Molde is a town in Norway.It is one of the stopping-off points on the Hurtigruten coastal route - a trip I've always wanted to take.
The Jan Garbarek Group's 1990 album'I took up the Runes' is one of my favourites. The cover is an ECM classic of minimalism.
It includes a five-part piece of music called 'Molde Canticle'.
My first time seeing the Jan Garbarek Group live was in 1990 and they opened with this song, with the late Nana Vasconcelos on percussion.
Here's a live version from 1991, with the late Marilyn Mazur (more on her elsewhere on the blog to come) from Hamburg.
A variation on this music was used at the closing Ceremony of the Winter Olympics in 1994 when Albertville handed over to Norway.
I remember watching and thinking "I know this music..."
The Olympic Hymn was sung by Sissel Kirkjebø, and there was plenty of actual SNOW.... Modern Winter Olympics are struggling to find enough of the real stuff...
The first that occurred to me was Telegraph Road from Dire Straits. I remember hearing this for the first time, and also playing it a number of times. I remember being at a snowy party in Huddersfield in the early 80s when this was played.
The opening notes set a wonderful atmosphere.
Take a listen now:
Via Wikipedia
Telegraph Road is a major north-south 70-mile (110 km) thoroughfare in Michigan, USA, and Mark Knopfler was inspired to write the song while riding in the front of the tour bus, which made the journey down Telegraph Road. At the same time, Knopfler was reading the novel Growth of the Soil by the Nobel Prize winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and he was inspired to put the two together and write a song about the beginning of the development along Telegraph Road and the changes over the ensuing decades.
Knopfler understands that we all have these rich inner worlds — kaleidoscopes of obsession, wonder and feeling. There are things that we love and keep to ourselves, pleasures that we have to escape crowds to enjoy, private lives that we all live. His music works, because it brings us to those places.
On the genesis of the song:
The road in question is Telegraph Road, a stretch of pavement spanning almost 80 miles from Toledo, Ohio, to Detroit, Michigan. It was little more than a modest dirt path since it was beaten in the mid-19th century, growing and widening as it became the backbone for infrastructure such as telegraph poles and roadways as the decades rolled onward. In the 1910s, it exploded in usage with the booming auto industry in Detroit, and towns grew off of it as people sought to capitalise on this influx of wealth into the region. But at this point, the story grows achingly familiar. The communities dependent on the road still bear the deep scars of the exodus of the automobile industry. The road has become the scar of progress that the community now bears. Its history is a drama played over a century.
Another road is The Valley Road.
This is from Bruce Hornsby and the Range.
And to finish, here's John Shuttleworth with the A1111 in Lincolnshire.
It would be great to get some help adding some further contributions to the World of Music blog.
There are two ways that you can do that.
Thanks to those who have already done one or both of those things.
Firstly, please consider writing a guest blog post on a musical genre, band, story, concert or other experience that meant a lot to you - and connected you with a particular place or geographical concept... I've already had guest blogs from several people and there are others in the pipeline to be published over the next few months... but then there are plenty of gaps.
Get in touch with your ideas.
I'd need:
- some words - anything from a few hundred to a few thousand...
- some pictures - your own would be preferred so that they are free to use without copyright issues
- a YouTube video or two - with the music you are referring to
- a brief biography of yourself - a couple of lines.
Search "Guest blog" to see the ones I've posted already....
The second way is to help me with some questions which have been turned into Google Forms. There are quite a few I've added in the three and a bit months the blog has been around.
It is only possible in the harshest of winters, and cannot take place every year. This is similar to the Fenland skating which can only take place on flooded fields in the Fens when conditions permit, and has become less common as winters are warming.
This race is fairly brutal and a long distance classic - comparable to some of the one day classics in road race cycling such as Paris-Roubaix.
Here's a map of the route - joining up eleven towns.
And here's a video of the two parts of the track by Public Service Broadcasting.
Part 1
Part 2
Contains footage (C) Fries Film Archief. Used with kind permission.
Written and produced by Public Service Broadcasting.
Drums recorded by Gregor Reid at Fonica Studios, Glasgow.
And the translation of the voice over on the track.
Newspaper:
Eleven Cities Tour on Friday
Newspaper:
Eleven Cities Tour to be a superhuman effort
January 18th, 1963
An ice-skating marathon that is unparalleled
5.30 in the morning 300km through a Friesland only the strongest can cope with
Newspaper:
Elfstedentocht: Tough, Tough, Tough
The starting signal is given for the Eleven Cities Tour
But what everyone is preparing themselves for.
