate, alienated fucked-up pal was that everyone thought it was a song about homelessness, which is a very strange twist.

‘I’ve always written slightly obliquely like that. But in ‘Streets Of London’, it’s so graphic, the images of the four characters in the song, starting off with the bloke in the market, then the old lady, then the lonely man in an all-night café and then the forgotten hero. There are four London characters there, but the central thing is the alienated individual who hasn’t realised, or needs to have it explained, that there are people much more alienated with no chance of being rehabilitated.

‘I was only 22 or something when I wrote it. In the end I wrote my friend another song, after he died, called “Song For Martin”. It’s about people who have that simple do-gooder idea, that you can help an addict. You can’t really. If he doesn’t want to be right, you won’t be able to help him. But that wasn’t for another… oh, 15 years or so.’
Available on ‘Spiral Staircase’ album (1969)

9 Plan B

2 Waterloo Sunset The Kinks
No it’s not number one!
‘I used to go past Waterloo every day on my way to Croydon Art School; when I was a kid my father took me to the Festival Of Britain; my first real girlfriend, we walked by the Thames; I was in hospital at the old St Thomas’s and my room had a balcony looking out over the river. All the imagery comes from memories like that. Although the song was supposed to be about the end of Merseybeat, called “Liverpool Sunset”. But when I was writing the lyrics I started to think about Waterloo and what it symbolised for me.

‘I also come from this strange family of older sisters. One of them was my surrogate mother, who I lived with, and it was really a song for her generation: people who lived through WWII and the aspirations they had. Terry and Julie could have been Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, but it was written for a generation who thought Britain could have been something else, something great again. Obviously my generation knew that was not to be. It’s also an acknowledgement that all great places have a dark edge. That’s what makes any great metropolis. When I lived in central London I used to cycle down there at the weekends. I still get a nice feeling down there by the river. My bridge was the one next to Waterloo, where the train goes over the river and it’s got a walking part to it. I used to look at Waterloo from there because that’s where I got my connection to Croydon.

‘I recently worked with Johnny Borrell from Razorlight and I like a track he did called “Don’t Go Back To Dalston”. American music always refers to Tennessee or Tallahassee. It’s quite brave to sing about Charing Cross and Dalston in the same way. But there’s nothing wrong with referencing where you’re from.’ Ray Davies
Available on ‘Something Else’ album (1967). Ray Davies plays the Royal Albert hall, Oct 23, 24.

3 God Save The Queen Sex Pistols [download]
We mean it, maaan!
The New York Dolls first gatecrashed Malcolm McLaren’s consciousness when they paid a visit to his Let It Rock boutique in 1972. ‘We arrived at a time when the music scene was dominated by all these cookie-cutter bands who weren’t really saying anything,’ remembers Dolls singer David Johansen. ‘There was a busload of Teds from, like, Glasgow or somewhere in the shop. We didn’t know that they were meant to be these tough guys. They looked like a gang of queens or something. So when they elbowed us, we elbowed them back.’ McLaren was entranced and decided that the band’s androgynous exoticism, street gang aura and debauched nihilism ‘rang all the bells that I wished pop culture had’.

A couple of years later McLaren was in New York, designing clothes and stage sets for the band (red patent leather and a hammer-and-sickle backdrop) and briefly managing them. The arrangement proved short-lived but a seed had been sown. Now all he needed was his own crew of snotty, combustible, teenage Rimbauds. Fellow Dolls lovers Jones, Cook and Matlock were already in place; soon John Lydon arrived and any semblance of control over the whole enterprise that McLaren may ever have had was challenged and eventually vanquished for ever.

This short, chaotic and eventually tragic trajectory climaxed with ‘God Save The Queen’, one of the most lucid, perfectly pitched and downright savage pop singles ever recorded. All the same, the song meant little to Johansen. ‘I remember hearing it and thinking it was a good song. But I didn’t really listen to punk rock. I was more into blues at the time.’
Available on ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ reissue (1997)

4 Sheila Jamie T [download]
Discovering the romance of the Smoke
‘There’s something kind of sad about the way John Betjeman talks about London in the verse that I sample on “Sheila”. He’s chatting about this old girlfriend and how they used to walk the streets of London and it sounds fragile and romantic. I like the way he’s an old man talking about it and he’s almost pining for olde England. Everyone mentions the streets and the dirt in London, but he thinks about churches and old buildings and the beauty of the place. It’s a side of London that I’m not used to hearing about because everyone complains about it so much.’ Jamie T
Hear it at www.myspace.com/jamietwimbledon

5 Peter the Painter Ian Dury
From one London legend to another
‘I first met Ian at Walthamstow School Of Art in about 1961. He went to the Royal College Of Art in ’63 and I got a job there in ’64, and taught him through the rest of his time.

‘He wasn’t a cockney. His mum was quite a middle-class educationalist, and his aunts were both teachers. He was a very intelligent, well educated kid. He wasn’t a professional cockney like Danny Baker. He just had an enormous love of London. He was driven by curiosity – about London, about the other musicians, about music generally and about rock ’n’ roll.

‘I always followed with interest what he was doing: his painting, his photography. Artistically I was doing quite a lot of graphics at that point, but if I couldn’t do something, I’d pass it on to Ian. So there are jobs I might’ve done for the Sunday Times that I know Ian did. There was a flat going near me at that time in Chiswick, which Ian took, so we were neighbours; I’d pop in and see him quite often. I remember him inventing the name Kilburn And The High Roads. I saw a lot of the Kilburn gigs, right through to early Blockheads.

‘I had a show at the Tate in 1983 and I asked him to write the theme music for it. The idea of an art exhibition having a theme song was a strange one, in 1983. He wrote a song called “Peter The Painter”, which was on the Music Students album [“4,000 Weeks Holiday”], if you want to check it out. He’d already written a song called “Percy The Poet”, so “Peter The Painter” was a companion to it. When I was at the National Gallery much later (he was unwell by then), he also wrote the music.

‘He was a great poet, wasn’t he? In the same vein as Betjemen or Roger McGough. He used words beautifully, because he was interested in words. He always had dictionaries around him. He loved words. I really admired his portrayal of characters in his songs, he could give you a sense of a person in very few lyrical brushstrokes. So it was always great lyrics, great musicians and a great show. He wore different costumes… I remember one show where he did magic tricks right through. I miss him, you know, there’s nobody quite like him any more.’
Sir Peter Blake
Available on ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Best Of Ian Dury’ compilation (2005).
Peter Blake painted the cover for John Peel tribute album ‘Right Time, Wrong Speed’, out now.

