Sep 29: Face the Wall

Peter Gabriel has been sharing videos all year - each new moon - as a new song is released from his O/i project... following his 2013 project to do the same for i/O.

Here he talks about music as a cathartic process.

Jun 29: A song you remember from your childhood

When I was a child I would often spend Saturdays at my maternal grandparents' house a few miles from home in South Yorkshire in a village called Whiston on the edge of Rotherham. I used to play records on a record player here. My grandad was a coal miner, so there would always be a coal fire lit, even on hot days, as it provided hot water for the house. 

This song stuck in my head for some reason. 

The lyrics are quite strange and mention death.

It turns out that this is a cover version of a Belgian song called 'The Dying Man' by Jacques Brel.

It also has an unusual key change towards the end.

It was a number one single in many countries including the UK.

Jun 20: A song that has many meanings to you

Another hard one...

This requires some thought about the different meanings a song can have.

It has to provoke some emotions of course, and perhaps be a song that I keep returning to it at different stages in my life... and view differently.

In the end, I went for the Moving Hearts song Tribute to Peadar O' Donnell.

At one point this was down on my shortlist of funeral songs... the uillean pipes here are played by Davy Spillane. I remember seeing him play live a number of times... including in the band that played live at the Riverdance show I saw in the mid 1990s.

The track appears on an album called 'The Storm'.

When I used to travel up to Skye for climbing trips this always went on in the car as we were driving through some of the more dramatic landscapes of the trip such as Glencoe or past Buachaille Etive Mòr. The album starts with 'The Lark' - a good set of tunes.

Jun 10: A song that makes you sad

Again, this needed some thinking.

This is one that I may have mentioned previously.

This song was written for Laurie Anderson by Lou Reed on the occasion of their marriage.

Jun 4: A song that reminds you of something you'd rather forget

Day 4 of the 30 Day Song Challenge.

This was a harder one to think about. 

It's probably thinking of a situation which was bad, but there was music playing, and that when you hear this song again it reminds you of that time... which can also work the other way.

I have to say I have been relatively fortunate in my 62 years so far compared to many others in that I haven't experienced too many really bad situations...

I'm going to suggest that I'd rather forget a lot of journeys to and from work, particularly through the winter months. I drive the A10 and other roads up and down... and they are dark and wet and potholed and getting worse - and have dangerous drivers who overtake badly, even on foggy mornings. It's a dangerous part of my day and I've had lots of close calls over the years. Sometimes I'm travelling with my wife as she works at the same school from time to time, but mostly it's just me.

I used to listen to Simon Mayo's show on Radio 2, then it moved to Greatest Hits Radio. When this song came on, I always turned off the radio.

To be fair there's quite a few bands I always turn off when they come on the radio: they include Oasis, Tina Turner, Morrissey, Mumford and Sons, T-Rex and a whole lot of others.... and I always listen to my own music when it's just me in the car.

Jan 5: Matt Podbury's innovative 'Music and Place' unit

In November 2024, I was fortunate enough to attend Practical Pedagogies 3 in Cologne. Particularly as I'd already been to Iceland that half term which meant two trips away from family. It was another cracking event organised by Russel Tarr and hosted by a school just outside of the city, with provocations and entertainment by Hywel Roberts. The 2026 event is now open with a call for sessions.

"To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”

Marshall Berman

One session I went to at Practical Pedagogies was by my friend Matt Podbury: who is also a colleague of the organiser Russel Tarr at the International School of Toulouse, where he teaches geography.

He had been trialling a new unit on music and its connections with our emotional landscape. This includes a look at favourite music, emotional music and lyrics, sense of place and also the connections with landscapes. It's a chance for younger students to be introduced to some of the classics as well.

For Matt that meant Pulp (with connections with Sheffield where he used to teach) and Queen.

The session was really nicely put together and presented. We will also come back to Sheffield again later in the blog as it has a great musical heritage.

The unit is available on the GeographyPods website.

Matt finished by showing a tool called SUNO, which is an AI tool that generates a musical track or song in just a few sentences, based on the prompts it is given.

One particularly nice aspect of the work was the creation of physical artefacts which were in the form of LPs. Matt had sourced blank white LP sleeves, and also some cheap €1 vinyl records. It also helps that he has a sizeable record collection dating back to the 1990s which he could use to model what we was hoping for. 

The unit also had an element of emotional geographies about it.

Give it a look... and a go...

I've created a great song with Suno... it will appear later in the blog.

And Matt will be reprising this workshop in a joint session with me at the GA Conference in April 2026.