That is the Elfstedentocht
The twelfth Eleven Cities Tour
Temperature: 16 degrees Celsius below zero
A brutal tour of more than 200km
But what everyone is preparing themselves for...
550 professional skaters
Around 9,500 leisure skaters
Skaters from Sweden, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium
But what everyone is preparing themselves for... That is the Elfstedentocht."
J. Willgoose, Esq. and Wrigglesworth sample old public information films and archive material and set them to new music. Live, the films are screened simultaneously as laptops are fiddled with, drums are pounded, theremins are wafted at, guitars are bashed and banjos furiously plucked.
Teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future.
A posting from a while back on Facebook explored the connection with sport and music, with a share of some outputs from a Twitter account called @_Bands_FC
When a musician who many people adored dies, there is often a need for a place of pilgrimage.
Consider the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. Jim Morrison of The Doors is buried there, along with other musicians, plus authors such as Georges Perec.
The Prodigy's most famous track is called 'Firestarter' and here it is.
They are one of my brother's favourite bands.
The bench is scorched black.
Band manager John Fairs and Prodigy founder Liam Howlett worked on the design and family members signed it off, the company said.
There's a connection here with GA Vice President Fiona Sheriff..,
She told me via the Google Form of a song that reminded her of a place...
Firestarter - my home town, Braintree. Keith Flint (RIP) was from Braintree, I went to both primary and secondary school with his niece Carly. Always makes me think of back home, as on nights out it was always on!
How about a song that mentions loads of place names?
Lemon Jelly's album 'Lost Horizons' is beautifully designed.
A long list of place names is mentioned in the song... narrated by the distinctive voice of John Standing.
And the band?
Lemon Jelly are a British electronic music duo from London that formed in 1998 and went on hiatus starting in 2008. Since its inception, the band members have always been Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen. Lemon Jelly has been nominated for awards like the Mercury Music Prize and BRIT Awards. The bright colourful artwork featured in the albums and music videos, and the Lemon Jelly typeface, became part of the "brand". (Wikipedia)
And here's the track itself and the first few place names that get a mention.
Paris Tibet Sydney Naxos Rangu Rotterdam Runcton The Cayman Islands Malawi Mauritius Haight-ashbury Patagonia
The album covers are also fantastical landscapes by themselves.
Feel free to map the places mentioned... someone probably has already....
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.
He played with a great many of my favourite musicians.
The first time I saw him I was completely blown away by his style and sound. This was a concert with the Jan Garbarek Group performing 'Molde Canticle' from 'I took up the Runes' at the Cambridge Corn Exchange.
I then saw him around a half dozen other times with the Jan Garbarek Group, including a concert at the St. Andrews Hall in Norwich, where I had front row seats.
One night in Norwich I also went to see him play a solo concert at the Norwich Arts Centre. He said quite a bit between the music that he played expressing thanks and surprise that people would come out to watch him "playing with himself".
This was a reference to the echo and delay unit that he used to layer up sounds and create some wonderful effects and tunes.
He started out working with other musicians, and recorded several solo albums too.
He also played with the Colours Quartet and recorded several albums, which had Lyle Mays as one of the players too.
Here's an early performance.
A tribute concert was held in Stuttgart in 2015.
It was released as an ECM album called 'Hommage a Eberhard Weber' - I have a copy of that album.
Musicians playing were: Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Scott Colley, Danny Gottlieb, SWR Big Band, Helge Sunde.
Weber's latest albums, Résumé (2012) and Encore (2015) comprise solos from his performances worldwide with The Jan Garbarek Group, overdubbed with keyboards/treatments by Weber, saxophone by Garbarek, and flügelhorn by Ack Van Rooyen.
This included a long piece which was written by Pat Metheny.
This was recorded with musicians in front of a screen which showed some of his solo work.
She called me once when I was in Hamburg. I couldn’t even believe it was her. The hotel had a message from Kate Bush and I called her back. She told me she loved ECM music in general and my music in particular. She wanted me to participate in one of her albums. She sent me a tape of the two tracks she wanted me to play on and asked me to think about countermelodies. So I did that and flew to London where she lived. I thought it would be like the jazz people I work with and that within two hours, the first tune is done and within another hour, the second tune is done.