6 I Was There (At The Coronation) Young Tiger
Calypso tribute to Liz’s big day
‘It’s in the tradition of another coronation calypso, “Reign Of The Georges” by Lord Executor. My record label wanted to give the public an idea of how a calypsonian composes on the spot, so I took the information about where the coronation would be and what would happen from the newspapers. Actually, it was recorded weeks before the coronation, so it could be released the day after.’ Young Tiger
Available on ‘London Is The Place For Me’ album (1958)

7 Has It Come To This? The Streets [download]
Hanging around McDonald’s never sounded so good
If you weren’t a big Travis fan, 2000 was a bad year for music. With drum ’n’ bass appearing on Abbey National ads and UK garage becoming a bling-obsessed cul de sac, there certainly wasn’t much to represent the daily grind of the average yout’. Released on London’s leading garage label of the day, Locked On, the then-teenage Mike Skinner’s drop-out calls to arms re-energised the capital’s music. Rather than trying to compete with the glitzy million-dollar R&B bangers coming over from the States, The Streets’ refreshingly lo-tech marriage of garage beats, dubwise bass and housey samples reflected the mix of musics ruling clubland at that time, and still sounds fresh today. The single broke Skinner as a chart artist in 2001 and set the scene for everything that followed, from grime to dubstep to – yes – Lily Allen. If the ‘hug a hoody’ campaign ever needs a theme tune, this should be it.
Available on ‘Original Pirate Material’ album (2001)

8 Down In The Tube Station At Midnight The Jam [download]
The ultimate urban paranoia anthem
‘It came about in rehearsals, from my bassline, then Paul put these spasmodic guitar stabs across it, and came in with a fantastic lyric. I think he described it as a short television play transposed into a three-minute pop song. The story is self-explanatory, but it has these evocative images that stay with you – the British Rail posters may have long gone, but violence continues today. It’s a very graphic lyric, it’s frightening as well. It was straight to the point so it was incredible in terms of the commercial success we achieved. In those days, Tony Blackburn thought we should be about singing about love and all that, not violence and day-to-day issues. Bearing all that in mind, it did incredibly well in terms of chart success – it got to about number 15.’ Bruce Foxton, The Jam
Available on ‘All Mod Cons’ album (1978)

9 Kidz Plan B [download]
Scathing indictment of teen violence inspired by the killing of Damilola Taylor
‘I got kicked outta school, and I spent the last year in a PRU [pupil rehabilitation unit]. Half of the school was for people who were truant or bullied and the other half was people who bullied other people. I never bullied anyone, I just used to have scraps – I had a short temper. But some of these kids there, it wasn’t that they had a short temper, it was that they were fuckin’ little cunts. Their whole attitude towards life… they didn’t value it, they had no respect for women, they thought there was nothing wrong with sticking a knife in someone. What I hated about it most was that there was just no getting through to them. No one older could tell ’em nothing. The only people they looked up to was gangstas and shit. I thought: the only thing these kids seem to listen to is violent aggressive music that has no context, no reason for being what it is, except for just talking about killing people. I knew the only way to get through to these kids was to make them think I was like them. I thought: I can’t write a peace song – “Everybody put your knives down, stop stabbin’ each other, let’s all hold hands and be cool.” So I wanted to write a song where initially they think I’m glamourising what they’re doing and, in the process of the song, slowly strip down this character and show his weaknesses and how ignorant he is. I know violence is exciting and all that shit, but at the end of the day, it’s not right. There is no excuse for being a cunt.’ Plan B
Available on ‘Who Needs Actions When You Got Words’ album (2006)

10 Small Faces

10 Itchycoo Park The Small Faces [download]
Classic celebration of the joys of stoned park life and the first Britpop single – which paved the way for London’s indie label revolution
Famed for mixing protest and enterprise with music, London has a rich, proud history of independent record labels. In 1967, The Small Faces released psych-mod anthem ‘Itchycoo Park’ through Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records; this celebratory ode to getting stoned in Little Ilford Park, Manor House, was the first record in the UK to be banned for overt drug references, although the group ultimately lied their way out of it.

From the ’60s onwards, London has seen an explosion of independent labels, fuelled by a fast-changing youth culture the major labels couldn’t (and still can’t) keep up with. During punk, ‘God Save The Queen’ was released on the then independent Virgin Records, while Stiff, Chiswick and Rough Trade popped up to encourage the likes of Cherry Red and Beggars Banquet, which thrived during the ’80s post-punk and new wave years. Scenes such as acid house (Boy’s Own Recordings, XL) and drum ’n’ bass existed almost exclusively on indies, and there’s even been the odd unexpected Number One, such as Wiiija Records’ (named after its W11 1JA postcode) Cornershop hit, ‘Brimful Of Asha’, in 1998. What makes these labels so special is their individual personalities – each one is like a friend who recommends cool records to you.

‘Stiff had a lot of my favourite bands when I was a nipper,’ recalls Matt Jacob, co-founder of Islington’s Memphis Industries, home to The Go! Team and Field Music. ‘I liked their recklessness, which is probably not something to aspire to. In terms of DIY attitude and enjoying the process of releasing records, they don’t come much better.’

‘My favourite has got to be Rough Trade,’ says James Endeacott, the man who signed The Libertines to Rough Trade and is now head of 1965 Records. ‘That’s the label, as a kid, that I looked up to and I was very fortunate to work there. They’re the benchmark of any great label, whether it’s in London or not. The way they operate and the way they’re so eclectic – they put out folk, reggae, anything – they give a real sense of London and it’s run by people who are London.’

Both Endeacott and Jacob are heavily involved in the capital’s current indie label boom which is throwing up some of the most exciting music London has heard for years – even if Endeacott’s label is part-owned by Columbia, a familiar scenario as the majors attempt to keep their fingers on the pulse (see also 679 Recordings and B-Unique).

‘There are literally hundreds in London,’ says Jacob. ‘Starting a label is a pretty alluring idea. But it’s the hardest thing in the world to keep it going. I heard recently that 94 per cent of labels lose money, so there’s probably only a handful in London that you could classify as successful.’

But if a label is going to succeed, London is the right place to start. Bands, journalists, PRs, DJs, promoters – all part of a firm industry infrastructure and a thrilling music scene – are drawn here.

