If we are talking about cities - as we have been, then I have always returned to the song 'The Camera Eye' by Rush. It comes from their best album 'Moving Pictures'.
Here's the back of the LP cover.
The song moves between London and New York; two cities known to lyricist Neil Peart.
Here's the performance of the song from the Time Machine Tour - the last time I saw them playing live.
The lyrics and the structure of the song are very well crafted. I also love the music, plenty of Oberheim and bass pedals...
Neil had read the work of John Dos Pasos, in particular his “USA Trilogy”. And in those books, Dos Pasos uses a literary device he calls “the camera eye”. That’s where Neil got the title from. One of the books in the USA trilogy is called “The Big Money”. Neil would later write a song based on that, too.
“The Camera Eye” opens with the sound of a city. It’s a city street scene. According to Geddy Lee, when they were putting together that pastiche of sound effects, one of the clips they used was a bit of audio from “Superman”, the 1978 movie with Christopher Reeve.
We start in New York:
“Grim faced and forbidding, their faces closed tight.
An angular mass of New Yorkers
pacing in rhythm race the oncoming night
they chase through the streets of Manhattan.”
And then comes the rain that will connect the two cities together.
Which rock band, still going after over 50 years, recorded their first album here, on Denmark Street, near Tottenham Court Road?
Answers in the comments...
If it helps with a clue, here's what Rough Trade Records said when they opened their store opposite in October 2024...
Denmark Street is often described as the birthplace of the British music industry where iconic artists such as Elton John, Sex Pistols and David Bowie hung out, made music and lived.
I've missed out the answer from the text above.
As part of the wider immersive arts and culture district Outernet London, Denmark St has been preserved and enhanced with new music businesses continuing to open.
Close by is the 2,000-capacity live venue HERE at Outernet, the largest venue in central London since the 1940s, as well two smaller venues aimed at emerging artists including The Lower Third, named in honour of David Bowie’s early band.
A classic from 'The Orb'.... from 1990.... not that we had those today, and wind is currently roaring around the house and down the chimney...
"They went on forever — They — When I w— We lived in Arizona, and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in 'em, and, uh... they were long... and clear and... there were lots of stars at night. And, uh, when it would rain, it would all turn — it— They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact.
Um, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colours everywhere. That's uh, neat 'cause I used to look at them all the time, when I was little. You don't see that. You might still see them in the desert."
The latest of Carl Lee's guest blog posts describes his decision to walk to see the biggest rock band in the world - and just as well that he did...
Walking to Knebworth
In August 1979, Led Zeppelin, who at that time were arguably the largest rock band in the world, played two huge outdoor shows in the parkland of Knebworth House just south of the Hertfordshire new town of Stevenage. It was the first outdoor ‘festival’ gig that I had attended and I walked there.
Back in the sixth-form in the late 70s and early 80s, musical tribes vied with each other for perceived gradations of ‘cool’ but strangely Zeppelin were able to cross these clearly demarcated boundaries. I was more likely to be listening to the Clash or Ian Dury at the time, and Zeppelin’s last album, ‘In Through The Out Door’ was clearly their most ‘meh’ album to date.
Yet Zeppelin had not played live in Britain for four years and there was clearly a sense of ‘event’.
If we didn’t go because my musical tastes were evolving from Radio Caroline classic rock to something more edgy and contemporary that really would not be smart. Saturday jobs were enabling of the seemingly affordable £7.50 ticket price: an absolute snip by today’s stratospheric standards of festival tickets. The question was how to get there.
I’m not sure whose idea it was but being early August and with no school the summer holidays stretching out ahead of us and it was decided that we’d walk there from Leighton Buzzard, where we lived, a distance of some 28 miles.
So on 2nd August we set off trudging the roads, crossing the A5 and M1 before alighting at Sharpenhoe Clappers, a chalk escarpment a few miles north of suburban Luton. We set up camp just as the sun was setting to avoid detection from outraged locals and did foolish teenage things.
