62. 10 South London Songs

From one locale to another

Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks
Guns of Brixton - The Clash
Up the Junction - Squeeze
Latchmere - The Maccabees
Morden - Good Shoes
Electric Avenue - Eddy Grant
The Only Living Boy in New Cross - Carter USM
The Lambeth Walk - (Me & My Girl)
Battersea Odyssey - Super Furry Animals
The Wombling Song - The Wombles

Not a bad bunch - I'd wager there are a lot more classic songs with a very North London feel to them, what with Camden and all that, and probably even more with an East London feel. Still, South London's where I'm at right now and I think this lot do it proud. There might well be more South London hip-hop etc but it's not my specialist area. Roots Manuva is from Stockwell but i couldn't think of any of his songs which were location specific.
I've covered quite a wide area here - Up the Junction is the definitive South London song, I reckon, with its beautiful absurd couplets. Also, it was good to discover a song about Morden, a legendary place to most people as the end of the Northern Line, you usually hear people saying it the way they say Mordor in Lord of the Rings whch is like the way they said Murder in Taggart.
I moved to South London about six years ago (from my birthplace in the West, which i may cover in a way later) but I wasn't initially sold on it and envied my cooler brethren in the North. While your Camdens and Shoreditches and Islingtons and Crouch Ends and Stoke Newingtons remain favoured holiday hotspots, as a place to live I'm a big fan of my current area of the South. I think things rally pick up when you get south of the Common. It's an interesting one, South London - though there are obviously good and bad little bits all around, it wouldn't be unreasonable if someone taking the 37 from Peckham to Putney felt themselves gradually going from one end of the scale to the other - I've been to and seen nice places and parts of Peckham and Tooting and Dulwich and Brixton and Earlsfield and Wandsworth, but I do have my preferences, and Richmond and Camberwell are different worlds.
In a way, Clapham, the epitome to some people of South London, is the part that annoys me the most, Clapham as in Clapham High Street and also Clapham Junction area - that's the area of the rugby haircut and the dull bars and the overly rammed Saturday nights. That's probably what I had in mind here.

I woke, night time, to a window smashing
nearby, like I'm in a classic Jam song.
Round here, the trains don't rumble like Ealing
lets them - but cats still yowl and boots still crush
weak skulls. Blood drips outside the M and S -
is it middle class blood? What an affront!
to those coarsened voices waking families
with their braying baiting inanities.
I draw lines too, don't think I don't. Nos and
yeses, north and south, giggs or not quite giggs ...
Spare me my own stunted sober words in
average kitchens at those tortuous parties
where the invitation, marking not yet
total purdah, is the only pleasure
and dumb boys, turned nasty adults, working
as spin doctors for that sly fuck Cameron
are the window smashers and they are the
neighbour wakers, drunk on lifelong privilege.
I draw different lines, do I? Well, I can
resent any man or any woman -
that I'll say for my part. Sketchy hatreds
withhold madness, smashing windows barely
interrupt my barely troubled slumbers

Grr, angry ... i think it was a time i wasn't really drinking so was envious of all the drunk people out having fun. That's all really.