No. It’s very different, which I learned in this, my first appearance in the pop world. They checked every note—everything, everything, everything. The first tune took six to eight hours. The second one the same. It explained to me why these pop people take so long to produce their albums. They never decide right away what to do. So when I came up with some ideas they said “yes, yes, let’s record it to 48 tracks.” Then I’d have another idea and again, it would be “yes, yes, yes, let’s do it this way.” I recorded dozens of ideas and in the end, only one was accepted. These people have the attitude that it’s only later when they mix that they decide. This is very unusual compared to the older ECM productions in the '70s when I started.
Making a record only took three days: two days of recording and one day of mixing.
Only later on when it became more complicated with synths and such did it take longer.
But pop people take six months or even longer to make a record."
This is the stand-out track for me on the new album by Bruce Hornsby, along with the title track itself. It's an eclectic work and continues Bruce's tradition of musical invention. If you get the chance to see him take it... he comes to the UK rarely...
Here's Bruce explaining the meaning behind the song... with references to Paul Brady (who I saw at the Leadmill in Sheffield) and the books of Richard Ford.
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'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.
The Superbowl half-time show is one of the highest profile cultural events in the USA (although three times as many people globally will watch a top-level Premier League football match than the Super Bowl itself).
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (Latin American Spanish: born March 10, 1994), known professionally as Bad Bunny, is a Puerto Rican rapper, singer, record producer, and occasional professional wrestler.
Dubbed the "King of Latin Trap", he is widely credited with helping Spanish-language rap reach mainstream global popularity and is considered one of the greatest Latino rappers of all time.
Bad Bunny has been named Spotify's most-streamed artist globally four times (2020, 2021, 2022, and 2025), making him the first and only artist to achieve this distinction.
Puerto Rico, officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,is a self-governing Caribbean archipelago and island organized as an unincorporated territory of the United States under the designation of commonwealth.
Puerto Ricans have been US Citizens since 1917.
Puerto Ricans often call the island Borinquen, a derivation of Borikén, its indigenous Taíno name, which is popularly said to mean 'Land of the Valiant Lord'.
The terms boricua, borinqueño, and borincano are commonly used to identify someone of Puerto Rican heritage
Puerto Rico was colonised by the Spanish before the Americans claimed it.
In 2017, Puerto Rico suffered back-to-back large hurricanes: the Category 5 Hurricane Irma and the Category 4 Hurricane Maria.The storms caused an extreme amount of damage to the island, causing the following effects: all power was knocked out, 95% cell service, 43% of waste water treatment plants, 40 thousand land slides, 97% of roads blocked, 28% of health facilities damaged, leading to over 90% of the population applying for assistance after the storms.
This has also become the subject of a Bad Bunny protest song - El Apagón ('The Power Outage') about continuing power problems.
“His very presence on the stage is a statement,” said Petra Rivera-Rideau, co-author of the book P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.
“The fact is that we’re currently in a moment where Spanish is seen as a mark of being foreign, of not belonging, where people are getting profiled for being Spanish speakers – that ups the ante and importance. It can’t really be overstated.”
"..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.
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.
los viejos playing dominos,
street vendors selling coco frío, piraguas and tacos (sold by Los Angeles’s actual Villa’s Tacos),
boxers Xander Zayas and Emiliano Vargas in the fight,
a man proposing to his girlfriend just as the femme-forward Yo Perreo Sola starts. “Las mujeres en el mundo entero,” he says, “perreando sin miedo”. (“The women in the whole world, perreando without fear.”)
Behind him, at la casita he built in the image of a house on the island, is a yearbook of stars, including Karol G, Pedro Pascal, Cardi B, Jessica Alba, Young Miko and Alix Earle.
Bad Bunny carried the Puerto Rican flag of independence, the original flag of the territory that was outlawed until 1952 and is distinguished by its sky blue triangle. While performing a salsa version of her 2024 Bruno Mars duet Die With a Smile, Lady Gaga wore a dress in the same shade.
Finally, if you haven't seen it yet, the show can be seen here:
If you drive through the Yorkshire Dales National Park, on roads near Malham and other well known locations, you will pass over one or more of the Craven Fault System: where different rock types meet, and where the landscape changes. In some places, the contrast this produces is dramatic, and I remember driving that way numerous times when I used to do more hill walking and climbing, including completing the classic 'Three Peaks' walk.
Craven Faults is also the name of a British electronic artist and producer known for combining analogue synthesizers, electronics and field recordings to create music that draws from ambient music, Krautrock and electronica. The name is taken from the Craven Fault System in the Pennines and much of his music draws inspiration from the landscapes of Yorkshire, where he resides.
