I first heard Smetana's Vltava (or The Moldau) while driving with my mum. We're both flautists, and she knows the piece well. As we listened she explained how it traces the course of the Vltava River through Czechia. It begins where two mountain streams meet, represented by two intertwining flutes. From there, the music carries you downstream past hunters in the forest, a village wedding, moonlit dancing by the water, the dramatic St. John's Rapids, and finally to Vyšehrad Castle in Prague.
She gave a running commentary as we listened, and it completely changed how I thought about music. I hadn't realised it could tell such a vivid geographical story.
When I joined Esri UK two years ago, I couldn't shake the idea of bringing this piece to life on a map.
Using an ArcGIS StoryMap, I've traced the journey of Vltava along the river itself. As you explore, you can listen to each section of the music, discover the historical and cultural context behind it, and see how the landscape, geography and composition are all woven together.
Thanks to Brendan Conway for the tipoff to Madeleine's work.
The fourth guest post from Brendan Conway - scheduled to post during the GA Conference.
Brendan Conway will be at the GA Conference sharing something he's been working on for some time. He is co-presenting with Alistair Hamill.
The indie dance band St Etienne, formed in 1990, have regularly signalled a strong geographical affinity with albums steeped in sense of place such as ‘Finisterre’ (2002) and ‘Home Counties’ (2017) which included tracks inspired by local knowledge of places in the rural-urban fringe of London such as ‘Whyteleafe’, ‘Breakneck Hill’ and ‘Angel of Woodhatch’.
Their album cover for ‘Words and Music’ (2012) is an incredible piece of map art based on Croydon town centre, redesigned by Manchester art collective Dorothy to change all of the road names to songs. Bob Stanley of the band explained the psychogeographical concept.
‘The general theme of the album is marking a route in your life through music—the idea is that you can follow roads on the map and end up with a playlist of different journeys. There are 312 song titles on the map—it's our hometown.’
Can you spot all 312?!
In a similar cartographic vein, in 2023 Bob Stanley, created a compilation album called ‘London A to Z’ for Ace Records.
The selection features places in London, recorded in the 1960s and 1970s. Such compilations can sometimes be disappointing, but not this one. Many of the artists are very well-known although their tracks are usually more obscure. There are many forgotten gems, providing interesting windows back in time. Nick Drake departs from his typical melancholy to deliver the upbeat ‘Mayfair’ (1968) and Norma Tanega celebrates ‘Clapham Junction’(1971) with her characteristic guitar licks. The prolific 1960s hit maker Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) sings about ‘Portobello Road’ which is close to where he grew up in London’s West End.
‘Hampstead Way’ sung by Linda Lewis sounds well ahead of its time. She famously had a five-octave vocal range and had cameo roles in 1960s classic movies ‘A Taste Of Honey’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Several songs have intriguing back stories to explore. For example, ‘London Social Degree’ (1968), covered here by long-time associate of David Bowie, Dana Gillespie. It was written by British singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, and musical director Billy Nicholls. Its naive inverted snobbery vibe and anti-intellectual lyrics sound a bit annoying now (a bit like Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ a decade later), but it's an interesting period piece, originally recorded by Billy Nicholls himself in 1968 on his classic baroque pop album ‘Would You Believe’.
Perhaps the greatest rediscovery on the compilation is ‘Euston Station’(1967), written and sung by the less-well-known and much underrated Barbara Ruskin, which should have been a big hit but failed to chart.
As Bob Stanley suggests in his ‘sleeve notes’, the original A to Z of London ‘invited you to create your own personal map of London’.
Now we can do a similar thing for his compilation using geographical information systems (GIS), so I used Geo Mapper 2D to geo-reference and visualise the locations of all the tracks, demonstrating the capacity of Geo Mapper to ‘Spotimapify’ such data.
Clicking on each location shows a relevant image (usually the record sleeve) and an opportunity to hear an extract from the track by linking through to the Ace Records web page about the compilation.
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.
I'll start with my daughter who was going to see Everything Everything and they were sat in Wagamamas before the show, and she also bumped into Example in Norwich Market ahead of his show at UEA that evening.
