Friends of the blog Mr Bob and Miss Katy AKA The Disappointment Choir have a new song just into time for your letters to Santa. I’m sure that their ‘A Pretty Good Christmas’ is a staple of your seasonal listening well you can add ‘Winter Hill’ to yer play lists.
It’s also in aid of the Young Minds mental health charity so buying it can give you a warm glow like a bottle of finest malt whiskey.
For non locals Winter Hill is a prominent hilltop from which you can view the Thames Valley stretching from Marlow with it’s wrecked bridge to the heights of High Wycombe. It also happened to be ‘make-out point’ when I were a teenage werewolf. This was of course in the days when dogging was just a glint in a perverts eye.
So when the pair revealed the title it set off memories that perhaps were not as wistful and ethereal as the song suggests.
Songs about peculiarly local areas thou – you got any?
Richard Hawley’s yer man for all things Sheffield.
I’m partial to this one. Killermont Street is where the bus station in Glasgow is. As well as many shouty tramps.
There is of course another Winter Hill in Lancashire.
Climbing up Winter Hill…great song.
Les Big Byrd celebrate the suburb of Bagarmossen with jangly guitars and a skateboard. Five minutes walk from us.
La Suede – Nul Points.
In 1962, the immortal Monica Zetterlund sung this beautiful song about Stockholm at Eurovision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvfiEnebb_w
The lyrics are by the equally idiosyncratic Beppe Wolgers: poet and kids program presenter,
Did those dastardly Eurovoters shower it with praise? Not a single point!
Veronica Maggio singing about Sergels Torg, a nice place (IMO) with a bad reputation…
Stockholm’s most infamous address? I guess it stands between “Plattan” and Malmskillnadsgatan…
Bill Pritchard sings of Trentham, Sneyd Green, Milton Road, Westport Lake and Hanley’s Cultural Quarter – all in Stoke on Trent. I’d have posted the even more obscure “Almerend Road” but for the fact I can’t find a video clip (Halmerend is one of the city’s outlying villages)
Willie Nile’s This is Life on Bleecker Street
Although I prefer The Day I Saw Bo Diddly in Washington Square
https://youtu.be/hSFgPEjxCek
How about a whole postcode area
Jake Burns – Belfast 14
and another post code
Ringo Starr – Liverpool 8
Not forgetting
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=53Nuia5NHA0
Almost.
The local council are “doing a Trump” a building a wall around Winter Hill.
http://www.maidenhead-advertiser.co.uk/gallery/cookhams/106218/wall-of-earth-set-up-to-tackle-winter-hill-dogging-and-anti-social-behaviour-problems.html
They’re all doing a Trump? Too many sprouts at the staff Christmas luncheon.
“Drug dealing, dogging and partying”! That beauty spot is a cesshill of vice.
Two of those are surely more social than anti-social…
Hmmm … I really like “Sammy’s Bar”, and my favourite version is that by Martin Simpson.
When I was in Malta last year, I looked on the map to see where Pietà is. It’s just south of Valletta. Haul away the daighsoe!
If “local” can be be defined as within 50 miles, then I nominate Box Hill in Surrey
Dumpys Rusty Nuts – Box Hill Or Bust
Same place, slightly different vibe.
Box Hill is also mentioned in PiL’s Flowers of Romance. For this useless information there is no charge.
In Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, somewhere called Boxhill (one word, not two) is mentioned. Is that a different place, then?
“And I’ve seen you on the corners and cafes, it seems.
Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme.
And he pulled her on behind,
And down to Boxhill they’d Ride.
I’m guessing that being something of a preferred Bikers destination, whether it is one or two words it is the same place
(and Google confirms this theory (ie not recognising a difference between one or two words))
It is indeed the same place. Box Hill is a fine viewpoint above the A24 along which for decades bikers have done the ton on the beautifully meandering stretch from Leatherhead to Dorking. The bikers even set up a cafe in which to enjoy a fine breakfast in a Sunday morning after a bracing ride, which prospers to this day. It’s gone a bit posh now but used to be Called Ryka’s for Bikers. Their bacon and fried egg bap brooks no denial.
http://www.rykas.co.uk/
Watch out for the camera van around the bend after the fixed speed camera heading north. People go past the fixed and put their foot down around the bend and whoops, flash! Sneaky bastards.
Oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
I think 10cc’s album Deceptive Bends is named after a sign that was on the A24 from Leatherhead to Dorking a bit before you come to the stepping stones which lead up to Box Hill. Agree with Twang – it’s beautiful up there.
Hollow Ponds, near Whipps Cross Hospital, where I had my arm put in plaster after falling off my skateboard aged about thirteen. Last took a boat out on the Ponds about five years ago. Great fun.
On the outskirts of Oxford is Shotover country park, which also has a reputation as a meeting point of sorts. “Shotover Hill” has been a song by both Supergrass and Broken Home:
The Real Thing – Stanhope St – from what I recall a fairly grim part of Liverpool – from the much neglected “4 from 8” album – the UK’s “What’s going on” – sort of…
John Surman’s “Saltash Bells” is named after the small Cornish town where I spent my infancy. After a few years, we moved across the river to the bright lights of Plymouth, which I would not be surprised to discover is the largest city in the UK to have had absolutely no cultural impact. It does get a namecheck in this lovely Oysterband song, though:
(that song is a rich vein for this thread)
Mull Of Kintyre.
Junior’s Farm.
The Long And Winding Road.
Heart Of The Country.
“The county judge, held a grudge, for the band on the run.”
Campbeltown Loch.
Nick Lowe explained the song “Indian Queens” as being inspired by a road sign he used to see when driving back from the West Country. Having written the song he thought he ought to go and have a look what it’s like. “It makes Perivale look like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon” our hero quipped,
Indian Queens is a bit further on from Saltash (see above). It’s part of the great Cornish tradition of small towns with lovely evocative names that turn out to be bit of a dump – see also Lostwithiel.
Steady on there – Lostwithiel is a lovely place. OOAA, apparently. You were probably thinking of Liskeard.
There’s a turnoff on the A30 for Indian Queens. Always makes me think of motorbikes.
“You’re like Manchester, you’ve got strange ways.”
“Reynard left and went to Warwickshire, to a mound near a railway line,
With canals and a freezing swamp. He climbs high up above the countryside
And breathes freely. To the south he could see Polesworth, and to the
North he could just make out the ruins of the priory where Joss and I
Played cricket as children. We were only three miles away, probably drinking
Tea and talking…”
That’ll be Pooley Mound that the Arch Drude is referring to, an old slag heap left over from the mine where the album cover for Fried was taken (the one with Julian under a turtle shell).
I’m from Polesworth, and you can see my parents house from the top of the mound.
Hebden Bridge with the added bonus of Lord Hereford’s Knob, or vice versa.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LlRrdbkyV8w
Thought I’d see what songs there were about Sarfend, and this popped up. NB: for once, I didn’t buy this when it came out. The label says it’s a COMIC SONG, in case there’s any doubt…he didn’t see much of the water, but he put some beers away.
Growing up in New Zealand there were hardly any songs about local places, well, a few folk songs actually. But songs from the US and England regularly name checked local places and somehow they never seemed embarrassing or contrived. Until this, released in the UK under the name The Pipp, but it’s actually a great NZ band called The Fourmyula, who had a couple of great writers in the band. Otaki is a sleepy place a couple of hours north of Wellington, back then it was full of holiday houses and hippies, now it’s retirement village land.
BTW the band’s drummer was one Chris Parry who went to become a manager and signed The Cure and The Jam
A mate of mine used to live here…
https://youtu.be/9aVib0YfdOk
Van The Man has taken us down most of the highways, byways and random eateries of Belfast and beyond, but I’d like to take you way back, way way waaaaay back, On Hyndford Street, where it all began: