Musical and geographical offerings from GeoBlogs: a 365 blog project for 2026.
Brendan Conway has been developing a range of GIS (and other) resources over the years.
He has shared some thinking around the 1966 World Cup Final, which took place 60th anniversary
There was mention of several musical elements as well, including a song created by Lonnie Donegan for World Cup Willie.
Any music that is added to this blog is also added to a special Spotify playlist.
As we pass the half way point of the year, that playlist has now passed 48 hours in length - two full days of excellent music that has been showcased on the blog.
Have a browse here....
Today is World Music Day.
World music day or ‘Fête de la Musique’, as it was first known, has its origins in France.This is a chunky book and a great endeavour from the cartographer Damien Saunder.
It is clothed in black cloth and with an embossed LP with cartographic meridians.
It features a wealth of album covers, quite a few of which are familiar but many of which are new to me.
I have been discovering some new bands from this book, which is always a good sign.
Publishers' description:
Presenting 415 album covers – beautifully reproduced, expertly laid out and accompanied by deeply researched text – Maps on Vinyl will especially appeal to map enthusiasts, vinyl junkies, music fans, graphic designers and artists.
My copy was was purchased from Stanford's in London and is a signed first edition, and was also purchased with my RGS discount.
It's definitely a coffee table kind of book. One to browse and point out - "oh yes, I had that on vinyl" or "one of my favourites"...
Tonight is the latest edition of an annual international event called GeoNight.
Hundreds of sessions will take place today all over the world.
There are only 2 events in the UK. One is being hosted at the Royal Geographical Society and mine will be broadcast live from my bedroom...
It's a version of the session that Matt Podbury and I did at the GA Conference on Wednesday the 8th of April - exploring the development of my World of Music blog for this year and ideas for the curriculum.
Please come along, and if you can't, please at least fill in the Google Form that goes with the blog.
So today was the day when Matt Podbury and I were on the programme for the Geographical Association's Annual Conference.
Here's our deck. Download to avoid the ads.
GA Conference 2026 Session - Parkinson and Podbury by Alan Parkinson
Thanks to those who came along. You were a lovely audience!
More to come in a future post, but I wanted to get the presentation up here for those who were asking....
I've been preparing a lengthy post for my LivingGeography blog and to share at the GA Conference.
It's now ready and I'm posting it today to coincide with my session at the GA Conference 2026.
It's taken me a while to get this post finished. It would have been better nearer the actual event, but better to be accurate and useful than rush something out.
It's also a cross-posting from my World of Music blog. This is taking shape nicely and is well into its second month, with hundreds of blog posts in draft ready to go, and some very nice guest blog posts already edited and ready to share.
Apologies for sharing the following image:
This De Adder cartoon went out in Canada, with thanks to Peggy March for sharing it.
MAGA weren't pleased, and created their own rival show.
A piece in the Financial Times suggested a link with future US foreign policy. This link may not be permanent. Rana Foroohar suggested that the show:
"..provided a decent political roadmap for what a post-Maga America should aspire to embrace: pro-growth humanism inside and outside our own borders..."
There's a great image as well to reinforce the global spread of the musician.
These include the reference to Boricua joy.
Scenes described in the Guardian piece linked to above include:
1. A young man carrying a Puerto Rican flag before a sea of sugarcane opened with a benediction for all of us: “Qué rico es ser latino. Hoy se bebe,” (“How sweet it is to be Latino. Today we drink”)Sugar cane is an important crop and is linked with colonialism and slavery in locations where it has been cultivated.
2. References to Puerto Rican community life.Finally, if you haven't seen it yet, the show can be seen here:
The latest in a series of guest blog posts from Carl Lee.
What is the sound of the city?
Can cities ever have a sound?
Something so distinct and culturally resonating that from the first half a dozen bars, a place, an identity, a city sweeps into your mind?
Does the Mersey really have a beat?
Can you trip hop to Bristol, or wallow in grunge on the streets of Seattle?
Clearly songs can evoke places and times.
The Clash made sure you knew that London was calling in the early 1980s, and every Christmas since 1987 we have enjoyed/endured a Fairytale from New York. Maybe you can take a different stance and completely diss a city in song as Randy Newman does with finality about Baltimore:
“Never gonna come back here 'til the day I die.”
This is probably an outlier as most songs about cities or a sound associated with a city are seen as positive affirmations of the local culture and place.
