"Through Electric Avenue, Brixton, down in SW2, Teddington and Kennington, Twickenham and Paddington. Uh huh. In the Blitz they never closed. Though they blew up half the roads. Oh, it hurts me just to see 'em going dead in a museum ..." sings Robyn Hitchcock in his stunningly beautiful elegy for the Trams of Old London. There's two interesting things here. One is the enormous affection people feel for the transports of the past. In this case Robyn mourns the passing of London's trams, which stopped running in 1952. This song was recorded many years before the introduction of the Croydon Tramlink, by the way. The other thing is the feature of London songs where the writer works in an impressive number of place names in a somewhat haphazard manner which scans rather neatly and sounds positively poetic ...Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Trams of Old London
"Through Electric Avenue, Brixton, down in SW2, Teddington and Kennington, Twickenham and Paddington. Uh huh. In the Blitz they never closed. Though they blew up half the roads. Oh, it hurts me just to see 'em going dead in a museum ..." sings Robyn Hitchcock in his stunningly beautiful elegy for the Trams of Old London. There's two interesting things here. One is the enormous affection people feel for the transports of the past. In this case Robyn mourns the passing of London's trams, which stopped running in 1952. This song was recorded many years before the introduction of the Croydon Tramlink, by the way. The other thing is the feature of London songs where the writer works in an impressive number of place names in a somewhat haphazard manner which scans rather neatly and sounds positively poetic ...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
spent a quite wonderful xmas day in the 3 kings in clerkenwell a few years ago with the lovely mr hitchcock singing songs for hours - ta for this it takes me right back
ReplyDeletex
This is brilliant. Thx for posting this.
ReplyDelete