Here are a few others:
Brendan Conway shared two interesting stories:
I was at a wedding reception and all of Madness were on the next table, being pleasantly mad throughout. By coincidence, a few weeks later I was helping out at the school fair with my brother who was exhibiting his pet piranha fish. Suggs from Madness stopped by, intrigued by the exhibit and asked loads of questions about them.
In early 1985, I was invited to help make some ‘youth’ programmes for County Sound, a Surrey radio station. An arrangement was made for me to interview Mark Ellen who at the time was editor of Smash Hits and a regular presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test. Later that year he was a co-presenter for the Live Aid TV broadcast. I went up to the Smash Hits head office in Carnaby Street where Mark was kind enough to spend an hour of his day talking to me and answering my esoteric questions, all recorded for one of the programmes we made later. While in his office another of the journalists brought me a cup of tea and joined the interview for a few minutes. It was Neil Tennant. Unbeknown to me at the time, he was just about to leave Smash Hits because he had just secured a recording contract with Chris Lowe as the Pet Shop Boys.
Angus was at school with Tom Robinson and has chatted with him and seen him perform many times since.
Matt had a pint with Jarvis Cocker in the Blue Bell in Conwy when he was on holiday there in the late 90's. He also came into the butchers where he worked and ordered a sandwich!
(Sadly I don't know what he wanted on his sandwich...)
David told me that he once shared a urinal (not the same bowl!) with Jon Bon Jovi, at the Apollo in Manchester.
The third guest blog from Brendan Conway. This one is going to lead to a lot of growth in the play list.
It can sometimes be useful to bring music into our geography teaching, especially when the artists who created and/or performed the music allude to a geographical term, concept, idea or insight, often by accident. We might call such artists ‘anonymous geographers’ because their expressions of geography are usually subconscious.
Let’s consider some examples.
Now That's What I Call Human Geography!
The world’s population has rapidly urbanised over the last hundred years, officially becoming over fifty per cent urban in 2007. Consequently, many songs about urban life have emerged, especially from the mid-1960s onwards.
Nowhere To Run (1965) by Martha Reeves & The Vandellas helps us to tell some interesting geographical stories, especially in conjunction with the accompanying early pop video made on a Ford Mustang assembly line in Detroit. There are links with economic sectors, rural-urban migration pull factors, comparisons with the rise and fall of the Rust Belt and changing health and safety practice in the workplace.
Penny Lane / Strawberry Fields Forever (1966) by The Beatles and Waterloo Sunset (1967) by The Kinks pioneered psychogeographical perspectives of city life.
Later, urban dislocation and anomie were captured in songs such as Town Called Malice (1982) by The Jam, based on Paul Weller’s upbringing in Woking, Surrey. West End Girls (1984) by Pet Shop Boys deals with inner-city class conflict in London, using a bleak narrative and intentionally obscure lyrical style influenced by TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922). Station Approach (2005) by Elbow develops an affectionate sense of place, inspired by lead singer Guy Garvey’s rail journeys via Manchester Piccadilly: ‘coming home I feel like I designed these buildings I walk by’.
Conversely, 'Gold Rush' (2018) by US indie pop band Death Cab for Cutie is a powerful lament about rapid urban change. It’s about recent developments in Seattle, Washington which rendered some areas almost unrecognisable:
‘I feel like stranger here;
Searching for something that's disappeared;
Digging for gold in my neighbourhood;
For what they say is the greater good;
But all I see is a long goodbye;
A requiem for a skyline…
I’ve placed faith in geography,
to hold you in my memory.’
An excellent tongue-in-cheek celebration of the built environment is 'The World’s Biggest Paving Slab' (2023) by English Teacher, who won the Mercury Music Prize in 2024.
The song invites closer observation of the minutiae of the urban environment, celebrating an extremely large paving stone outside Colne Town Hall, Lancashire with dimensions of 3x2.7m (10x9ft). The slab was installed in the late 19th century having been extracted from Cloughfold Quarry, near Rawtenstall in Rossendale, Lancashire:
‘I am the world’s biggest paving slab;
But I sit here quietly;
No one ever looks down at the ground;
Yeah, no one ever notices me’.
