In the Spare Room column in the last issue of Word (63) Giles Smith stated:

"Bruce Springsteen has a line on his most recent album about driving home through "the last lone American night". It's not easy to imagine a UK-born lyricist singing, without sniggering, about "driving through the British night". If they did, it would probably be raining. Maybe we simply lack the geography - the vastness of America, the aching intimation that if you drive, and keep driving, you will eventually arrive at yourself. (In Britain, if you keep driving, you will eventually arrive at Truro.) But more likely we don't have the aptitude for it."

As evidence to the contrary I would like to highlight It's Immaterial's sublime driving paean 'Driving Away From Home (Jim's Tune). Another would be Billy Bragg's 'A13' "take the A road, the ok road, that's the best!' Whilst both are a bit tongue in cheek (the 12" version of the former includes a terrible pun to Kerouac and On the Road) neither are sniggering; indeed in their own way they are deeply heartfelt and, what's more, they make me want to get in the car and drive along the M62 and the south Essex arterial road! No mean feat.

These songs are perhaps the exception that prove the rule, but it does seem to me that in the past travel has been quite a prevalent theme in British pop. What's more it has often been far removed from the American idea of travelling to find oneself, nut rather, as in for eaxample 1979/80, has been more concerned with a seemingly willful desire to embrace alienation and isolationism in bleak foreign environs just across the channel. Examples I'm thinking of here include Simple Minds' 'I Travel', Human League's 'Travelogue' album, John Foxx's 'Europe after the Rain' and Japan's 'European Son' and 'Nightporter'.

By the early 80s people had clearly had enough of such middle-distance staring miserabilsm (the fools!) and the emphasis on place in pop seemed to largely revolve around hedonistic escapism (Duran's 'Rio' and Wham's 'Club Tropicana' being the exempla). However come the mid 80s and a closer to home sense of place ran through the works of bands like The Smiths (you couldn't move for references to Whalley Range, Salford, Strangeways etc.) and Aztec Camera (eg Killermont Street about unemployed Glaswegians boarding the coach on K. Street and heading south).

At the end of the 80s two albums came out that were wonderous attempts to express musically a sense of British 'city-ness' (particularly as experienced at night) and at suggesting movement/lives/loves within the city limits: It's Immaterial's 'Song' and The Blue Nile's 'Hats'. It's Immaterial's 'New Brighton' (the opening track) is a magnificently evocative song about a little known corner of Merseyside and as for the Blue Nile, virtually every other song of theirs is about the road, although they are usually more about staring late night AT the road rather than being ON the road. Looking at the cars rather than being in them.

There is a beautiful stasis about Blue Nile/It's Immaterial songs, in which the immobile subject gazes longingly into the moving headlights, the halogen triggering thoughts of romance (and as Giles guesses it is always raining, though since I imagine most of their songs to be about Liverpool and Glasgow perhaps this is unsurprising).

The only current British artist I can think of who imbues his songs with such a love of place is Richard Hawley, with the Sheffield of his youth being almost the dominant character on Coles Corner, and to a lesser extent, its follow-up.

So to summarise perhaps road songs don't dominate British pop in the way they do American music, but that isn't to say they don't exist. And whilst Brits may be shy about explicitly singing the praises of 'Britain' in songs, that's not to say they don't wax lyrical about their own local patch; for me The Blue Nile's 'Hats' is every bit as much a love letter to Glasgow as Woody Allen's 'Manhattan' is to New York.

Kevin Milburn
p.s. If any of you have not read Giles Smith's 'Lost in Music' you should do so straightaway, it's one of the funniest books you'll ever read about being a teenage music obsessive. A subject that's been written about to death, but rarely with such charm.