I left London – for the second time, of which more anon – over five years ago, having now made my home on the Kent Coast with my wife. We didn’t leave because we hated the city particularly, it was more a case of realism around what we would be able to afford in the future, and it did work out in our favour in the end, as we were able to buy a house here.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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I’ve broadly been a city boy for much of my life, living in large urban areas for most of the time, and in many ways it’s where I preferred, at least until recently. But not everyone does, and as you’ll see in many of these songs, there are specific places called out for various reasons.

The titular song for this post, by the way – the glorious early Tindersticks single – was used as long ago as 2009 on /Tuesday Ten /082 /Life in the City. The video for it is an amazing look at London life in 1993.

Thanks, as ever, to everyone who suggested songs.

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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 above).

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/The Wildhearts
/Greetings From Shitsville
/Earth vs the Wildhearts

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My first London “home” when I went to University (thirty years ago this past month) was in NW3 (just) – the King’s College London halls of residence on Kidderpore Avenue, just off the Finchley Road as pretty much the westernmost point in NW3. I quit Uni at the turn of the Millenium, having already spent the year after my first year back in the North. It took another decade before I returned to London, and truly made the city my home.

London does not suit everyone: with a population of well over nine million (15% of the UK population), but covering just 0.6% of the area of the country, it is a dense, chaotic place that is constantly changing – and with a multinational population and facing the world, it in so many ways completely different to the rest of the UK. So you either love it or hate it: and Ginger was absolutely in the latter camp.

That said, his view of NW3 is very different to what many of us understand to Hampstead to be, and I can’t help but feel that NW3 was chosen as it fitted the rhythm of the song. Hampstead has long been a wealthy, genteel area of town, up on the hill with exceptionally expensive houses and a host of famous and notable people living there. Ginger sees it from someone living in a shitty, crumbling flat with no fucking money, and he wants to be anywhere else: probably most likely his native North-East.

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/Elvis Costello
/(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea
/This Year’s Model

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Another song sneering about a specific area of London comes from Elvis Costello (and remarkably, this song is as old as me), and while punk was all the rage, apparently he wanted nothing to do with it. He’d seen all the fawning coverage, he’d likely heard the bands and been to the gigs, and frankly didn’t give a fuck.

Chelsea, of course, has changed beyond all recognition these days, with King’s Road, once the centre of the Mod and then Punk movements now full of shops catering to the upper middle classes and the smart townhouses that are on the streets around it becoming very expensive indeed: this is no longer an area for subcultures and those looking to find their place.

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/Imperial Triumphant
/Tower of Glory, City of Shame
/Spirit Of Ecstasy

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Imperial Triumphant are a proudly New York band, and like the city they are from, they are brimming with ideas and influences to make their sound rather more than the sum of it’s parts. Far more than a Jazz-Black Metal combo with Art-Deco masks, each album seems to take them further in conflicting directions – but it somewhow works. I can’t help but feel that this song is referencing their home city, but also city development generally over the past 150 years or so, particularly since Skyscrapers first appeared (the first – although this is contested by some – being the Home Insurance Building in Chicago in 1885).

Building upward was the obvious solution to a lack of space in the centre of cities, allowing more efficient use of space for offices, and later for housing. But too many of the latter were substandard (with too many disasters, right up to the present day) and used to house the poor as if they were disposable.

New York, of course, is a city of great contrast, where the rich and poor live beside each other, but certain areas of the city have never benefitted in the ways that others have. Sure, the current Mayor Zohran Mamdani is making changes for the better for everyone (despite what the right wing press may tell you), but there is always more to do.

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/The The
/Heartland
/Infected

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Matt Johnson was never one to mince his words, and the magnificent single Heartland absolutely seethes at the decline of London (and the UK) in the Thatcher-era eighties. He sees the daily struggles of the working poor, of those living amid crumbling infrastructure, of discrimination and police violence – but also the rich getting richer as policies lean toward their benefit. This was forty years ago, and everything he predicted in this song came to pass.

London is now all-but unaffordable to many, and the rich are now doing very nicely thank you. Listening back, this song sounds like a call to revolution, and maybe it should have been heeded then.

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/R.E.M.
/(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville
/Reckoning

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There’s been a lot of disinformation and bullshit in recent times, from far-right sources suggesting that some big cities have become “no-go zones” for white people – which is, by the way, complete horseshit. But what’s intriguing is that people feel they need to make up stuff about towns they really know nothing about.