Drone footage of the Sharpenhoe Clappers
In the morning we set off to complete the 12 miles to Knebworth. This was a more rural route taking us through the villages of Lilley, Kings Walden and St Paul’s Walden before attempting to find the entrance onto the site. To say we were excited would be a huge under-statement although the chaos of the camping area was a shock. Drop latrines, rubbish everywhere, menacing rockers chuntering ‘acid, acid, acid’, hardly any food and already the real hardcore staking out their pitch close to the stage. And this was just Friday night.
Saturday broke and to be honest I don’t have many clear recollections of the rest of the day apart from the fact we were a long way back behind folk much taller than us and with the wind swirling the sound around.
The only support act that stuck in my mind was Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and that was possibly because of the impossibly tight spandex trousers he was wearing.
Check out the track 'Singring and the Glass Guitar'....
When night fell and Zeppelin came on stage the excitement was electric.
I have had to go back and watch a film of the gig to reconfirm my impression at the time:that this was a rather uncertain show, rambling and lacking sharpness.
And also, because of the distance from the stage and the wind taking the sound away, it was not exactly the greatest aural experience - but hey it was Led Zeppelin playing live!
It was almost like touching a holy relic, a band of mythical proportions whose music along with Pink Floyd were my first teenage crush. That was probably enough. I bought a sweatshirt from the gig. Somebody’s parents picked us up the next day, bedraggled, in need of a bath, hung-over but with a cracking yarn for the sixth form common room.
Interestingly, looking back over Wikipedia some comments from the music journalist Chris Welch caught my eye. Attending the show he observed that
“Audience reaction at Knebworth had not been overwhelming and many seemed content to stand and stare like mesmerised spectators at an alien ritual.”
Having now been to outdoor shows where the audience has been in raptures and the act or band has been absolutely flying I can completely concur with Welch’s observations. It may have been Led Zeppelins biggest gig but it certainly was not their finest. Yet at the time it was a magical adventure, and it was made much better by walking there.
It was a sort of pilgrimage.
Here's another review as well:
And a recording of one of the concerts.
Led Zeppelin: 4th August 1979
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
Additional comments from me:
I remember the different groups when I was in Sixth Form - 1980-1982. I was definitely in the prog-rock camp.
In an interview he gave in 2005, Robert Plant said:
"I was racked with nerves. It was our first British gig in four years and we could have gone back to the Queen's Head pub. We talked about doing something like that. But instead we went back in such a flurry and a fluster to 210,000 people in a field and 180,000 more the next day, surrounded by Keith and Ronnie and Todd Rundgren. Nobody's big enough to meet those expectations. But because there was some chemical charge in the air, it worked. It didn't work for us. We played too fast and we played too slow and it was like trying to land a plane with one engine. But it was fantastic for those who were there."
These are songs which will always get people singing when they come on the radio or at discos, they'll be whistled by people in charity shops, and certainly result in a lot of waving and iPhone torches at concerts when they are played. They're anthems...
Here's the first of some suggestions for anthemic songs... the ones which perhaps bring concerts by the band who created them to a close for years... the ones that the set list builds up to.
I was fortunate to hear Elbow play this live at the end of a concert in Thetford Forest in Norfolk.
It was a warm and pleasant evening and the crowd was in the arena set in the forest...
Here's Guy Garvey explaining the meaning behind the song.
Do you have other suggestions?
And don't worry, I have Mr. Brightside already on the list...
Help(2) (stylised in all caps) is a charity compilation album created by the organisation War Child in order to raise funds for their work involving helping children living through war.
It was released on 6 March 2026 through War Child Records.
The album will accompany a documentary film directed by Jonathan Glazer.
The first one was the subject of some work from John Wilkinson and a GA Conference session which was one of the influences on the creation of the blog.
“Universal Soldier” is an anti-war protest song written by singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, who is best known for the Academy Award-winning song “Up Where We Belong” from the film An Officer and a Gentleman. She wrote “Universal Soldier” in 1963 after encountering injured American troops returning home from the Vietnam War. The song has been previously covered many times, notably by Donovan, Glen Campbell, and First Aid Kit.
