Songs About Cities: Top 10 Songs about LONDON
London has had literally hundreds of songs written about it. Thousands, actually! Well, of course it does: in so many cultural, artistic and historical ways, London remains one of the most significant places on the planet. It has its own mythology, written on the walls of streets wandered down by The Beatles, William Blake, Peter Pan, Jack the Ripper and The Queen! London, where Harry Potter fans will find platform 9 and three quarters, and Austin Powers can still be seen trotting down Carnaby Street with James Bond, Mick Jagger and Twiggy.
London is a lot of things to a lot of people.
Today’s blog will by no means cover every lyrical reference this most hallowed of metropolises has inspired, but what I will do is take a cherry-picked curated tour through the city by way of song. They won’t all be the biggest, most obvious ones either, since part of the fun in this type of article is in finding new music, be it a genuinely new tune or simply an older one that has passed you by until now.
Some bands have made a career out of referencing London (The Clash, Pet Shop Boys, The Stranglers, absolutely loads more) and some only have the odd oblique reference to a London street name in a lyric. Today, I’ve tried to find a balance. Honestly, there’s an overwhelming amount of tunes about Laaandaaan out there, so this list is more of a celebration than a definitive list. Dive in!
The Songs at a Glance
Streets of London - Ralph McTell
West End Girls - Pet Shop Boys
(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea - Elvis Costello
Chaos Down in Soho - Sleaford Mods
Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove - Killing Joke
Battle of Epping Forest - Genesis
Hong Kong Garden - Siouxsie and the Banshees
London Calling - The Clash
Joe Strummer loved writing about London! Considering he was born in Turkey (or maybe because of that?), he was obviously deeply inspired by England’s capital. There are loads of Clash tunes about London, and my favourite one is easily Guns of Brixton (what a bassline!) but I could hardly leave a tune called London Calling off a list about London songs, could I?
The song references to a coming Ice Age are, in my opinion, metaphors for the civil unease felt around the city in the late 70s. As a squatter over in Ladbroke Grove, Strummer - the son of a foreign diplomat - could see things from a number of viewpoints.
Streets of London - Ralph McTell
Some may know this song by Tony Rice’s cover version, but let’s go with the original, shall we? Particularly when you find out that there are over 200 versions of the song out there! Ralph McTell is the original writer, and actually left it off his debut record because he felt that it was too depressing!
Streets of London describes the people and situations McTell witnessed as he busked his way around Europe. He initially called the song ‘Streets of Paris’ until he realised that his inspiration was coming from London.
Amongst those hundreds of covers is one featuring McTell himself, alongside Annie Lennox.
West End Girls - Pet Shop Boys
It may not be obvious to you (it wasn’t to me), but this Pet Shop Boys synthpop banger is partly based on T.E. Eliot’s epic poem The Wasteland. Is that how the band feels about London?
I don’t think so, but the song is fairly clear about the ever-present class snobbery that exists in the city, and the pressures of living in a big city. Sonically, it’s a pretty pioneering song, and as I’ll note again and again in this blog, the themes addressed are as relevant now as they were 40 years ago when the tune was released.
(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea - Elvis Costello
It’s a fun thing to learn that Elvis Costello was working late night shifts as a computer programmer when we wrote this. Sneaking a guitar into his office (not an easy task), he’d get his writing skills flowing once everybody else had left for the night.
Based around Bruce Thomas’ commanding bassline, the tune speaks to childhood memories of Costello visiting Chelsea with his dad, mixed in with movie references and feelings about the culture surrounding the area’s ‘groovy baby’ past and the punk fires that were beginning to burn there.
Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty
Home to one of the two or three most famous saxophone parts in existence, Baker Street is Gerry Rafferty’s ode to London. Indeed, the Paisley-born songwriter lived his life in two cities at that point, with his London time being spent at his friend’s apartment in…you guessed it, Baker Street!
Baker Street is in Marleybone, as slap-bang in the city as you can get. The song addresses the ennui felt by this bi-locational existence, and about the promise of a new life in London.
Chaos Down in Soho - Sleaford Mods
Here’s a London tune from a group who hail from the land of Robin Hood, Warhammer and fashion designer Paul Smith. Nottingham’s Sleaford Mods fit in well in most places, which is something when you consider how uncompromising they sound.
This one is about class violence and attitudes from the nation’s capitol, and has a weirdly brilliant, entirely fictional argument at the beginning between vocalist Jason Williamson and ‘Russell Brand’. In an age when lots of music ignores social problems and stigmas, Sleaford Mods head straight for it.
In the City - The Jam
Sheerwater native Paul Weller has written about London on a number of occasions, but this Jam classic always resonates. It's about the power of youth, about the rise of underground culture, and about that special time in your life when you begin to stop trusting authorities and start thinking for yourself. Relevant now? Absolutely.
Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove - Killing Joke
Ladbroke Grove is a street that gets you down through the middle of Notting Hill and into Kensington. It’s one of the most gentrified parts of an extremely gentrified city, but it wasn’t always so. Back when Killing Joke were unemployed squatters, it was a multicultural area of ideas and art. The Clash formed here (Strummer was a fellow squatter), Hawkwind had come from the area a decade before, as had novelist Michael Moorcock. The 1958 Notting Hill Race Riots had occurred down the length of the street.
All of this is summed up in Killing Joke’s song - written decades later - which asks the very simple question: “What has happened to Ladbroke Grove?”
Battle of Epping Forest - Genesis
Was there ever an actual Battle of Epping Forest? Details are hard to find now, and also hard to find back in 1973 when Genesis vocalist Peter Gabriel set about writing lyrics for the band’s magisterial album Selling England By the Pound. As the story goes, he read an article in the paper about this supposed battle, then found nothing more about it and promptly invented the details.
It’s very ‘early Genesis’ in that it’s musically eye-popping, and full of Peter Gabriel’s quaint (cartoonish) characters. The battle itself (in the song, at least) involved two rival East End London gangs fighting for supremacy in the middle of Epping Forest, which sits to the northeast of the city. Despite its fictional nature, the cavalcade of characters - and indeed the whole narrative itself - is as ‘eccentric London’ as it gets.
Hong Kong Garden - Siouxsie and the Banshees
No, not a song about China but one about racism on the streets of London. This was Siouxsie and the Banshees’ first single, and the story’s narrative - a gang of English thugs entering a Chinese restaurant in London and being abusive towards the Chinese staff - was told directly from Siouxsie’s own first-hand experience as an onlooker. As a slice of actual London life at the time, it’s an important snapshot, and says more about the empathy of the punk and post-punk scene than any newspaper headlines of the time.
Many Londons
What became clear to me when researching this blog, is that a lot of artists feel quite conflicted about London. Despite its undeniable allure, a great deal of songwriters feel the classism and double standards of the place, and are compelled to comment.
I suppose it’s because London is many things to many people, and even lifelong Londoners have their cherished parts and areas that they don’t tolerate. Is this true of most big cities? I don’t think so, though I will find out as I document more cities.
There’s no mistaking how glorious the city is, and not just on a superficial level, but there are obviously many Londons in that space, and which one you experience is often determined by outside factors.
As I mentioned at the beginning, there are thousands and thousands of songs written about London. I caught some good ones here, but I obviously missed loads as well. What would you have had in here?