‘It helps that the media’s here,’ says Endeacott. ‘But London’s also one of the most exciting cities in the world. There’s so much going on and it attracts bands. They come here and they want to go and look at the art; look at the big buildings; see the great bands.’
This abundance of amazing clubs, galleries, green spaces and people is, perhaps, London’s crucial advantage –it’s all too beautiful, as a wise man once said. Chris Parkin

14 Chas & Dave

11 Oh Happy Day Spiritualized [download]
Live gospel shoegaze-fest
‘It’s really London, isn’t it? Someone said that was our London album the other day and I was like, “Fuck, I’ve never thought about it like that.” London’s just got it. It’s the only city where the good, the bad and ugly hit up against each other; the funk and the city is still there in the centre. Especially when you compare it to American cities where they take away certain elements and you lose the drugs and the prostitution and all the low-rent stuff. I’m not saying we should make things dangerous, but with those elements comes something really exciting.’ Jason Pierce, Spiritualized
Available on ‘Live At The Royal Albert Hall’ album (1998)

12 London Belongs To Me Saint Etienne
All the joy of leaving home in less time than it takes the kettle to boil
‘When we got together we’d all just literally moved to London, out of the suburbs into somewhere more central. Me and Pete [Wiggs] had this basement flat off Dartmouth Park Hill [near Highgate], which was really dark. It wasn’t grim, but I’m glad we moved out of it. That was what really inspired the song, just the rush of excitement when you first move to London and get a flat of your own. What it makes me think of is walking the length of Parkway; when you get to the end you’re in Regents Park, and there’s a path across the road which has willow trees on it – it’s mentioned in the lyrics. Around that time, when the band started I had this crappy temp job at this boring office block on Marylebone Road,where I was doing photocopies all day. I’d walk across the park to get to work, and I really, really wanted to sit down under one of these trees and just spend the day reading. I still get that feeling walking around London now. If you’re walking from King’s Cross to Farringdon, you’re effectively walking on top of the River Fleet – I love the idea of that. You don’t really get that so much in Croydon.’ Bob Stanley
Available on ‘Foxbase Alpha’ album (1990)

13 Mile End Pulp [download]
Jarvis meets some real East End villains
It was first heard on the soundtrack to ‘Trainspotting’ before being tucked away on the B-side of ‘Something Changed’, but ‘Mile End’, which documents a traumatic stay in a piss-sodden tower block in the East End, is one of Jarvis Cocker’s funniest and best-observed songs. Every inch the wide-eyed northerner, he’s baffled by a place where ‘nobody wants to be your friend, ’cos you’re not from round here like them’, before making the slightly controversial allegation that ‘the pearly king of the Isle Of Dogs feels up children in the bogs’. We’re sure he doesn’t really.
Available on ‘This Is Hardcore’ reissue (2006)

14 Gertcha! Chas & Dave [download]
Punk rock, cockernee style
‘Is this the first ever punk single? Ha ha! I think so. We were at EMI around the same time as the Sex Pistols, so who knows? We sang “Wertcha” initially. It was a phrase we remembered from childhood, something yer dad would say before he slapped you one. It was part of what we called “rockney”: singing rock ’n’ roll about things we understood in our own accents. By the time we recorded it as “Gertcha!”, we changed one lyric: “When me rock ’n’ roll records wake him up” became “When me punk rock records wake him up.” Then it got used on a beer ad and made us some money. But there was always that London accent that gave it punk energy.’ Chas Hodges
Available on ‘Don’t Give A Monkey’s’ album (1979)

15 For Tomorrow Blur [download]
Optimistic indie anthem
‘It’s about being lost on the Westway… it’s a romantic thing, it’s hopeful. The nicest thing about that song, that I love, is the bit at the end where it goes on about someone going into a flat, and having a cup of tea in Emperor’s Gate. That comes from when my parents first moved to London – they had a flat in Emperor’s Gate, right next to The Beatles. For the whole of my life I had this image of my parents living next to The Beatles, so Emperor’s Gate, to me, is a romantic thing. Then the person in the song gets in a car and drives all the way up to Primrose Hill and says ‘It’s windy here and the view’s so nice.’ If you go to the top of Primrose Hill, someone’s written the lyric there – it’s been there for what, 12 years now, which is fantastic. So it is very much a London song, it has its own landmark now.’ Damon Albarn
Available on ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ album (1993)

16 A Foggy Day Ella Fitzgerald [download]
Definitive version of George Gershwin’s elegant hymn to the pea-souper
PG Wodehouse’s 1919 novel ‘A Damsel In Distress’ was optioned by RKO Studios, who drafted in George and Ira Gershwin to provide the music. George Gershwin had already served as a rehearsal pianist for a PG Wodehouse musical, and it’s no coincidence that one of the lead characters in ‘A Damsel In Distress’ is an American composer called ‘George’. The movie was eventually released in 1937, and Fred Astaire’s lead song, ‘A Foggy Day’, soon developed a life of its own. It remains the most illustriously covered song about London, with names like Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Art Tatum, Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw, Charles Mingus and Tony Bennett all tackling it. Fitzgerald’s 1958 recording remains the definitive performance, her gorgeous, sighing, behind-the-beat delivery enunciating every word with a suitably weary charm.
Available on ‘Take Love Easy’ album (1959)

17 22 Grand Job The Rakes [download]
A day in the life of an office temp
‘It’s a hybrid between two things that happened. I failed the interview for a job earning 22 grand then got a shit temp job in Shadwell. We used to go to Old Street on Thursday nights. It’s such an office thing to do. Start with a pub near work, then the three or so losers left at closing time – which normally included me – get a cab to Old Street. Without money, London can be pretty crap.’
Alan Donohoe, singer, The Rakes
Available on ‘Capture/Release’ album (2005)

18 West End Girls Pet Shop Boys [download]
Localised Thatcherite socio-economics deconstructed to a stabby 303 bassline
‘West End Girls’ was originally based on a very different urban anthem, Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five’s ‘The Message’, which explains the young-ish Neil Tennant’s uncharacteristically street tuff sing-rap delivery on the verses. The song explored the pressures of urban life in an avaricious city, much like Flash’s hip hop classic, but using more fittingly banal semantics. Not that anyone noticed. The dark subtext of the lyrics was largely ignored by the people it referred to, who were too busy trying to get off with each other in nightclubs to its disco beat.
Available on ‘Please’ album (1986)

19 London’s Burning The Clash [download]
Hometown heroes’ scathing challenge to the city’s apathy
‘When The Clash performed at Islington’s Screen On The Green on 29 August 1976, a new song was unveiled: “London’s Burning”, written on the streets of London as Joe Strummer paced the city.

“There was nothing to do in those days,” said Strummer. “Television stopped at 11pm, all bars stopped at 11pm, and that was it. There was only walking around the street to amuse yourself after that. I was walking around a lot in West London, and ‘London’s Burning’ came to me all at once.”