The album arrives the same week the United States and Israel launched a needless war against Iran, escalating tensions and sowing chaos across the Middle East. Dave Gahan and Martin Gore have transformed this folk song into a dark, electrified menace.
Their version bristles with rattling chains, chilling synth pads, and a heavy, deliberate beat, anchored by Gahan’s unmistakable voice. The band recorded the song at Abbey Road Studios in November 2025, which in itself feels notable.
After the release of Memento Mori and the heartbreaking loss of founding member Andy Fletcher, it wasn’t entirely clear if Depeche Mode would continue recording new material.
The album ends with Olivia Rodrigo doing a cover of Stephin Merritt's 'The Book of Love' - also covered by Peter Gabriel on his 'Scratch my Back' album... a much better version in my opinion.
The lyrics reference the impacts of the war on people, place and the environment - the three elements of geography.
This week we have seen oil very much in the news....
Here is the song being performed by Martin Carthy and David Swarbrick. I have seen this song performed by Martin in Norwich.
I was reminded of a link when I watched the local Look East evening news programmes in the week.
It featured someone from a company called Boiler Juice. I order my heating oil from this company.
Thousands of people living in rural East Anglia, and other locations such as Northumberland rely on heating oil. I live in one of those households. I had recently had a delivery of 500 litres, which should take us through into the summer months all being well. We use this for our heating and hot water. There is no gas in the village (although that is apparently at a premium as well), and limited options for solar and heat pumps too. Being a village with limited public transport - 20 miles from the nearest train station and having to commute to work I will also be paying more for petrol to get to school.
The price of heating oil has more than doubled in the last few days. I did a little quote on Boiler Juice and it showed the price spike. Heating oil, like jet fuel, is kerosene-based. Both are traded on European wholesale markets which depend on Gulf oil travelling through the Strait of Hormuz, which has now been closed by threats from Iran.
Unlike electricity and gas supplies, there is no price cap on oil.
According to latest Census figures, 865,000 homes in England and Wales – mostly in eastern England, Wales, the north-east and the west country – 127,000 in Scotland and 380,000 in Northern Ireland are affected.
This is as nothing of course compared to the impact of the current war, started for no good reason, which has already claimed hundreds of civilian lives, including the teachers and students at a school....
The music was stripped back, and there were acoustic performances in a number of unusual venues.
The band undertook a series of free, unannounced concerts in iceland. they hauled 40-plus people round 15 locations to the furthest flung corners of their homeland for their debut venture into live film, to create something inspirational.
On their way they went to ghost towns, outsider art shrines, national parks, small community halls and the absolute middle-of-nowhere-ness of the highland wilderness, as well as playing the largest gig of their career (and in icelandic history) at their homecoming Reykjavik show.
‘Heima’ (icelandic for “at home” or “homeland”), truly, shows Sigur Rós as never before. whereas seeing the group live is normally a large-scale and sometimes overwhelming experience, making full use of lights and mesmeric visuals, ‘Heima’ was always intended to reveal more of what was actually going on on stage. it does this via long-held close-ups and a rare intimate proximity, without ever once breaking the spell.
Loosely based on a documentary format – and including personal reflections from the band – ‘Heima’ also serves as an alternative primer for Iceland the country, which is revealed as less stag destination-du-jour and more desolate, magical place where human beings have little right to trespass.
'Heima’ was directed by Dean Deblois, a long-time fan of the band and director of the Oscar-nominated animated feature ‘Lilo & Stitch’, using an Icelandic crew.
MIKLATUN, REYKJAVIK: The largest of the concerts in question took place in this small park in Reykjavik city. Miklatun is better known locally as Klambratun and is also location of Kjarvalsstadir Art Museum.
ASBYRGI, HUSAVIK: A fantastic arena for a concert and everything else for that matter. Asbyrgi sits in a very peculiar depression in the landscape and offer excellent shelter from winds from particular directions. Surrounded by a half-moon shaped cliffs up to hundred meters in height this is one of the absolute must-stops in the country.
DJUPAVIK, HOLMAVIK: This was perhaps the most intimate of the concerts in question. Population of Djupavik is zilch, nill and not much there but an abandoned fish factory which has been partly turned into a summer hotel. This is very much off the beaten track of most travelers but that might appeal to many too.
OLAFSVIK, OLAFSVIK: The tiny village of Olafsvik may not look or offer much but this was the location of one of Sigur Rósar concerts. The routes into town are very scenic and the magnificent, if disappearing, Snaefellsjokull glacier towers above.
ISAFJORDUR, ISAFJORDUR: Isafjordur town is the largest place found in the Westfjords of Iceland and as such pretty lively. Straight across from the bay is the nature preserve Hornstrandir which is one of the very finest places in the country.
SEYDISFJORDUR, SEYDISFJORDUR: A tiny village in the East of Iceland with majestic mountains formed all around it. This is the current summer stop of the only passenger ferry sailing regularly to Iceland.
KARAHNJUKAR, EGILSSTADIR: This is way up in the highland close to where the huge Karahnjukar dam stands. Protesting the dam was one reason why they played here and funnily enough, next to a dam, totally without electricity.
OXNADALUR, AKUREYRI: Oxnadalur valley is a spectacular valley you drive through on your way to or from Akureyri in the North of Iceland. Some of Iceland´s most jagged peaks join any traveler here for and below a river runs through it. This is also the birthplace of one of Iceland´s most famous poets.
The Underfall Yard is actually linked to Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
The 23 minute title track, "The Underfall Yard", is a song about Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the great Victorian engineers. The Underfall Yard itself is located in Bristol and is an engineering solution, partly developed by Brunel, to maintain water and silt levels in the city's harbour.
The song explores Enlightenment themes, contrasting the rationalism of the Victorian era to a coming 'age of unreason'.
The Underfall Yard was initially inspired by Richard Fortey's The Hidden Landscape.
In the book, Fortey describes a journey along Brunel's Great Western line, where, as the author travelled west, the rocks are found to be older.
Videos have been filmed from cars driving through cities around the world. You can listen to music on the local radio station or in the car, and also opt to hear the background sounds as well, which include the engine and street noise, sat-nav instructions etc.
This site has more cities and different versions of the city in some cases than an earlier version, with multiple videos of some. There are hundreds of cities available.
I put Reykjavik on the screen during an Open Day at my school and enjoyed watching a car following familiar roads from trips there.
There are some fascinating cities to drive through. Think about the impression that you get from the views of one vehicle. Which part of the city has been chosen to represent the city? Does the route go past the 'nicest' parts or the Central Business District? Has it been selected to avoid the busiest intersections where the car might end up standing still for some time in queues? Can you work out where in the city it is with the help of mapping or StreetView (if available).
Try Sana'a in Yemen for example for an interesting cityscape. Follow a battered Land Cruiser for a while.
Or Fukushima City with pristine streets, and the wide roads of Abu Dhabi.
There's a few other options such as Doncaster in the rain.
Some videos are higher quality than others. Some of them take place at night time. There is a variety of weather, including the icy streets of Anchorage, the beach side roads of Brazil and Costa Rica, and the distant hills that can be seen outside of some cities.
You can also opt to walk or cycle through the city and there are other options down the right hand side of the menu, which can be closed and the site put on full screen to avoid distractions.
The speed at which you travel can also be controlled....
There are some different ways this could be used with with groups, and I can imagine some sort of analysis or comparison of two cities in different parts of the world to compare the buildings, infrastructure, standard of driving etc. Also look out for signs of globalisation on billboards.
While the vehicle drives through the city, you can also tune in to a local radio station and hear what is playing in the car as it drives through the city.
The latest guest blog post from Carl Lee heads to the deep south of the USA - but not in person.
Tremé
New Orleans, Louisiana.
Three months after.