Some go further, with Jarvis Cocker’s X-rated homage to his home city Sheffield, ‘Sheffield Sex City’ of which, it might be observed, is more concerned with his idling smutty thoughts whilst in the housing benefit queue than the existential qualities of the city of Sheffield.
Jarvis’s mate, and occasional musical collaborator, Richard Hawley has probably got a better stake in being considered, if not the sound of Sheffield, at least its preeminent musical chronicler in the 21st century.
As Hawley himself has said of whether Sheffield has ‘a sound’, “it doesn’t really matter what type of music people make, what matters is that people are eager to play, to make music.”
For Hawley music is a craft, something that needs to be honed and practiced. And some places, and times, are better at providing the opportunities to craft away, whatever the genre of music.
In the late 1970s and 1980s a generation of musicians honed their craft whilst living on welfare benefits, Jarvis and Hawley amongst them. Local pubs provided them venues, an eco-system of support was developed, a market forged and sometimes fame found.
In 1986, Sheffield Council opened the first municipal recording studios, Red Tape Studios, to support musical aspirations in a building that also housed recording studios owned by members of local bands the Human League and Comsat Angels. They were trying to create a burgeoning local music scene. In the next street was The Leadmill, Sheffield’s most famous music venue that at that time was a Sheffield Council supported charity.
Image: Picture Sheffield.
Ownership of those private studios and the Leadmill has changed over time but Red Tape Studios remains as a local resource for aspiring musicians in Sheffield.
In 2024 Ed Sheeran popped in to shower some pop glamour around whilst working with students on the ‘Tracks’ course provided by the Sheffield Music Centre. A more recent but equally ambitious project in Sheffield is the Harmony Works restoration of grade 2 listed Canada House into a music education hub with recording facilities and practice and performance spaces.
Sheffield is but one of many cities across the UK that are investing in their musical talent.
Liverpool, Cardiff and Newcastle are further examples of local authorities engaging in the development of young musicians. And as Newcastle demonstrated in 2025 when Sam Fender won The Mercury Music Prize in the year it was hosted in his home city, this can be a significant source of local pride and cultural identity.
As Fender proclaimed on stage in his home city "this region is the best region in the whole damn country".
Developing music craft is not the same as creating a distinctive musical sound that has a clear, unambiguous association to a particular place, even when lyrical references of a place and its culture litter the songs of artists singing about their experience in their home towns, cities and regions.
Take away Sam Fender’s distinctive Geordie voice and the sound could also be the sound of Springsteen’s New Jersey, a continent away.
The Arctic Monkeys are another case in point. In their early days they may have sung about the fact that “You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham” but today they are clearly more New York City than Rotherham, and their mantle of South Yorkshire’s working class troubadours has well and truly been usurped by The Reytons who actually are from Rotherham, and very proudly so.
When The Reytons played to 20,000 in Rotherham’s Clifton Park in July 2024 it was a gig they had organised themselves like virtually all of their career to date.
Putting out their own music, managing themselves, organising their own tours and not bowing down to a global recording company. They were the ‘Kids Off The Estate’, where ‘Clifton Park was like Disney Land”, coming home to prove a point that music, certainly their music, was a thing intrinsically rooted in their home even though their sound was not too dissimilar to that of many acts around, Sam Fender for example, who weren’t Rotherham estate kids.
So the sounds of the city are many and can also sound like the sounds of somewhere else.
But then there is New Orleans, and Nashville, and Havana, Cuba. All flies in my rhetorical anointment.
Maybe the notion that anywhere can have a distinctive beat, melody or tone is simply nuanced and complex, like the world of music itself.
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.
Well, it's a small milestone, but one to celebrate. Perhaps with a few small beers.
We're coming up to three months blogging on music, and I've just passed 10 000 page views - something I can get in just one day over on LivingGeography.
Thanks for reading...
I've been adding every song that gets mentioned on the blog to a Spotify playlist.
Hopefully this will grow to be an essential playlist to expand your musical horizons...
There are now 100 songs and over 10 hours of musical delights to dig into...
Music has always been part of my life. I have always been to see as many concerts as I can from an eclectic mix of bands (although life events have reduced their numbers over time due to reduced availability, plus the ever increasing cost of concert tickets compared to when I started going to live events in the 1980s).
Having said that I've now got used to paying close to (and occasionally over) £100 for a ticket for some big-ticket gigs, but I wouldn't go to the extent that some fans recently did to secure Oasis, Radiohead etc. tickets.
The ticket below was from a concert which had perhaps the best opening of any live concert I've been to...
Peter Gabriel ticket from 1993 - Alan Parkinson - shared on Flickr under CC license
You can watch it here... treat yourself to six minutes of joy, and incredible vocal performances.
I have a fairly large collection of CDs, which I mostly play in the car, or on my Bose sound system. I will still buy about 10 CDs a year for this purpose when I want to have a decent sound and not the compressed streaming option.
I subscribe to Spotify, and have done for well over a decade, which means I own less physical media than I might otherwise have done, but have also been able to access a range of music from artists who I would not have 'risked' spending money on - thankfully I didn't make too many 'mistakes' in my time buying physical media. I've had a few trials of Apple Music too. There are some people who point out issues with relying on such services for our music - the algorithm, the politics, the lack of proper payment for the artists involved.
There is also Bandcamp, where I can obtain higher quality downloads and buy CDs direct from artists, which lets them see a fairer proportion of the value of what is purchased.
In this blog, as the year goes on, I shall be sharing memories of bands I have seen, and also music that has been of particular importance to me. Many of these songs and albums date back to a particular period of time, or connect to particular places.
They include Glastonbury, which was an experience... and for a week or so the largest settlement in Somerset.
I'll also share some pictures of some of my old tour t-shirts, and post on the anniversary of some of my favourite gigs or notable dates in music history or personal memories.
There'll often be connections to geography too of course... in the lyrics of the songs, the theme of the songs, the origin of the album (or musicians), the changing nature of gig-going, the venues, the politics and some other personal connections.
Hence the name of the blog 'World of Music'. This will include a look at the music from particular countries, or which have connected with politics, the environment, particular places or landscapes or other geographical processes.
One thing that is different to my other 20 blogs is that this one will very much welcome guest blog posts. Get in touch if you have an idea for something you'd like to write about and I'll send you a few more details of how you can do that.
I've already contacted a whole range of geographers and asked them to share their own musical memories and connections and will be filtering those in too. Carl Lee has already sent me the first tranche of a whole series of eclectic posts, and others have promised to share a guest post during the year ahead.
I'll also be adding lots of polls and Google Forms to compile a 'compilation tape' of your own geographical ideas. There'll be lots of potential for you to get involved and share your own musical stories - we all have them.
Ultimately I hope this may lead to a resource exploring musical geographies that could be shared more widely.
It's good to know that my daughter also shares my love of live music, including a trip to Copenhagen last year to see one of her favourite bands: The Wombats, and Paris for Charli XCX, plus Latitude Festival of course (a very geographically relevant name). My son also has accompanied me on several recent gigs, and we are off to a few more during this year. My wife is very much an 80s girl and has seen the Pet Shop Boys many times over the years in particular.
For more details on musical connections, come and see Matt Podbury and I's session at the GA Conference in April 2026. More on that in a few day's time.
OK, let's press play on the blog, and drop the stylus into the groove.
Oh, and there won't be any of that noise that the younger generation calls music... just proper stuff...
I've been working on preparations for a new 365 project blog: a post a day for a year, which will appear here from the 1st of January 2026, and its time to get more people involved if you have a few moments.
I've completed several of these 365 projects before, including my GeoLibrary blog, Geography on/in Film and Fieldnotes from Iceland.
This blog is going to be on the theme of music and its geographical connections in the broadest sense, including how it connects us to specific places or moments in time, captures landscapes and emotions or forms part of our cultural geography.
Most people have some personal connections to particular musical genres or musicians.
Few people go through life without music in it... we pick music for giving birth and saying goodbye for the final time; the 'first dance'; 'our song'... travelling music... music to get us to sleep or get us going in the morning.
Music provides comfort, enjoyment even personal moments of ecstasy. It can lead to obsession and collections and also provoke anger. It can be political and radical or anodyne and mainstream and called "elevator music" for its blandness.
The creation and consumption of music has an environmental, economic and social impact on the planet: From Taylor Swift's billion dollar plus ERAS tour, to a folk performer in an upstairs room in a pub.
Every generation has its opinions on the music of the past, and the new music that is emerging and becoming popular. Music or noise? "What's that you're listening to?".
We've also seen other changes to music over the decades.