Several rural issues are included in Hard Times of Old England Retold (2007) by The Imagined Village such as the decline of rural services, habitat loss, the impact of holiday homes on house prices and supermarkets on prices of farm produce.
Kraftwerk are masters of synth-pop soundscapes about transportation including Autobahn (1974) about motorway driving, Trans-Europe Express (1977) about long distance rail travel and Tour de France (1983) which is a celebration of cycling. Their music was foundational to the development of hip-hop such as Planet Rock (1982) by Afrika Bambaataa.
Now That's What I Call Physical Geography!
There are many great songs referring to the physical landscape.
Among the best topographical songs are Ain't No Mountain High Enough (1966) by by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell or Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) (1985) by Kate Bush.
The British group Public Service Broadcasting have created many excellent geographically oriented tracks, including Everest (2013) which sampled narration from the documentary about the first successful ascent of Mount Sagarmāthā (Everest) called The Conquest of Everest (1953).
The track was used to promote an Everest 1953 Sagarmatha Chomolungma (3D Scene made using ArcGIS Online)
Rivers are a popular geographical topic for many songwriters.
Black Water (1974) by The Doobie Brothers was inspired by the Mississippi; American Pie (1971) by Don McLean is a perennial favourite, not least for its reference to a hard engineering in flood management: ‘Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry’ and River (1971) by Joni Mitchell has recently become a popular Christmas song.
Weather phenomena often appear in songs.
Arguably the most popular are optimistic tracks with singalongability such as 'I Can See Clearly Now' (1972) by Johnny Nash, Here Comes The Sun (1969) by The Beatles, superbly covered by Nina Simone in 1971 and 'Weather With You' (1992) by Crowded House. Summer In The City (1966) by The Lovin' Spoonful is about the urban heat island effect.
One of the most overtly meteorological songs is the tribute to the BBC Shipping Forecast: 'This Is A Low' (1994) by Blur.
There are surprisingly few songs about climate change, but one of the best is Oh Larsen B (2005) by (British) Sea Power, about the ongoing collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica:
‘You had twelve thousand years and now it's all over;
Five hundred billion tonnes of the purest pack ice and snow…
Oh Larsen B, desalinate the barren sea.’
Let’s hope for more songs about climate change and who knows, one day there might be a band called Geography Teacher?!
The tracks mentioned are on the playlist that Brendan has created called Now That's What I Call Geography! (Vol 1).
It is embedded below:
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.
The Beatles are amongst the most significant and influential musical acts ever, although I've never really played their music yet, but have of course heard a lot of their music over the decades. They are synonymous with the city of Liverpool, and the 1960s, although they went through a number of phases before their last performance on the roof of Apple Records in London on 30th January 1969.
This was at 3 Savile Row, which was just next door to #1 where the Royal Geographical Society had their HQ between 1870 and 1912.
This map shows the locations of all the places featured in their lyrics.
Take yourself on a tour of lyric locations in The Beatles songs. From Eleanor Rigby's gravestone in Liverpool to Abbey Road in North London, see the locations behind The Beatles lyrics throughout England, France, Russia, India, the United States, and more countries, covering 25,510 miles around the world.
Image: Alan Parkinson, shared on Flickr under CC license
Brendan will be making several contributions to the blog as the year goes on - see his other StoryMap posted yesterday.
The inspiration of places had become an integral part of their music. The geographical locations linked to Sgt. Pepper and their other work in 1967 provide the focus for this Story Map.
Brendan Conway has produced a series of ESRI StoryMaps. I referenced one a few days ago, but this one is a Beatles themed one - linked to another guest blog post I shall publish in a few weeks' time. The StoryMap format lends itself very well to this sort of exploration.
I may set up a small competition at some point if we get enough regular readers of the blog to create a musical StoryMap for a favourite band or piece of music. Brendan has modelled some good practice here in that regard.
How might Life On Mars? have been inspired by BBC controversy?