‘There is ample poetry to be found in the on stage reunion of Joe Strummer and Clash guitarist Mick Jones – after 19 years – on 15 November 2002, five weeks before the singer’s death. The venue was Acton Town Hall, a benefit by Strummer’s group The Mescaleros for the Fire Brigades Union. So what could have been a more appropriate end to the night? The final song Strummer and Jones ever played together, dedicated to Andy Gilchrist, was – of course – “London’s Burning”.’
Chris Salewicz is the author of ‘Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography Of Joe Strummer’
Available on ‘The Clash’ album (1977)

20 Sunny Goodge Street Donovan [download]
Hippy-era tribute to the popular electrical goods-retailing thoroughfare
The pint-sized folk troubadour’s mellow 1965 ode to scoring dope on Goodge Street contained the first open reference to drugs in British pop – ‘Violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine’ – which was swiftly followed by the first high-profile drug bust in British pop. In fact, Donovan still recalls the incident in his between-song stage banter today. The flat was a boho paradise, and he and his lady were in bed when the coppers called; in the ensuing panic, Donovan remembers leaping naked onto one unlucky policeman’s back. Donovan’s arrest meant he was denied a visa to enter the states for the Monterey Pop Festival in California, ceding his headline slot to the little-known Jimi Hendrix. Still, he probably didn’t miss much.
Available on ‘Fairytale’ album (1965)

28 Dizzee Rascal

21 K Hole Ali Love
I go out on Friday night and I come home on Saturday morning
‘It wrote itself really. I woke up feeling terrible one morning and the experience came flooding back. It’s a song about London wrongness. You go out on one side on Friday and end up on the other side by Sunday night and don’t know where you are. It’s happened to me a lot. I live in Shoreditch above this club called On The Rocks, and there are always parties going on. Just like in the rest of the city. It’s a unique place. One minute I’m at an indie party, the next a house party, then a hip hop party, then a warehouse rave. It’s so diverse.’ Ali Love
Available on www.alilove.co.uk

22 Soho Bert Jansch and John Renbourn [download]
The zenith of the ’60s London folk scene captured in song
‘Around the time of that song, there used to be a folk club in Greek Street called Les Cousins and most of the folk singers and players would meet there. I had a Tuesday residency there for about a year and it was an all-nighter so you had to play right through the night. But the song itself is centred around Soho Square because, during the day, if it was nice and sunny you’d go and sit in the square. Mark Pavey and Davey Graham tried to reopen the place again a few years ago but it’s now a restaurant. For a while, the 12 Bar club in Denmark Street was a bit similar but it didn’t quite have the magic. And anyway, kids now will have their own versions of Les Cousins.’ Bert Jansch
Available on ‘Dazzling Stranger’ album (2000)

23 London Is The Place For Me Lord Kitchener
Calypso tribute to the capital’s charms from the Windrush generation
On his way to the UK aboard the Empire Windrush, Aldwin Roberts (aka Lord Kitchener) composed this paean to a city he had never seen, which he joyfully played to the waiting newsreel crews as the ship docked at Tilbury. Although Roberts lasted 15 years in London, his optimism about his new life ran out well before then – soon, songs such as ‘Sweet Jamaica’ were warning folks back home of the cold welcome to expect in England. Kitchener late moved to Manchester, implying he failed to heed his own warning.
Available on ‘London Is The Place For Me’ anthology (2002)

24 Primrose Hill John & Beverly Martyn [download]
Ode to the popular picnic spot
This is one of many tracks inspired by London’s second-poshest mount. It keeps good company alongside The Beatles’ ‘Fool On The Hill’ (based on a misty morning encounter with a mysterious disappearing man – absolutely nothing to do with drugs), ‘Upfield’ by Billy Bragg and ‘Primrose Hill’ by, variously, Loudon Wainwright III, Saint Etienne, Emiliana Torrini and Madness. The husband-and-wife duo’s blissed-up sunset folk-out is, on the surface, a simple tale of the everyday joys of coupledom. To everyone else, it best captures the joy of a summer’s evening spent lolling around on the hill, getting good and drunk with friends.
Available on ‘The Road To Ruin’ album (1970)

25 Born Slippy Underworld [download]
A cry for help from the bottom of a bottle becomes an anthem for the Stella generation
‘The art and design collective Tomato – which we’re part of – had a little office in Soho, above what is now Black Market Records, so my nights would usually start in a pub called The George, on the corner of Wardour and D’Arblay Street. That particular night, however, started in The Ship on Wardour Street with someone called Bastard Bunny and a friend of ours, Claire, who worked at Tomato. She was “the most blonde I ever met”. Tottenham Court Road tube station was the entrance to Essex and it was always the late-night train home to Romford for me. I was the unhinged-looking drunk in the corner with a notebook that no one would go near!

In truth, the song was me literally asking for help. I was describing a progressively despairing state of mind. I was using alcohol to numb the senses and thus arrived at the point where “Born Slippy” was written. I was saying, “I’m going to describe a typical night; does anybody think that this is no way to live, and could somebody throw me a lifeline?” There was one particular show I remember where a forest of lager cans was raised in the chorus and my heart sank – which shows how far my head was up my whatsit at the time, because I wasn’t in touch with the reality of the song. That was the only song of ours for years that we ever printed the lyrics for or explained and, once we’d done that, then it was okay if people wanted to use it as a drinking anthem. I really don’t mind at all, now. “Born Slippy” has become a folk song.’
Available on ‘Underworld 1992-2002’ (2006)

26 London Town Light Of The World
Summery black Brit-funk anthem from 1980, as popularised by Tony Blackburn’s seminal Radio London soul show
‘Light Of The World were one of a clutch of British funk bands who emerged in the late ’70s and early ’80s, along with Funkapolitan, Central Line, Beggar & Co, Hi Tension. They were putting a definite London accent to the soul music we all loved – a touch of reggae, a bit of rock. “London Town” was a cute and funky tune, something I was still playing well into the ’80s. DJs like Chris Hill and Robbie Vincent were the voices on the underground, but me and Steve Walsh were taking it to a bigger audience. We wanted housewives to hear this stuff, not just guys at the Soul Weekenders. It was what I played on my Radio London show between1982 and 1988 – it went out from 9am to 12noon and those phone calls got pretty X-rated at the time! Ha ha! This was the sound of London, not the kind of thing that you usually heard on Radio 1 at the time.’ Tony Blackburn
Available on the ‘Addiction To Funk’ anthology (2006)

27 What A Mouth Tommy Steele
Skiffle gives birth to pop as we know it
Long before The Beatles or even Cliff, Tommy Steele was Britain’s first pop idol. During the 1950s, a strange rule was enforced which meant that American hits had to undergo a six-month period in quarantine before being released in the UK. Steele, under the guidance of prototype music biz svengali Larry Parnes, was one of a number of artists who launched a career by taking advantage of this quirk to record covers of

American songs and pilot them to the top of the charts before the originals saw the light of day. ‘What A Mouth (What A North And South)’ in 1960, however, saw Steele abandoning this tactic in favour of ersatz-sounding cockney in order to tell the tale of a chap named Jim whose mouth was so large it was mistaken for a coal cellar – with hilarious consequences! Notwithstanding the undeniable cheese-factor, this song saw pop being re-calibrated to cater to British audiences and, perched awkwardly between music hall, skiffle and ’60s beat pop, it pointed to the future.
Available on ‘Rock With The Caveman’ (2005)

28 I Luv U Dizzee Rascal [download]
The holy grail of grime, Dizzee’s 2002 white-label tells a grim tale of teenage pregnancy over a terrifying rhythm track
‘I used to look out of the window of my flat in Bow and I see Canary Wharf every fucking morning,’ said Dizzee Rascal. ‘Glaring at me, taking the piss.’ His breakthrough single was the perfect calling card for Dizzee’s bleak, paranoid, neurotic, emotionally fragile worldview. It’s a savage tale of deceitful women and vicious men set to a barrage of bleeps, ringtones and a monstruous, grinding bassline. ‘Some whore banging at your door, what for?’ spits Dizzee. ‘Fifteen? She’s underage, that’s raw.’

‘My music is about bringing visions to life, in words and in music,’ says Dizzee. ‘ “I Luv U” is like a soap opera, the kind of conversation that’s going on all over London at the moment.’ You can hear the sound of the city permeating every second of the track – the rumble of traffic, the bleeps of PlayStations, ringtones, car alarms and tinny hi-hats seeping out of headphones – as a screaming battle over a teenage pregnancy is enacted in the shadow of Canary Wharf.
Available on ‘Boy In Da Corner’ (2003)

29 Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner Hubert Gregg [download]
Written by BBC broadcaster Hubert Gregg in 1944, as he watched German doodlebugs passing over the city, it’s a away of life for Larry Barnes, Pearly King of Thornton Heath
‘If we are doing a pearly show and we don’t do it, people will always request it. They expect it, it’s as simple as that. You see, Hubert Gregg was the most Etonian gentleman, he really was so charming, he had public school speech and manners, elegance, the whole bit. And I don’t think he really thought of that song as a cockney song – you don’t have to be a cockney to be a Londoner. I spoke to his wife, Pat Kirkwood, and she hit the nail on the head: “Being a Londoner is nothing to do with being born in London. It’s, do you want to be in London?” I mean, the Pearly Queen of Norbury, who is my partner when we do variety, was born in New Zealand, but London is where she really wants to be. What is it about the song that makes people want to sing along? It’s a good, rolling number, it’s down-to-earth with simple lyrics; he doesn’t try to be maudlin, he doesn’t try to be over-sentimental. He states a case plainly and simply – which is, I belong to London and London belongs to me.’ Larry Barnes
Available on ‘Ultimate Pub Singalong’ (2000)

30 You Can’t Always Get What You Want The Rolling Stones [download]
London wakes up from the ’60s dream
Released just weeks before the ’60s turned into the ’70s, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ finds the Stones sounding, for the first time, vulnerable and maybe even a little tentative. And it’s all the better for it. It captures a city coming down, with various symbols of swinging London’s restive, hedonistic vitality shorn of their glamour and rendered melancholy. Demonstrations are now merely somewhere to ‘get your fair share of abuse’. Beautiful debutantes have become heroin addicts. Chelsea is simply where you go to pick up your prescription. And yet it’s strangely comforting – a reminder that even though, eventually, reality always replaces dreams, reality is usually closer to the truth. To complete the sense of overwhelming bathos, King’s Road’s Chelsea Drugstore is now a McDonalds.
Available on ‘Let It Bleed’ (1969)

34 The Who

31 A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square Judy Campbell [download]
Swoonsome London-based romance made famous by Vera Lynn. The song’s most memorable performance took place during the air raids of 1940
‘It was the beginning of the air raids, but we went out, because we wanted to go out. The Shepherds Bush Empire had such nice shows, and you could see people like Margot Fontayne dancing. Judy Campbell was a successful young starlet then. I suppose “A Nightingale Sang…” just hit the right note for the time. Oh, it was so divinely escapist: “There was magic abroad in the air/There were angels dining at the Ritz…” It was nothing to do with air-raids. It was a popular song. Well, Judy Campbell came on in a satin evening frock, looking glamorous – and when she got to the point where she sang, “a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square”, she held up her hand and sang, “Hark!” you know, for the nightingale. And then “Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!” the air raid siren wailed! So instead of the nightingale, we got the siren! And the theatre just fell about they laughed so much, and Judy Campbell just died laughing on stage. It was just a yelp of laughter from the audience, they quite forgot the air raid!.’ Sylvia Harris
Available on The Best Of Vera Lynn compilation (1999)

32 London Dungeon The Misfits
US punks’ ode to a night in London’s cells
‘During our early years we tried to do an English tour with The Damned. When we completed our first three shows we walked off the tour after not being paid. We went to London and after that I went to Canterbury with Sid Vicious’s mom Anne. Our singer Glenn Danzig and guitarist Bobby Steele went to see The Jam at the Rainbow. A bunch of skinheads started a fight with Glenn who turned to watch Bobby run down the block! To protect himself, Glenn pulled a piece of glass from the Rainbow’s broken window and got arrested. In Brixton jail he put the lyrics together for “London Dungeon”. We worked on the song to audition for The Clash’s second world tour. When our drummer Joey Image fled to the USA for drugs, we aborted that tour and left our clean-faced rotting corpses in your London Dungeon.’
Jerry Only, The Misfits
Available on ‘The Misfits’ (1979)

33 A13, Trunk Road To The Sea Billy Bragg [download]
Bobby Troupe’s iconic ‘(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66’ is transplanted to Essex
‘I was sick of hearing people sing songs about America. How did we know that Amarillo, New Mexico wasn’t as dreary as Dagenham? There was a punk perversity about it, but also a pride in singing about my manor. “Starts down in Wapping/ Girl there’s no stopping/By-pass Barking and straight through Dagenham down/ To Grays Thurrock/Romney and Basildon…” And the dual carriageway to Southend does have a mythic weight for boy racers that’s part of that rock ’n’ roll dream. If Springsteen could romanticise New Jersey, I didn’t see why I couldn’t do the same for estuarine Essex.’ Billy Bragg
Available on ‘Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy’ album, bonus disc (1987)