Antoine Baptiste is running to catch up a second line band in the Tremé, trombone in hand. He has got himself a gig standing in for Trombone Shorty. When he arrives after explaining himself to the band he hollers “play it for the money boys, play it for the money” and they break out into ‘Feel like funking it up’.
And so opens Treme the HBO drama that premiered in April 2010 - not quite five years since Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans resulting in destruction and the loss of over one thousand lives.
The Tremé, the oldest African American neighbourhood in the USA, and is just north of the famous French Quarter, and it took the full force of Hurricane Katrina but survived serious flooding because it is on higher ground. Treme the television drama is the story of how the residents of the Tremé tried to rebuild their lives three months after America’s most destructive hurricane to date.
Treme spans four series and 36 episodes and if you have never watched it you are in for a real treat; it is American drama at its absolute best. Not that should be surprising given that it was created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer who were also responsible for ‘The Wire’, a series often cited as the best American television drama ever created. It had pedigree.
Here's that opening scene.
Treme is as much about a place as it is the people that live in that place and call it home.
It was in the Tremé that free people of colour first lived in American and as Wendell Pierce, who plays Antoine Baptiste, explains, “In Tremé captured Africans could listen to the music of European brass bands and they combined those two sounds into jazz. Um pah pah turned into um…pah a douba douba douba boom boom yeah”.
So the Tremé, a working-class inner suburb of New Orleans, was effectively the birthplace of jazz and unsurprisingly it seeped into the cultural soul of the place.
Nowhere is that more clearly expressed than in the tradition of the second line.
Here at death there is no greater honour at your funeral than to have, after the close family - the first line, friends and neighbours who with a jazz band make up the second line. To the cemetery a dirge is mournfully played but on departure - post the funeral - the band, driven by the drum, kicks up party style, literally funking it up. The cost of the second line was met by the social and pleasure clubs that glued together the working communities of the Tremé.
Although Hurricane Katrina certainly dealt a blow to the Tremé, that was not the event that has been most damaging to this unique culture and community.
That has been urban renewal and the changing demographics of the resident population, partly as a result of gentrification.
In the 2000 Census, 93% of the population of Tremé was Black. By 2020 it was just 58%.
The old working class culture of Tremé, the neighbourhood bars and Black owned business have now been subsumed by fancy coffee houses and packaged ‘jazz and blues’ experiences all projecting a perceived and sanitised ‘authenticity’. The old communities that had developed unique musical and cultural traditions such as the Mardi Gras Indians are increasingly difficult to sustain as long standing member sell up and move out, or are moved on by the city authorities as a response to redevelopment or they have simply aged and died.
In 2010, HBO's Treme captured the freewheelin’ bohemian ‘pioneer’ gentrifiers of the Tremé: the chi- chi gumbo restaurants, the French Quarter clubs and the new wealthy residents and older moneyed dynasties - but also there were the itinerant drug-dependent musicians, the casual street gun crime and the brutality of the city's policing especially during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. It is a moment in time in a place.
Echoes of this culture and sound undoubtedly remain, and New Orleans retains its reputation for the birth-place of Black American music, whether jazz or blues, while Mardi Gras still attracts tens of thousands of people from all over the World.
However, you can save yourself the air-fare, the handing over of your DNA and social media history to the US border control or run the risk of ICE picking you and deporting you, by finding 36 hours to binge watch Treme.
References and reading.
Wendell Pirece’s New Orleans - a tour of the neighbourhood thanks to 'The Guardian'
Tremé: Death of a neighborhood, survival of a culture
Black Masking Indians: A historical New Orleans Carnival tradition
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
Last night, was a wonderful experience down in London. After months of waiting, it was time for my son and I to use our tickets to see David Byrne's current concert tour.
I last saw him playing live over 30 years ago, at Cambridge Corn Exchange, when he played a mix of his own solo songs and some Talking Heads classics.
