Last week my wife Daisy and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary, and twenty-one years together (we got married on our eleventh anniversary), and to mark the occasion we went on an adventure – the longest holiday since our honeymoon. The trip was something we’d wanted to do for ages: going by train across Europe.

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We’d initially intended to be as flexible as possible, but as we began planning, we realised we needed to book various things in advance, but allowed ourselves a number of options in our trip: which ended up being a lengthy loop across France, Switzerland, Lichtenstein (just), Austria, southern Germany and France again across eleven days.

So what is this week’s /Tuesday Ten? It’s a playlist of songs covering some of the places and culture that we visited or passed through, and bands or songs that came to mind while we were travelling.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Deep Purple
/Smoke on the Water
/Machine Head

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After a long journey to Geneva, we spent our first day in Switzerland travelling even further afield, to the small town of Martigny to visit Barryland, a museum and breeding centre dedicated to the St. Bernard dog breed – the national dog of Switzerland, and the iconic Alpine rescue dog. Our train to Martigny took us along the northern shore of Lake Geneva, providing absolutely astonishing vistas from the upper deck of the train, and passing through a number of notable towns. In musical terms, the most important is Montreux, the wealthy town that hosts the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer.

Smoke on the Water was inspired by the 1971 fire at the venue for the festival – where, as is understood, an audience member fired a flare (!!) into the roof of the Casino venue during a Frank Zappa set, and the venue was entirely destroyed (it was later rebuilt). The song tells the tale of what happened, but is perhaps best known for Ritchie Blackmore’s iconic guitar riff, unquestionably one of the most instantly recognisable riffs of all.

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/Kathryn Joseph
/mountain
/from when i wake the want is

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We criss-crossed the Alps on our travels over the week, and at points it was easy to get blasé about the endless, incredible views from our trains. But one early journey took our breath away, as we made a late decision to take the long way back to Geneva from Martigny, using the Mont Blanc Express back into France, through the ski resort of Chamonix and taking the best part of four hours to do it. The views were worth it, mind, particularly the heart-stopping, precipitous climb out of the valley Martigny sits in – we climbed around 500m in the first 5-10km, and were quickly above the snowline. Indeed, our travels were mostly in glorious spring sunshine, and it was clear that we were passing through these ski resorts right at the end of this year’s ski season.

Kathryn Joseph’s elegant song – from her exceptional 2018 album – is dealing with different troubles, and likely a different landscape than the Alps, but it was another song that spent some time in my head this week.

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/Celtic Frost
/Circle of the Tyrants
/To Mega Therion

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Rather than just taking the direct train from Geneva to Zurich, we once again diverted off the main route and took no less than five trains in total between the two cities, so that we could visit the pretty hilltop village of Gruyères. It’s famous these days for two things: cheese, and the HR Giger Museum. The museum was every bit as odd and unsettling as I’d expected, with examples of Giger’s work from across his lifetime, including of course his work on the Alien films (including one room where an Alien figure on the ceiling “greets” you as you enter it!).

The rest of the village was very pretty too – as my wife noted, it felt like a Disney setting where the villagers might spontaneously break into song – and the cheese was great, too.

With the darker and subversive tones to his work, it is perhaps no surprise that Giger influenced a great number of musical artists too, and Celtic Frost were one of them: the avant garde Swiss extreme metal band were years ahead of their time (I can’t imagine what this must have sounded like to first-time listeners when it was released in 1985!), and this album was one of many to use Giger’s work – in this case his work Satan I is the cover art.

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/The Young Gods
/Blew Me Away
/Appear Disappear

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Swiss band The Young Gods have long been a favourite of mine, and we changed trains in their hometown of Fribourg/Freiburg (a city that is currently in a bitter dispute about whether it should become officially bilingual, being on the borderline between the French-speaking regions of Switzerland to the south and the German-speaking regions to the north).

The most recent TYG album, Appear Disappear, continues to confound and amaze – it was my album of the year for 2025 – as they have begun explaining the sometimes oblique songs in a little more detail.
We saw a lot of blue water in the Alps – the colour of the rivers and lakes was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and so Blue Me Away came to mind a fair bit. But as it turns out, the thundering breakdowns and ethereal drones of the song are actually about the push and pull of love and loss, and musings on how difficult it can be for those left behind…

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/Cabaret Voltaire
/Yashar
/2×45

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We weren’t passing by Cabaret Voltaire at the right time to visit it (as we found out, much of cultural Zürich isn’t open on a Sunday or a Monday), but I absolutely made sure we passed by so that I could see it. The birthplace of the Dada art movement, a movement that was as political as it was artistic – and one that influenced another host of musical artists, including the Cabs, Talking Heads (more on them in a moment) and Neubauten.

Arguably the point where the Cabs fully transitioned from an experimental band to an outright industrial-electronic band, the tribal fury and vaguely middle-eastern droning synths of this track was the highpoint of their recent reunion shows, as the retooled version of it packed one hell of a punch.

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/Talking Heads
/I Zimbra
/Fear of Music

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As well as the Cabaret Voltaire, the Dadaists also spent time in the Cafe Odeon down by the river (and just down the hill from CV), a sumptuous bar that was also a home from home for artists, musicians and writers and those escaping the horrors of post-Weimar Germany between the wars, we dropped in for a glass of champagne – mainly as this is reputed to be the first bar in the world to serve champagne by the glass.