I like the description of the artist that is on their Spotify profile.
Half-remembered journeys across post-industrial Yorkshire. On first impression it appears to be a journey through a uniform landscape, past familiar mills, peaks and dales. Until you start to notice the details. The devil’s in the details. It occupies your peripheral vision. It leaves you questioning how you arrived where you did. How did we get here? It almost certainly started in Dusseldorf or Köln. Or possibly The San Francisco Tape Music Centre. It’s not important. The journey to Yorkshire is somewhat hazy. Hansa by the Wall, 1977. Stockholm’s Museum Of Modern Art, 1968. Maida Vale, 1963. Rugby, 1986. It enters Yorkshire via Kingston-upon-Hull. Although, even that isn’t set in stone. It’s not important. It’s important to ask the question every now and then. The answers less so. Banks of vintage equipment. A master craftsman at work in a nest of patch cables within an old textile mill.
The tracks often have a geological aspect to them, or are tied to particular locations within the area.
The journey on Sidings isn’t made with people in mind. It begins in an isolated community which built up around one of the great engineering projects of its age - 14 tunnels and 22 viaducts to open up the north - and finishes at an enclosed field on a moor in 1858. It takes in studios from Los Angeles to Rochdale from 1952 to 1980, while drawing inspiration from the progress in manmade infrastructure and the transport of goods.
The Space Shuttle was a phase of space exploration that is no longer... the current Artemis II mission has been very much in the news with a journey on the "other side".
There were several tragic accidents during its time as the main launch vehicle for NASA.
Members of Canadian rock band Rush were invited to a shuttle launch - the first of the Shuttle Columbia in 1981.
The experience became the final track on their 1982 album 'Signals'.
I had the programme from the Signals tour, and remember reading about this memory from Neil Peart - who always wrote the notes to the tour programmes.
We met our liaison man, who conducted us safely into the "V.I.P." zone (Red Sector A) in the pre-dawn hours. We were due to play that night in Dallas, so we couldn't wait much longer. Finally they announced that the launch would be scrubbed for that day. Well, we ran for the car, and our daring driver sped off, around the traffic jams, down the median of the highway, and got us to the airport barely in time.
The next night we had a show in San Antonio, after which we drove off immediately, clambered into a hired jet, and flew straight back to Florida. This time the launch took place on schedule, and it was SOMETHING!!
I remember thinking to myself as we flew back to Fort Worth after a couple days without sleep: "We've got to write a song about this!" It was an incredible thing to witness, truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I can only hope that the song comes even close to capturing the excitement and awe that we felt that morning.
— Neil Peart in the Signals tour book.
The song incorporates audio from voice communications between astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen and ground control, specifically Ascent CAPCOM Daniel C. Brandenstein and with commentary from Hugh Harris, Kennedy Space Center Public Affairs Officer.
Here they are playing the track live in Montreal, Canada in 1981.
Via Wikipedia.
The song was used as a wakeup song for astronauts during STS-109, which was the last successful flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. It was used again for astronaut Mike Fincke during STS-134, flown by Space Shuttle Endeavour on its final mission before retirement. Fincke described how his friends Greg Shurtz and NASA employee Ken Fisher chose the song because the band was inspired to write it after viewing the launch of STS-1. Fincke went on to say the song was played as a tribute to the Space Shuttle program, which has inspired people around the world.
Here's the detail from the Signals tour book from the programme of that tour - I had a copy of this.
And here's the Public Service Broadcasting track: "The Other Side" which is the story of the Apollo mission which was the first to do what Artemis II did a day or so ago - and after which astronaut Bill Anders made the classic Earthrise photo that was so important to the environmental movement as it showed the fragility of the Earth... we now have an updated version of that image.
Phil Collins has written several songs which touch on the issue of homelessness.
The first one was from the Genesis album 'Abacab' which was released in 1981 - not their finest hour.
It is called "Man on the Corner". I saw this performed live several times as part of the Genesis live set.
The second was from his album "...But Seriously".
'Another Day in Paradise' has the most obvious lyrics related to the issue...
On writing the song:
“I remember when we played Washington… Washington was almost at a standstill and these people were trying to sleep on the grills where all the hot air was coming up, and you could see that it was in the shadow of Capitol Hill. I thought it was an extraordinary contradiction.”