Image: Alan Parkinson
After a day in London taking in some exhibitions and other activities we headed for Hammersmith and down to the Rutland Arms for pre-show meal - a nice Saharan dust enhanced sunset was taking shape and the riverside pubs were busy.
The show was wonderful. It was all about joy and love, and storytelling... and the choreography of the band and the imaginative staging of each track was excellent.
David Byrne's tour is called 'Who is the Sky?' (who is this guy?)
The Hammersmith Apollo (as I shall continue to call it) was packed, and after the first half an hour or so, people were up dancing. The energy was infectious and the audience's response to the music, the political asides and humour was up there with the loudest audiences I've heard... If you get the chance to see it then take it.
Luckily most people respected the request at the start by David Byrne to 'be present' and limit the videoing and photography.
Videos shot on a phone never capture the full impact of a show like this, and the sound is always terrible compared to the careful mix. The bass and lighting on this track: "Once in a Lifetime" were particularly memorable...
Lyrics referencing groundwater hydrology...
And here's a shot of mine, towards the end of 'Life during Wartime'... another Talking Heads classic, which featured lots of images and videos of ICE and the response to them...
Jarvis Cocker has a close connection with the city of Sheffield, as we discovered on the 1st of March.
He has talked and written at length about this connection.
Carl Lee will also share a blog on Jarvis and his Sheffield connections from his own perspective as someone who has lived in the city for a great deal longer than me.
Sheffield Sex City's lyrics continue, later on in the song, describing sitting on a hill overlooking the city:
And listen, I wandered the streets the whole night crying, trying to pick up your scent Writing messages on walls and the puddles of rain reflected your face in my eyes. We finally made it on a hill-top at four a.m. The whole city is your jewellery-box; a million twinkling yellow street lights.
Here's the track in question:
More musical urbanism also comes from this story from a few years ago which has featured on LivingGeography.
When Jarvis Cocker wrote his lyrics for the Pulp song Wickerman, he was inspired by a real-life journey he undertook through the subterranean rivers in the middle of his home city of Sheffield. And now the evocative verses’ local references – from mentions of Sheffield places The Wicker, Forge Dam, The Moor, Broomhall and The Leadmill to ‘Little Mesters coughing their lungs up’ and ‘the old Trebor factory that burned down in the early seventies’ – mean the composition has been deemed worthy of academic study.
Wickerman formed the basis of a question posed to students sitting exam board AQA’s Geography A-level Paper 2, on Human Geography.
Candidates were shown 13 lines from the song – an eight-minute, part-spoken word epic which featured on We Love Life, Pulp’s final studio album to date, released in 2001 – before being asked to compose a response to a specific brief.
Stacey Hill, head of curriculum for geography at AQA, said:
“The question was on how external factors such as art can influence a person’s perception of a place, as opposed to how a local person – in this case someone from Sheffield – might feel about their surroundings. The reason we chose the Pulp lyrics was because they fit the purpose for this type of question very well.”
Port Sunlight was a community built by the Lever Brothers for their workers, who made soap.
It was over to Port Sunlight for me and some friends in the late early 1990s - was not sure when exactly, but this WIKI confirms it as 1991 - it shows the venues of Roy's gigs and I remember quite a few of them in the 1990s all over the north of England.
Port Sunlight is a model community and we had a little look round before the concert. It's a beautiful place, and full of social history. The workers were provided with a nice house and a garden where they could grow some of the food they ate. It was created in 1888
I remember the hall - the Gladstone Theatre - being made from wood, and there were lots of signs warning of no smoking, which was hard to maintain when you're seeing Roy Harper back then...
Port Sunlight sits on the banks of the Mersey on the Wirral Peninsula - quite a trek from South Yorkshire for the gig, and named after the main brand of soap. A large number of architects worked on designs to ensure that there was variety in the type and design of houses.
Other similar model villages funded by industrialists are Saltaire and Bournville.
As with Bournville, alcohol wasn't originally provided.
Built in 1900, the Bridge Inn in Port Sunlught was originally a ‘temperance hotel’ that didn’t serve alcohol. This changed when William Lever put it to a vote and the village’s residents decided they wanted a place to enjoy an alcoholic drink.