34 I Can See For Miles The Who [download]
Pete Townshend’s psych-pop masterpiece
This song may namecheck the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower, but was allegedly inspired by a hazy night spent gazing across London from Highgate. The cover of the album it appears on - 'Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy' - shows seminal mod hangout The Railway Hotel, now the site of four blocks of flats, each named after a band member.
See more album covers that picture London

35 Lily Allen

35 LDN Lily Allen [download]
How the pop starlet is the latest to make the London accent work for her
It’s November 1976. The Damned have just beaten fellow Londoners the Sex Pistols in bringing out the first ever English punk single. It’s called ‘New Rose’ and it’s delivered in a suitably malevolent mid-Atlantic accent. The Damned huddle around a stereo to hear the Pistols’ response, ‘Anarchy In The UK’. As the guitar chimes out and Johnny Rotten does his Sid James cackle, their jaws drop.
‘We though they were taking the piss,’ says Damned bassist Captain Sensible. ‘It sounded like fucking Black Sabbath with Old Man Steptoe wailing away over the top.’

Thirty years ago, pop stars weren’t meant to sing like Albert Steptoe. Not even punks. English bands dutifully sang in an American accent, bowing to its phraseology, its rhythmic cadences and its drawling, rhotic Rrrrrrs.

While many other regional accents of the British Isles were rediscovered in the folk revival of the early 1900s, the London accent remains largely absent from Cecil Sharp’s folk archives. Music hall remained the capital’s only musical voice: Harry Champion’s cockney classics like ‘Any Old Iron’ and ‘Boiled Beef And Carrots’ were densely written, filled with innuendos, often alternating between speech and melody. Echoed by Rudyard Kipling’s bawdy ‘Barrack-Room Ballads’, it was a tradition that was sustained right up to World War II and beyond.

But singing in a cockney accent became something of an embarrassment as rock ’n’ roll swept the nation in the late ’50s. London pop stars like Joe Brown or Tommy Steele would sometimes provide a cheeky nod to music hall – just as Ray Davies of The Kinks or Steve Marriott of The Small Faces would do a few years later – while theatrical songwriter Anthony Newley developed a slightly gentrified cockney accent that plotted a path for David Bowie. But the norm was for born-and-bred Londoners – Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Roger Daltrey – to sing like they’d grown up in the backwoods of Louisiana.

By the mid-’70s, a few bands started to question that. Chas Hodges from cod-American blues-funk outfit Head Hands And Feet formed Chas & Dave to explore ‘cockney rock ’n’ roll’. Ian Dury used funk, blues and jazz as a vehicle for surreal, half-spoken cockney doggerel. Robert Wyatt, born in Bristol but brought up in the Home Counties, spoke and sang in an eerily blank estuary English that was to prove highly influential. And, of course, Johnny Rotten was borrowing from such curiously English sources as Max Wall and Laurence Olivier’s Richard III.
‘Before I saw The Clash and the Pistols, I tried to sing like Otis Redding,’ says Paul Weller. ‘I decided to sing as naturally as I talked.’
‘There was a definite punk agenda,’ says Billy Bragg, ‘which was to regionalise yourself, to give yourself a sense of place. And there was a premium in sounding awkward.’

Bragg acknowledges that a London accent forces a singer to approach melody differently. ‘You can’t sing something like “Tracks Of Your Tears” in a London accent,’ he says. ‘The cadences are all wrong. It’s also difficult to sing harmonies in a London accent. And you can’t sustain syllables for long: “Greetings To The New Brunette”, starts with that sustained “Shirrrr-LEY!” when I sound like a fucking foghorn. You end up with a higher density of words in a song, which betokens a certain urgency. It’s like those early Jam gigs, where Weller seemed like he could hardly get his words out quick enough, as if he was just bursting with the energy of youth.’London singer-songwriter Chris TT agrees.

‘American accents – like Scottish and Irish accents – have a slower pace that allows greater sparseness in lyricism. The word “got” can last for a month when a blues singer sings it, but only a tenth of a second when I do.’ Nowadays the exaggerated sense of regionalism that emerged from punk and received a second wind from Britpop has birthed a host of London-accented artists who follow Weller, Bragg, Blur and Suede. Every other indie band from within 500 miles of Bow Bells – The Rakes, Art Brut, Bloc Party, Athlete, Carl Barât and Pete Doherty, Milk Kan, Jamie T, Mystery Jets – are singing in fluent cockney. And a generation of rappers and MCs who eschew Americanisms aren’t far behind.

Lily Allen’s flat suburban drone is the latest addition to this rich lineage, and ‘LDN’ is a curious concoction. The calypso riff is actually borrowed from Tommy McCook And The Supersonics’ ‘Reggae Merengue’, but is clearly a nod to Lord Kitchener’s ‘London Is The Place For Me’; Allen’s neighbourhood of crack dealers and ASBOs is the dystopian flipside to the fantasy London of Kitchener’s sunny Windrush anthem.

Allen’s deadpan, declamatory delivery certainly draws comparisons with Mike Skinner, and the way in which she exploits the arrhythmic cadences of London speech sometimes invokes Dizzee Rascal. But her poetic doggerel (‘A fella looking dapper/And he’s sitting with a slapper/Then I see it’s a pimp and his crack whore’) owes more to Ian Dury. She convincingly projects a peculiar London swagger that seems to tie up all the loose ends of the last century. She is a post-punk Marie Lloyd; she is Irene Handl reinvented as a calypsonian; she is the urchin flower-seller in Lionel Bart’s ‘Oliver!’ transplanted into latterday Dalston Market. But, this time around, nobody is mentioning Albert Steptoe… John Lewis
Available on ‘Alright, Still’ (2006)

36 Babyshambles

36 Albion Babyshambles [download]
Elegy for an England falling into disrepair
Pete Doherty’s adherence to a vision of an idealised England has underpinned his songwriting from his very first efforts in The Libertines. Creatives from William Blake to Enid Blyton and Michael Bracewell have all explored the idea of a lost Arcadian wonderland, but in ‘Albion’, Doherty dreams not of some bucolic idyll, but of grabbing his gal (‘I’ll be waiting in the photo booth at the underground station’) and escaping to places as oddly unglamorous as Deptford and Catford. The final destination is irrelevant, it seems; it’s the getting away (‘anywhere in Albion’) that matters.
Available on ‘Down In Albion’ album (2005)

37 Knocked ‘Em In The Old Kent Road Harry Champion [download]
A gem from the glory days of music hall
At the dawn of the twentieth century, London contained more than 300 music halls. Harry Champion’s ‘Knocked ’Em In The Old Kent Road’ was a genre classic. Thankfully many of music hall’s most beautiful venues are still open for business. The Hackney Empire has now returned to theatrical use. The Stratford Rex is a fully functional music venue once again. Perhaps most remarkable is Wilton’s Music Hall in Stepney.

