Jan 17: Guest blogger Brendan Conway #1: From Penny Lane to Euro-Country: Psychogeography is alive and well

My first guest post from Brendan Conway.

How the legacy of the greatest single ever made continues to inspire songwriters to capture a sense of place including current rising stars such as CMAT.

In recent decades, a recurring theme among the most creative and highly-regarded musicians is their influences from the past, including recordings from many years before they were born.

One example is Irish musician CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson). CMAT’s first album in 2022 included a track called ‘Geography Teacher’. Her most recent album title and title track ‘Euro-Country’ also has a justifiable geographical ring about it, with various meanings, including her love of music from different countries, particularly when artists sing in their own language and all types of country music.

CMAT’s songwriting is strongly influenced by her experience of growing up in Dunboyne, County Meath around the time of the banking crisis of 2008, which caused a major economic crash in Ireland following the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom years. 

Songs on the album include laments about the ensuing social and economic impacts and loss of cultural identity: 

‘Everybody became unemployed. Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash.’ (see Middle-aged Men and Suicide in Ireland (Donnell and Richardson 2018) ).

The title track ‘Euro-Country’ starts with a verse in Irish and the video takes place in the sterile interior of the Omni Shopping Centre in Santry, northern Dublin. There is nothing distinctive about the place - it could be anywhere. 

Geographers will pick up strong resonances with issues around ‘clone towns’ and ‘out-of-town’ retail-led developments. 

Along with many of the best contemporary artists, CMAT actively trawls deeply and widely through musical heritage. In this video, CMAT breaks down the process behind her 'EURO-COUNTRY' album, plus 'Running/Planning' (Artist In Residence’ on BBC 6 Music in August 2025 - there is a link to influence of Pentangle and The Beatles' use of the mellotron explained here) 

Her work follows a long tradition of psychogeographical songwriting which began in the 1960s. 

Along with so many trends of that era, The Beatles were a major catalyst. They initiated or picked up on cultural shifts, ran with them and brought them into the mainstream, often in a profoundly influential way. In turn, their songwriting style borrowed ideas from other songwriters such as Bob Dylan and critics such as Kenneth Allsop. 

A turning point was The Beatles song 'In My Life' on their 1965 studio album 'Rubber Soul'. Starting with the line ‘There are places I remember…’ it was mainly written by John Lennon drawing on reminiscences of his childhood holidays in Durness, northern Scotland.

It signalled a major shift away from The Beatles’ earlier, straightforward love songs to a more autobiographical, reflective style of songwriting. In particular, their innovative fusion of pop music with feelings and memories about geographical places unwittingly pioneered a psychogeographical approach to songwriting. 

Then in February 1967, The Beatles released arguably the greatest single record of all time - a 'double-A side' of Penny Lane written by Paul McCartney and Strawberry Fields Forever written by John Lennon. Both were psychogeographical vignettes of suburban life - evoking memories of places associated with their upbringing in Liverpool.

The influence of The Beatles' new approach on other songwriters was immediate and enduring. In 1967 alone, several hits of the year demonstrated that other artists were choosing psychogeographical themes to good effect including The Kinks' 'Waterloo Sunset'; Small Faces' 'Itchycoo Park'; The Monkees' 'Pleasant Valley Sunday', and Scott McKenzie's 'San Francisco'. 

It wasn’t just about the song's lyrics but its instrumentation and production as well. 

The Beatles popularised the use of cut-up methods and sampling loops to paint soundscapes with early uses on songs such as 'Tomorrow Never Knows' on the 1966 album Revolver. 

On their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band they incorporated cultural influences from distant times and places including vaudeville, music hall and Indian classical music. They embraced new technologies of the day such as the mellotron (a keyboard instrument which played tape loops) for the opening chords and /textures throughout 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and synthesisers on the 1969 album Abbey Road, especially on George Harrison’s classic song 'Here Comes The Sun'.

The Beatles cleared a path for other artists to experiment such as Pentangle who fused folk with rock and jazz for songs such as 'Light Flight' (1969) about challenges of life in London for three young women and 'Wedding Dress' (1971), which CMAT describes as ‘the greatest song of all time’, incidentally recorded 25 years before her birth!

Well into the twenty-first century, artists frequently gain substantial inspiration from the innovations which took place many years before they were born, five or six decades ago. For example, CMAT explains that ‘I love the mellotron… we used it on every single song on this record’ such as 'Running/Planning' to create sound imagery by fusing disparate genres such as country and western, chamber pop strings and old-school music tech. 

As in a relay race, the psychogeographical baton created by The Beatles has been handed successfully from one generation to another.

For further details about The Beatles' psychogeographical song writing and other links to geographical places, take a look at these two Story Maps. (They will appear elsewhere on the blog as well).

Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever  - the geography of the greatest single ever

Sgt. Pepper’s Places - a geographical perspective on The Beatles in 1967

Brendan Conway is a geography teacher with over thirty years’ experience and led his current school to the GA Centre of Excellence. He has authored a range of learning materials for Oak National Academy, Tutor2U, Collins, BBC Bitesize and has expertise in GIS. Brendan is very interested in the links between geography and music and has written far too many story maps on this theme.