A good number of my friends could probably argue about the best Talking Heads albums and songs, but for me, Fear of Music and specifically the madcap opener I Zimbra have a pretty good shout of being the best. A song that takes in Afrobeat and Disco, and uses lyrics based on a poem by Dadaist founder Hugo Ball, and it sounds fucking thrilling, like the best party you’ve ever been invited to.

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/Laibach
/Leben heißt Leben
/Opus Dei

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We only spent one evening and night in Graz – it was a point to stop after our nine-hour-plus journey on the Transalpin from Zürich, before moving onto Munich – and we quickly realised that it was a charming city that we really should have spent another night in. Buzzing with life even on a Tuesday night, it was full of fascinating buildings, great-looking restaurants and friendly bars.

There aren’t a great number of notable bands from the town, but one rock band – Opus – had an international hit in 1985 with the martial stomp of Live Is Life, a song about the connection between bands and their fans, but I’ve featured that song before.

But usefully, Laibach – a band from just over the border in Slovenia – also covered this later in the decade – with a very different tone. They turned it from a celebratory song into a militaristic, warmongering piece. Amazing how much you can change…

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/Julie Andrews
/Do-Re-Mi
/The Sound of Music OST

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Laibach unexpectedly gained global notoriety – after over thirty years active – with their cover album of The Sound of Music and the related film about their gig in North Korea, something that at points feels like some kind of fever dream. But I’m not featuring them twice…

We passed through Salzburg on our way from Graz to Munich (a recently introduced service after a new high-speed line through a 33km tunnel was opened between Graz and Klagenfurt), and indeed passed by Burg Hohenwerfen in the Salzach Valley. That castle is high on the rock over the river, and features in The Sound of Music, as the backdrop to the scene where the Von Trapps are taught their musical scales (the song Do-Re-Mi, of course…).

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/Mo-Do
/Eins, Zwei, Polizei

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The sheer number of armed police at a number of our stations on our travels – particularly at the Paris terminals, but also patrolling our ICE at Freilassing near Salzburg as we crossed the border from Austria into Germany – meant that this song was perhaps an almost constant earworm over the week. A European dance sensation back in 1994 (I had forgotten that it was released this late!), it is a pretty basic dancefloor thumper that apparently takes inspiration from Austrian nursery rhymes…

And yes, I did also consider the mighty Der Kommissar by Falco, but he was from Vienna, and we didn’t go there this time…

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/Richard Wagner
/Mein Lieber Schwan!
/Lohengrin

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One of the most dramatic locations we visited was on a day-trip – and the one day where travelling by train was really fucking frustrating – south to the German-Austrian border, to the town of Füssen and onto the majesty of Schloss Neuschwanstein. Sure, it was a vanity project for King Ludwig II that cost vast sums of money, had no real use, and is something of a tribute to the medieval castles built by kings that Ludwig II idolised, but bloody hell, what a place. Perched on a rocky outcrop hundreds of metres above the land around it, and with the Alps as a backdrop to the south, the views are extraordinary, and the interior is pretty impressive too.

Ludwig II was also a patron on the arts, and particularly lavished money on Richard Wagner, who arguably wouldn’t have been able to complete his most famous works – or fulfil his dream of the opera house in Bayreuth – without Ludwig II’s money (and debts). Ludwig II apparently loved the legend of Lohengrin in particular, and there are swan motifs everywhere within the castle (indeed the name of it too refers to them!).

As my wife notes, Lohengrin is one of a long line of warnings in music and literature to not fall in love with a swan. In all of them, too, the warning is never heeded…

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/Richard Strauss
/Sonnenaufgang
/Also sprach Zarathustra

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Richard Strauss was a Bavarian composer that worked in both Austria and Germany, and in his later life worked for the Nazis, particularly as head of the Reichsmusikkammer and conductor at the Bayreuth Festival – although there is some debate about his leanings, and the roles may well have been taken to save his Jewish daughter-in-law and their family.

While we were in Munich, we didn’t have time to go out to Dachau, but we did go to the NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, a museum that details the rise of the Nazis and particularly the role of Munich has the home of the movement. It was a difficult, overwhelming museum, frankly, but a necessary one: this told stories that we never knew in the United Kingdom, from a different viewpoint and with an honesty and frankness that made no bones about the fact that this was an appalling, corrupt regime: and the parallels with Trump’s America were absolutely unmistakable.

Anyway, Also sprach Zarathustra was written in Munich, and the dramatic, glorious opening to the work was famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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/Indochine
/L’Aventurier
/L’Aventurier

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Our final stop on this mammoth trip was one of convenience, really: since we only live a twenty minute drive from Dover’s Ferry Port, we finished up in Calais on the last night to allow us to get the first foot passenger ferry back across on Monday morning. Calais, once again, didn’t show it’s best light. A gloomy evening, with few if any taxis (tip for future if you arrive at Calais-Ville station, book one ahead of time), and with our hotel some way out of the town centre, we had little in the way of options for food.

But there was a neighbourhood pizza joint, and they had some French music videos playing on the TV. Amid various songs I didn’t know was one that stood out – French new wave/post-punk band Indochine, with their classic early single L’Aventurier. A song with distinctive guitar tones, and a driving rhythm that must have stood out in 1982, never mind now…

And that was the end of an epic trip. We might do it again, but maybe limit to one country, or at least a shorter distance, next time…