With its mirrored ballroom and vast chandelier, Wilton’s was known as ‘the handsomest room in town’. It’s rumoured to have been the scene of the first ever can-can and was the headquarters for the East Enders who gathered to fight Oswald Mosley’s fascists in 1936. Now, theatre has returned and, as befits its radical heritage, a number of ‘pay what you can’ seats are reserved for most shows.
Available on ‘A Little Bit Of What You Fancy’ compilation (2000)

38 A Rainy Night In Soho The Pogues [download]
Big-hearted, boozy ballad
Soho can be a difficult place to negotiate when you’re sober. But when you’re drunk, it’s even worse. The whole area turns into an emotional minefield, with every neon shopfront, clip joint, or twat on a rickshaw suddenly taking on a profound metaphorical significance. If you ever want to wallow in boozy heartbreak, Soho’s the place for you. Which is probably why this waltzing lament makes so much sense to so many people.
Available on ‘Rum Sodomy And The Lash’ reissue, bonus track (2005)

39 London The Smiths [download]
‘Billy Liar’ esqe relocation melodrama
‘Smoke lingers round your fingers/Train, heave on to Euston/Do you think you’ve made the right decision this time?’ Anyone who has ever relocated to The Smoke will recognise (albeit possibly in a less romanticised form) the excitement and anxiety implicit in the opening lines of this song.
Available on ‘Louder Than Bombs’ album (1987)

40 14 Hour Technicolour Dream The Syn [download]
Song performed at an all-nighter at Alexandra Palace starring Pink Floyd, as remembered by Time Out’s art editor
‘The bands were up on a platform in the middle of the room, so there wasn’t a separate stage area and audience area, it was all mixed up. I have in my mind a lot of noise, like the whirring of a projector. There was a lot of flickering light which was quite visually confusing. I can hardly remember the band – I just remember this atmosphere of confusion. Also everybody was pretty stoned, so that made it even more confusing.
In the main area people were hanging about but not dancing – I don’t remember any dancing at all, which was strange. It was a much more freaky, slightly alienated sort of atmosphere. In the side areas I remember a lot of people sitting around on the floor; it became a kind happening, and it just seemed to go on and on and on. I remember thinking: This is really weird, but I’m obviously in the right place.’ Sarah Kent
Available on ‘Original Syn’ (1967)

41 Squeeze

41 Up The Junction Squeeze [download]
Kitchen sink drama from Deptford
‘Chris Difford came up with the lyrics while sitting on the tourbus, homesick, on our first tour of America about 15 miles outside New Orleans. He has a great eye for detail and an ear for language which just rings true. When he first gave me the lyrics, I knew I had the supporting role. It was such a great lyric, you didn’t want the tune distracting you from it’. Glenn Tilbrook
Available on ‘Cool For Cats’ album (1979)

42 Lambeth Walk Noel Gay/Douglas Furber [download]
Now you too can do the dance…
‘Take eight steps forward. On the eighth step, the man faces lady. Man and lady link left arms and strut around in a circle again taking eight walks. On the eighth step, the man unlinks arms and offers his right arm to the lady, who links her left arm in his right. Finish both facing line of dance. Man commences with left foot and lady right foot and continue. Take three walks forward counting, “One, two, three”. Transfer weight back to rear foot, count “and”. Transfer weight forward to front foot, count “four”. Repeat, the man commencing with right foot and lady left foot. Unlink arms and continue: Man walks two steps towards centre. Lady walks two steps to the wall, counting, “One, two”. Man and lady turn to face each other and close feet together, count “three”. Slap hands on the legs, just above the knees and bend forward. Count “four”. Both man and lady walk two steps towards each other, count “one, two”. Close feet together, facing partner and, three feet apart, count “three”. Raise the hands (right) level with the head and give the cockney salute, shouting “Oi”.’
From ‘Ballroom Dancing’ by Alex Moore

43 Swinging London Town Girls Aloud [download]
Ironic on so many levels
Aside from the haunts frequented by Time Out, there exists another London, one of £120 bottles of Smirnoff Red, DJs playing ‘funky house’ and wannabes after their big break. Girls Aloud, no strangers to Chinawhites, documented the facile lives lived on the members’ club circuit on this satirical track for their last album. ‘I’m just a big time Gucci girl with a first in retail therapy’, they croon. The kettle’s reaction to this put-down is as yet unknown.
Available on ‘Chemistry’ album (2005)

44 Consider Yourself Lionel Bart [download]
Arguably the best known song dealing with crime in London. But it’s not the only one...
Available on ‘Oliver’ OST (1968)

Morrissey – ‘The Last Of The Famous International Playboys’
This tale of a young, aspirant gangster drew a response from Reggie Kray who said he enjoyed the melody but found the lyrics ‘lacking a little’.
Available on Bona Drag album (1990)

Cockney Rejects – ‘War On The Terraces’
An acute piece of social commentary or a slightly-too-affectionate homage to those lovable, West Ham-supporting rogues, the ICF?
Available on ‘Greatest Hits Vol II’ album (1980)

Dizzee Rascal – ‘Imagine’
Dizzee ponders the damage done to his ‘roads’ by turf wars and wonders what anyone really gains from risking their life in defence of ‘a couple of square metres of pavement’. Among the saddest and most beautiful London songs of recent years.
Available on ‘Showtime’ album (2004)

45 Cockney Translation Smiley Culture
David ‘Smiley Culture’ Emmanuel’s satirical Jamaican English-London English dictionary from 1984, set to a skeletal dancehall beat. Includes lines like…
Say cockney have ‘mates’ while we have ‘spa’
Cockney live in a drum, while we live in a yard
Cockney say ‘scarper’ we say ‘scatter’
Cockney say ‘rabbit’, we chatter
We say ‘bleach’, cockney ‘knackered’
Cockney say ‘t’riffic’, we say ‘waaaacked’!
Cockney say ‘blokes’, we say ‘guys’
Cockney say ‘alright’, we say ‘ites’
We say ‘pants’, cockney say ‘strides’
Sweet as a nut… just level vibes, seen?
Available on ‘The Complete Smiley Culture’ (1986)