What's the most unusual venue for a gig that you've ever been to?
It's their most ambitious undertaking yet and even includes vocals from Einstürzende Neubauten leader Blixa Bargeld. It brings the listener to Europe’s heart and de facto capital, the cultural and political metropolis that is the ‘Hauptstadt’ of the Federal Republic of Germany – Berlin.
Walter Ruttmann’s radical Berlin tape-artwork Wochenende (or Weekend), which is sampled on three of Bright Magic’s tracks provides a key aural resource. Created in 1928, the piece collaged speech, field recordings and music into a sonic evocation of the city.
I've always been excited by the work of the band's multi-instrumentalist songwriter J Willgoose Esq. and there is a good geographical connection once again in this album (as there was with 'Everest' and the coal-mining theme of 'Every Valley'.
Combining sound archaeology and the flâneuring of the psychogeographer, one street-level pursuit of the city’s energy involved Willgoose walking the Leipzigerstrasse, site of the city’s first electric streetlight, using a wide-band electromagnetic receiver from Moscow’s Soma Laboratories. “I walked up and down recording electrical currents and interference,” he laughs. “You can hear a few of these little frequency buzzes, clicks and impulses in Im Licht (a song inspired in part by pioneering lightbulb manufacturers AEG and Siemens). It’s what I was trying to do in the wider sense, I suppose – to capture those tiny little pulses you pick up while walking through a city.”
Bright Magic is the latest album from the band Public Service Broadcasting. It is influenced by the city of Berlin, and influenced by 'Metropolis', Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Marlene Dietrich, Weimar era Germany and the history of the city. I was due to visit in 2020 for an ERASMUS trip, but the pandemic ended those plans.
I have blogged about this band and their music many times before. This is another triumph after 'Every Valley' and 'The Race for Space'. The final track embraces the quotidian... with a rendition of a poem by Kit Tucholsky called 'Eyes in the Big City' with vocals by Nina Hoss.
Check out the album on your favourite streaming service...
The electrical hum of the frozen food aisle at the store on Ecclesall Road has been described by fans on social media as "the calmest droning chord ever", a "gong bath" and like the "string section of an orchestra".
Local music technologist Alex McLean was one of the first to notice the unexpected soundtrack and shared his discovery on Reddit. He said: "I was just doing my shopping and walked into the corner where you're surrounded on three sides by these quite big freezers.
"I just felt this sense of calm, surrounded by these really rich tones, it's like a long continuous chord that never ends."
Such noise is part of our everyday geographies.
Dr Will Scrimshaw is a lecturer in popular music technology and composition at the University of Sheffield. He said the supermarket environment is perfect for creating such a distinctive sound.
"You've got a lot of freezers in that area and there's a lot of glass so it's quite reflective and that allows the frequencies to build up, which is why it's so prominent.
"You'll hear it quietly in lots of appliances. Normally if they get a little bit older and they start to develop a few quirks then that can become a bit more prominent.
"I think it's one of those things that once you've heard it you'll start to notice it in your everyday life a little bit more."
Anne Greaves - a former colleague at the Geographical Association - shared this video of a musical performance featuring the freezers.
OSS030 - Improvised performance in the key of C# Major to accompany the hum of the freezers
Musicians featured: Zebedee C. Budworth - Classical guitar + vocals Rob Bentall - Nyckelharpa Hazel Thompson - Clarinet + voice Ruth Webber - Tenor saxophone Sarah Heneghan - Pandeiro + percussion Peter Brooks - Guitar Phoebe Niamh - Harp Sam Weatherald - Clarinet + percussion (khatal) Eleanor Hooper - Vocals Graham McElearney - Harp Mike Smith - Guitar Lou Barnell - Vocals Cal Innes - Melodica Mat Pronger - Trumpet
Outer Spaces is a non profit run by Jamburrito showcasing musicians performing live in unconventional and interesting spaces.