Spoiler alert: Life On Mars? isn’t really about Mars! It was actually about escaping from the perceived banality of suburban life to search for other, hopefully more interesting places.
'Life On Mars?' presents a cynical perspective about such aspiration, with acerbic views on the American Dream ‘It's on America's tortured brow; That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow’ and the impact of mass tourism on destinations: ‘See the mice in their million hordes; From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads.’
Why did David Bowie pick on tourism and why these particular places?
It seems that he was influenced by a high profile BBC television programme of the time called 'Holiday', which was launched in 1969.
David Bowie’s real name was David Jones.
Born in south London in 1947, he was in the vanguard of the 'baby-boomers', the generation born between 1945 and 1965. This demographic tsunami became a key driver for change in music, fashion and demand for consumer goods and services including tourism.
The young David Jones was a bit of a trend setter, making his first TV appearance in 1964 at the age of 17 in an interview with Cliff Michelmore who at that time was one of the best-known personalities in the UK. Michelmore anchored the popular BBC current affairs programme 'Tonight' which ran a report about the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, recently founded by David Jones and a few of his friends.
Less than four years later in 1969, at the height of the Space Race, David Bowie wrote 'Space Oddity'.
The title of the song was a pun inspired by the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Apollo 8 mission which took the first human beings around the Moon at Christmas 1968.
In July 1969 'Space Oddity' was rush-released as a single to coincide with the Apollo 11 mission which took human beings to walk on the Moon for the first time.
The song gained further profile when it was used by the BBC as background music during their coverage of the key moon landings which were coincidentally anchored by the omnipresent BBC stalwart Cliff Michelmore.
Also in 1969, the BBC launched a lifestyle consumer series called 'Holiday 69' (later shortened to just 'Holiday') on the 2nd of January, providing viewers with an audio-visual respite from the depths of the British winter.
Yet again, it was anchored by his 1964 interviewer Cliff Michelmore.
The programme was extremely successful, running for 38 years until 2007, becoming the longest running travel series on UK television, with Michelmore leading the presentation until 1986. Such programmes would regularly attract millions of viewers, at a time when there were only three TV channels to watch in the UK until 1982 and no satellite TV or Internet.
'Holiday' offered viewers vicarious experiences of tourist destinations which at the time were just becoming attainable as places of escape. As Michelmore reflected later ‘it was a bit of sunshine in the middle of the winter, even though it was in black and white!’.
More recently, the BBC has courted controversy when presenters express opinions about current affairs, attracting accusations of bias, but such incidents are nothing new.
The very first Holiday programme attracted international criticism when Cliff Michelmore reported about sewage on beaches in Ibiza and referred to it as 'this septic isle'.
David Bowie would probably have been aware of the Holiday programme and the controversy over the Ibiza coverage. So it’s no coincidence that he chose Ibiza and the Norfolk Broads to reference as places of escape.
The programme would also have attracted David Bowie's attention because the theme music used was 'The Castle' by the US American psychedelic rock band Love, taken from their 1966 album Da Capo. Love was led by Arthur Lee, who was an influence on Bowie's early work.
Further details about the geographical places linked to Life On Mars? are available in a story map created using ArcGIS Online:
The original theme tune for the series was Love's "The Castle". Subsequent theme tunes in the mid-1970s included Hugo Montenegro's arrangement of Lalo Schifrin's theme to the 1968 movie 'The Fox', a cover of the Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun", and Part One of Jean Michel Jarre's Equinoxe.
Gordon Giltrap's "Heartsong" was used as a theme tune from 1978 until the end of the 1985 series.
This is the one I remember the best.
In 1986 it was replaced with "The Holiday Suite" written by Simon May, who also composed the EastEnders theme. This proved unpopular, and was replaced on Holiday '87 by a further Giltrap composition "Breaking Free" which also only lasted one year. For Holiday '88-'91 they used a third Giltrap composition "Holiday Romance".
In 1992 Paul Hardcastle composed a new theme, titled "Voyager". This theme was used throughout the 1990s and 2000s until the programme came to an end after 37 years in 2007.
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).
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.