46 London Pride Noël Coward [download]
Musical hall favourite
Although more famous for his mal mots than stirring rhetoric, few upper lips could have remained as starchy during the Blitz as that of Noël Coward. Despite his dandyish reputation and perceived reluctance to get his hands dirty, Coward caught the zeitgeist with his 1941 hymn to the indomitable London spirit. Treating bombs as no more bothersome than a signal failure on the Metropolitan Line, this stoic ditty became one of his most popular songs, even once the war was over.
Available on ‘London Pride’ (1996) compilation

47 Baker Street Gerry Rafferty [download]
Unprepossessing local thoroughfare immortalised by Scots singer-songwriter
Quite why Scots pop troubadour Rafferty picked an unremarkable, traffic-clogged road to pay homage to in his 1978 hit is anyone’s guess, but 20 years later, the song was deemed worthy of covering by pop-metal superstars Foo Fighters, who recorded it as a B-side. The street is mentioned just once, in the opening line and it seems a mate of Rafferty’s – the one who’s ‘got this dream about buyin’ some land, he’s gonna give up the booze and the one-night stands’ – lived there. The Foos (wisely) chose to replicate the sax solo on guitar, but Lisa Simpson stuck with the original instrument when she played it at the close of the ‘Lisa’s Sax’ episode of ‘The Simpsons’.
Available on ‘City To City’ album (1978)

48 London London Caetano Veloso [download]
Swinging London ballad from Brazil
‘The Brazilian military had forced me and Gilberto Gil to leave Brazil and we ended up in London in 1969. I sing about looking for flying saucers in the sky. I loved London and was obsessed by English rock music, but was very, homesick, very depressed, and initially I hated the music I recorded in London. Now I love that song. It sums up the emotions felt by an outsider in this big, beautiful, grey city.’ Caetano Veloso
Available on ‘Caetano Veloso’ album (1969)

49 Punky Reggae Party Bob Marley [download]
Bob issues a party call to arms
The song which cemented the kinship between punk and reggae. Reggae was an obsession shared by many of punk’s prime movers while Marley was exiled in London during the mid-’70s and willing to acknowledge the outsider status shared by punks and rastas alike. His response was to envisage a party closed to ‘boring old farts’ but attended by luminaries of both scenes including The Clash, The Damned, The Maytals and, slightly less explicably, Canvey Island pub rock stalwarts Dr Feelgood. Still, the more the merrier.
Available on ‘Exodus’ album (1977)

50 Herculean The Good, The Bad and The Queen
First release from Damon Albarn and Paul Simonon's new collaborative project
Read interview here

Where did you have your best ever meal out?
Claridge’s, without a doubt. It was unbelievable. I’m not a foodie but I had some lamb which was a real taste sensation. It was just after I’d, ahem, become a pop star, so someone else was paying. I thought to myself, yes, this is the life…

What’s your favourite gallery?
I go to the National Gallery a lot, because I’m often in the centre of London for meetings and work. I went to an exhibition recently – was it about demons or pagan artwork or something? I seem to remember there being some William Blake works there. Anyway, it was wonderful.

Where do you like to spend Sunday mornings?
It has to be Spitalfields Market. Although I’m not sure about the refurb. It all seems very lovely but I’m wary that it’ll become, I dunno, Hampsteadfied. But there’s something very special about that whole place. I feel like I’m in a market town around there. I also love hanging around Brick Lane.

What’s the best market?
Portobello on a Friday. It’s a very inspiring place to potter around. You get amazing old Victorian clothes. I collect old hats – I’ve got about 50 or 60 – and I’ve found a few great ones there. I bought an old soldier’s hat which I wear on stage for one song. I also bought a child’s picture in Portobello a while ago. It was a painting of an old 1950s airport. It inspired the opening of my stage show.

What’s your favourite music venue?
The Forum. I’ve seen some great gigs there – Angie Stone, the Scissor Sisters – but every time I go it’s fantastic. Even if they did have a power cut the last time I played there… In terms of smaller venues, I like the 100 Club and the Metro.

Do you get recognised at gigs?
I hope so, otherwise I have to pay to get in! Ha ha! If it’s an indie gig at somewhere like Metro people are often surprised and slightly offended to see me. ‘Oi, what are doing here? How can you possibly like this kind of music when you make crap like that?!’ People are so tied up in music and identity sometimes. But generally people are really friendly at gigs. You’re all there to see the same thing.

What’s the best sporting event you’ve been to?
I used to see lots of rugby – I remember a good England game against the New Zealand Barbarians at Twickenham a few years ago. But the best sporting event would have been one that I took part in – a Help A London Child run in Hyde Park. I came 200th out of about 5,000. That included hundreds of serious amateur runners, and I was quite pleased with my time.

Is there a specific place in London that never fails to excite you?
Hyde Park. I used to run around there every morning. I love that scene in ‘Neverland’, with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, where they’re in Hyde Park in autumn. I love London in autumn generally – you get the most beautiful colours, the sun’s lowest and the light’s brightest. But Hyde Park looks particularly stunning as you drive down Bayswater.

What’s the most extravagant thing you’ve bought?
I went into a car showroom to buy a Mini. I ended up buying a 1961 Porsche 354 on the spur of the moment. It’s the same model as the one James Dean died in. It’s very beautiful but an entirely random purchase.

What the best thing you’ve driven around London?
I was moving house recently and I borrowed a white Transit van. I put a copy of The Sun on the dashboard and I had XFM blaring out on the stereo. I felt so heterosexual, it was amazing. I think I even swore at someone in a petrol station! It was one of the most liberating experiences of my life.

What’s been your most disastrous transport move?
I did have a scooter once that got stolen three times in the space of a week. It was an electric one, but a proper Vespa. I ran out of electricity just as I was driving through Ladbroke Grove, past all these guys on their BMXs who were taking the piss. My cool stakes are questionable, but I just looked such a dick as I crawled past them at a snail’s pace. I was determined not to get off, so I simply crawled home at about 5mph. What a loser. Since then I’ve just taken limos everywhere.

Have you ever cycled in London?
Good lord, no. It looks like fun but I get sweaty enough just walking. I’m a very sweaty person. The photos of me getting off a bike would be hideous. I could ride one of those motorised bikes but you look a bit of a berk. The worst thing is seeing chaps in suits on those ridiculous children’s scooters. There’s a way to demasculinise yourself, by standing on a skateboard with a handle. Just walk, you fool!