National Rail has has teamed up with Jo Whiley to produce a series of short audio guides telling the stories of music scenes past and present in some of the Northern cities it serves.
The Musical Routes series includes entries for key Northern hubs including Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle, Carlisle, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Doncaster, York and Widnes and can be listened to online or via a geotargeted app.
The guides have a serious purpose too, coming on the back of research which revealed that, unfathomably, one in five Brits had no idea the Beatles were from Liverpool (it’s not like the city ever mentions it), that 23% of Scousers claimed blissful ignorance of Oasis’ Mancunian origins, and a whopping 62% of people were unaware that the Manic Street Preachers come from Wales.
Radio presenter and long-running BBC Glastonbury host Whiley said: “I’m very passionate and proud of Britain’s musical heritage – and I’d hate for people to lose their connection to it. I believe that you can appreciate music on a whole new level when you get out there and experience the places that influenced it.”
As for the guides themselves, several key moments in pop and rock history are covered. They include the Sex Pistols’ pivotal 1976 gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall and the slew of bands and indie labels that followed, the contractually obliged Beatle’s eulogy that is the Liverpool entry, Leeds’ shadowy goth past and Sheffield’s status as a bastion of electropop – complete with the cocktail bar that inspired Human League’s Don’t You Want Me Baby.
There are a few less obvious gems to be gleaned from the snippets too – who knew that Paul Simon wrote Homeward Bound on the platform at Widnes Station, for example, years before The Stone Roses briefly made the Cheshire town the centre of the pop universe for one afternoon in 1990? That The Beatles (again) were once kicked out of Carlisle’s Crown and Miter pub just five minutes into their pints? Or that York’s perennial never-quite-made-its Shed Seven had an improbable 15 top 40 singles in the nineties?
Also news to me was that Trevor Horn is from Durham, which probably means the producer has single handedly ensured the city takes a top 10 spot in the rankings of UK cities’ chart output, despite Durham not being home to a single band or artist I could name prior to the Horn revelation.
There are some glaring omissions too, it must be said, and should anyone from National Rail’s editorial board (is that a thing?) be reading I’m sure my rates compare quite favourably to Whiley’s if they want an update.
The current lack of a Hull entry, for example, means industrial fans are denied any information on the genre’s origins with Genesis P. Orridge’s early sonic experiments in Throbbing Gristle, while Fatboy Slim’s early outings as a Housemartin are likewise absent.
Any musical history of Leeds in the eighties that sidesteps Red Lorry Yellow Lorry seems a tad remiss too, though probably not as remiss as a Sheffield entry which, near-unforgivably, neglects to mention Warp Records.
Meanwhile my Uncle Melvyn, who had a brief stint as a guitarist in Saxon many years ago (I don’t say this as a claim to fame – I’m fairly sure everyone over 65 with a guitar in South Yorkshire has had a brief stint in Saxon at some point), will no doubt be gutted that the new wave of British heavy metal lynchpins don’t get a nod, perhaps even more so given that their metaltastic Sheffield neighbours Def Leppard do.
Sticking with the personal slights it’s unfortunate, although entirely justified to be fair, that Whiley evidently considered my own youthful contributions to Manchester’s musical history less worthy than, say, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Buzzcocks or The Chemical Brothers. Like poor Uncle Melvyn before me, I also go unmentioned.
At the opposite end of the scale to ‘unmentioned,’ the Beatles are almost omnipresent, with the Fab Four’s activities cropping up not just in Liverpool but Newcastle, Stoke, Carlisle and beyond.
Whiley even manages to shoe-horn Lennon and co into the Manchester entry, although she gets full marks for context: “While nearby Liverpool may have had the Beatles, Manchester had everything else,” Whiley opines, in a statement that’s sure to raise heckles at the far end of the East Lancs Road, but which is nonetheless correct.
Despite the omissions, these brief vignettes are definitely worth a quick refresher listen next time you’re stuck at the signals waiting to pull into one the North’s musical hotspots (or Doncaster). There are even entries for some Southern and Midlands cities too if you like that sort of thing, so give them a try. And feel free to write in with niggles or angry complaints about which of your own favourite artists didn’t make the cut.