Which brings us to R.E.M., and their classic early single. The story goes that Mike Mills wrote this song to try and convince his then-girlfriend Ingrid Schorr, not to go home for the summer – and she entertainingly told the story from her side many years later. But what’s great about this song is that it’s a warning about what they might face “back home”, from the point of view of someone who’s never been there.

So in other words, it’s a phony, selfish attempt to keep them in Athens, Georgia.

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/Empathy Test
/Vampire Town
/Safe From Harm

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Empathy Test first appeared London over a decade ago, causing something of a sensation early on by their exceptional songcraft and a distinctly downtempo, romantic sound that resembled little else around at the time. Vampire Town – originally a B-side, but featured on the second of their twin debut albums (such was the riches of songs they had at the time) – is a song of escape, of being dragged down by a city that they no longer love, but there are assurances to a lover that it’s not them that is the issue, but where they live.

Interestingly, there may have been an element of fact in this song, as Isaac Howlett subsequently moved to Austria, a better springboard for the group’s remarkable success in Europe.

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/LCD Soundsystem
/Yr City Is a Sucker
/LCD Soundsystem

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Another band proudly from New York are LCD Soundsystem, and James Murphy’s complex relationship with his home city is first referenced in the nine-minute throwaway (and closer to their debut album) Yr City Is A Sucker. Yr City Is a Sucker is a strange song. It’s kinda hinting at a city that promises so much but perhaps never delivers: be that campaign promises, be that affordability, be that a fun life. NYC, like many megapolises, is an expensive, overwhelming place and must be difficult to find your feet in.

In some respects, this was a dry run: he articulates his thoughts on his hometown better on the astounding piano-led ballad that closes his true masterpiece Sound of Silver – but I’ve used that before on /Tuesday Ten /275, when I was heading to NYC for the first time.

I’ve been to New York City twice, and frankly I loved it. Sure, I was seeing it as a wide-eyed vision of a tourist, but there was a buzz and vitality that just had me grinning. But then, I’ve now left the London that I long loved. Maybe I just needed that change to be able to appreciate the big city better.

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/Leonard Cohen
/First We Take Manhattan
/I’m Your Man

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Still with New York is a darker, weirdly prophetic song. One of Leonard Cohen’s greatest songs is him getting into the mind of someone seemingly fantasising about getting violent revenge on a city that apparently wronged him, guided by invisible voices to wreak terrible damage. But along the way, the protagonist notes that they were seen as a loser before, and that some statement act would suddenly change the minds of those who thought it.

Fifteen years on from this song, such damage was of course wrought on New York in the form of the 9/11 attacks, but by terrorists very different to those depicted in this song. Visiting the 9/11 memorial when we were in NYC was a strange, unsettling experience – but something we felt we had to do.

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/Bloc Party
/Song For Clay (Disappear Here)
/A Weekend in the City

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The second album by Bloc Party was something of a concept album, almost entirely based around the disillusion with the rampant gentrification and unease with change in parts of inner East London. The opening track, the fantastic musical thrill-ride of Song For Clay (Disappear Here), sees Kele Okereke’s lyrics almost entirely take place in the-then ultra-trendy Shoreditch restaurant of Les Trois Garçons, part of the first wave of gentrification of the area (which has long since been completed).

There’s a blankness to the feel of the protagonist, as they wonder what saw them get here, to somewhere that he appears to be unable to feel joy in things he should be loving. I remember the pre-change Shoreditch, an area few would dare to tread unless they were going to some underground party or club in some derelict space (which I did on a few occasions). Nowadays, it is somewhere with a few places I might go, but is otherwise far too expensive for anything I want to do.

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/The Wedding Present
/My Favourite Dress
/George Best

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Where David Gedge has a really fucking terrible night in Manchester. Being a Leodisian by birth, but raised in Manchester, perhaps his affinity to his native West Riding made him pick Manchester as the base for this song. This is a song of seething jealousy, as he gets fucked up having seen his partner (either an ex- or still a partner, it’s not clear) with someone else, and getting other clues too.

Coming from a Mancunian family, and spending much of my childhood in Huddersfield, just over the Pennines, I probably have more of an affinity with Manchester than I ever did with Leeds: both cities have changed enormously over the past few decades, becoming economic powerhouses that have somewhat sucked the life out of the smaller towns and cities around them (Huddersfield being a particular victim, with the local trains being exceptionally busy and currently being upgraded thanks to it now being little more than a dormitory town for both). But like most big cities, both teem with life and fun things to do if you know where to look, but also, they can drain the life out of you. Horses for courses, I guess.